Why is everyone at Bell Multicultural High School in D.C. taking Advanced Placement English courses and tests? Most of the students are low-performing, with parents who don’t speak English at home. In the past, no one even considered requiring such students to tackle the long reading lists and tough vocabulary of college-level AP.
Yet Bell Multicultural is not alone in pushing what seem to be ill-prepared students into the program. In the course of compiling its 2009 Top U.S. High Schools list, Newsweek has discovered schools across the country adopting this form of academic shock treatment. Instead of the traditional approach–remediating low-achieving students, building their skills slowly–some schools with significant numbers of low-income students are giving the full AP dose of frequent writing assignments and three-hour exams to nearly everyone.
