Advanced Placement
David Grosskopf
Dear all,
I am writing to inform you that we are at a crossroads in the
Language Arts department at Roosevelt High School, and we are about to
concede to a major change.
The district has mandated that we will offer an Advanced Placement
course.
Now many of you had been pushing for this and have declared our
obstinacy on the issue inconsistent with our declared mission that
privileges choice and depth in our course offerings. However, Advanced
Placement is not a thing we can simply add to our list of 11th and
12th grade LA Options. Because of who our students are at Roosevelt,
two thirds to three quarters of our students would flood the AP classes
—they’d be compelled to, because colleges want to see students take AP
when it’s available. Not only would this result in the kind of
partitioning of students that we have avoided (favoring diverse
intellectual communities instead), this would decimate the Options we
provide.
We are now wrestling with the best way to integrate an AP course—
either Composition or Literature or both—into our Language Arts
program at Roosevelt. Ideally, this best way would satisfy the
following conditions:
1) It’s good for individual students and it’s good for our community
of students.
2) It keeps diverse students in class together.
3) It allows us to deliver the AP content well.
4) It allows us to preserve Options.
We have desires, too, but some of us are preparing to concede these
points. For example, mixing Juniors and Seniors has been powerful,
reinforcing that they are bound together by an intellectual idea and
purpose rather than an arbitrary birthdate. Another benefit: hard-
working Juniors help keep senioritis in check.
All of this means that Language Arts at Roosevelt is about to look
different. Perhaps we will send all Juniors, or all Seniors, through
one of the two Advanced Placement courses. Perhaps we will do
something messier. Having just received the directive, we have not
decided on our course of action. But we are expected to enact a change
for next year, and it will be a big one.
David Grosskopf