Reasons To Hope For Increased Rigor

With the national standards movement codified in No Child Left Behind, schools are facing a challenge to implement increased rigor in classrooms across the country in order to prepare students for the "global economy" and more directly for the standardized tests that hold schools accountable for student progress. While he testing is an obviously debatable notion, I believe that the increased call for rigor in the classroom is absolutely in the best interest of students, and there is mounting evidence that this call is being answered nationally, in Maryland, and beginning to be addressed in an increasingly systematic way in Baltimore.

A national education publication titled "The Progress of Education Reform" (published by the Education Commission of the States) focused its most recent article on the growth in the number of students taking and the number of schools offering dual credit programs that allow high school students to simultaneously earn credit toward high school and college. The article primarily focused on ways to fund these programs; however, the growth of programs like Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate, and concurrent enrollment is a promising statement about education's rise to the call to provide challenge and rigor in classrooms.

Maryland has recently been hailed in a number of publications for its growing number of students enrolled in Advanced Placement courses, taking AP exams, and the highest statewide passage rate on these exams in the country. (See link at the end of the article.) Despite this good news, the AP Annual Report discussed the fact that minority students, particularly African American students, are still underrepresented in terms of both those taking and passing the exams. If we consider the fact that so many African American students in this nation have been left behind in terms of rigor up until now, this cannot be a surprising fact; however, the Advanced Placement program has begun giving grants to schools in Baltimore City to increase AP offerings. These grants are called 3+3 because the goal is to add three AP course offerings to the school's curriculum over the next three years. This is exciting news, but initially seems to offer no guarantee that students in Baltimore City's most struggling high schools will be able to access the course content, even if their school received one of these prestigious grants. At least, this was my initial worry. It turns out thought that this grant actually provides funding for teachers who will not teach a AP to attend professional development workshops provided by the AP team in order to increase rigor in ALL classrooms and courses throughout the school, which will provide better preparation for AP courses when students reach their junior and senior years. The most recent of these workshops, which was attended by all faculty members from my high school (which has received a grant) offered clear and useful strategies for defining, scaffolding, and achieving increased rigor in all classes. Teachers left the workshop with real tools, fresh ideas, and a strong desire to work together to implement these in their classrooms. All of this evidence seems to provide a real hope for the increased rigor that our students need in order to increase their mastery, passage rates on the HSA, and ability to complete beyond the wall of their particular high school. The key now is to take time to plan, implement, and evaluate these strategies through departmental and faculty collaboration. Let's hope it happens!

http://www.usnews.com/blogs/on-education/2009/2/4/maryland-ranks-no-1-in-ap-tests success.html?s_cid=rss:on-education:maryland-ranks-no-1-in-ap-tests-success