Shortchanged by Annie Abrams
The College Board’s Advanced Placement courses have become omnipresent in American high schools, supposedly representing a leg up for the college bound, the AP tests a chance for the best and brightest to shine. Yet even as the courses become more firmly ensconced, some question their value and role in U.S. education. Is it a course that provides a real high-level education, or simply an opportunity to pursue a credential?
Annie Abrams’s new book, Shortchanged, puts the story of Advanced Placement courses in perspective, but in the end, perspective does not improve the view of the College Board’s product. It’s an important read for anyone contemplating the time honored courses, either from a teacher or student perspective. And it is a reminder that while the name “College Board” sounds like some sort of quasi-governmental entity overseeing higher education, they are simply a private company with products to market.
Abrams breaks the book into halves; the first section deals with the origin story of the courses. That story is a complicated mix of contrasting impulses, containing, Abrams says, “ego, elitism, imperfection, zeal, and hope.”
The founding fathers (they were all white males) embraced a Jeffersonian view “that hierarchy was not only necessary but vital to the American way of life,” but that hierarchy could not be based on inherited wealth or station. Education, in this view, is a way for persons born into the lower classes to establish that they were deserving of rising to the levels of the elite, that there is an “invisible underlying hierarchy of intelligence that a meritocratic educational system could reveal.” So why not create a series of courses that aids in that process?
The type of education that the founders had in mind was not a “practical” or vocationally-aimed education, but a classic liberal, humanities-centric education. The Blackmer committee, when laying the groundwork for AP courses in the fifties, wrote, “Individual persons are an end in themselves. Liberal education and the democratic ideal are related to each other in a thousand ways” and for that individual, education should “develop their mental abilities to the very utmost.” They extolled robust, flexible, thoughtful, wise, rich, and deeply humanistic intellectual development far beyond what could be measured by a simple test.
And yet, Abrams observes, “the high-flying ideals animating the body of the report contrast sharply with its provisions for testing.” Blackmer’s committee handed off its report for others to implement, starting with an appendix to the report written Henry S. Dyer on the subject of the examinations.
Examinations would turn out to be a problematic area for AP courses. As Oberlin professor Luke Steiner, who turned down the chance to head up the examination chair for his discipline once observed, “formal examinations, if emphasized, tend to distort the learning process.”
That, unfortunately became part of the story of Advanced Placement, as the courses became anchored to testing and a tightly dictated program that has locked teachers and students into a tightly defined program, even though “the program’s architects had specifically warned about the kinds of threats” the program posed to teachers and students. Instead, Abrams shows us a writing course that is about simply checking certain boxes to satisfy computerized evaluation and a history course that straps teachers and students to a breakneck race through a list of required topics.
Abrams portrays a complex picture of how that happened, but in an email, she pointed to one root cause of AP’s loss of vision. “One part of the puzzle,” she wrote, “is that, in pursuit of other aims, we've lost sight of what liberal education can do for students, teachers, communities.”
Lacking that focus on the end goal, the AP program, with “its canned content and automated grading” has shifted focus to an “anti-intellectual approach—expecting teachers to prioritize a corporation’s authority, reductive curriculum, and mediated relationships with students.”
Many critics point to the 2012 hiring of Comon Core architect David Coleman as CEO and President of the College Board as a big step down the wrong road, and certainly Coleman, who has no classroom teaching experience, who once famously observed that students should understand that “nobody gives a shit what you think and feel,” and who seemed to see education as simply preparing one for work or college seems like a problematic choice for an enterprise aiming to foster humanistic, self-reflective, and deeply intellectual education. But Abrams shows that the College Board lost the plot before it ever hired Coleman.
Nor has the travel down the wrong path stopped. If you think you know AP courses based on experience from even five years ago, Abrams shows how the program has become increasingly technocratic and compliance-oriented, including incorporating AI and digital platforms that require courses to center the needs of software rather than students.
The slow erosion of teacher autonomy in AP classrooms is problematic, I’d argue, because the best of AP classrooms are those energized and lifted by the teacher in the classroom. That teacher-led approach is the best hope of meeting the AP goal of preparing students for college.
In recent years, the College Board has benefited from states that count the number of AP courses offered as part of a school’s evaluation. Whether that truly benefits students or not is another question.
Abrams is not pitching a particular solution. Instead, she hopes that readers conclude that necessary “conversations about the aims, purposes, funding of public education are difficult and time-consuming, but there are dangers in outsourcing them.” Her closing lines in the book are a reminder of the importance of such conversations.
There is so much hope in students. We are squandering it. And as we fail to invest in the nation’s future, a private company is making a killing.
