Nashville public schools boosts the number of AP exams taken thanks to free-test program
Nashville public schools students took more college-level exams last year than ever before, a result that officials say stems from an effort that foots the bill for the tests.
In the 2017-18 school year, district-run school students took 6,636 Advanced Placement exams, about a quarter more than the previous year’s total of 4,811 exams. The increase happened in the same year the district began paying for students to take the tests to provide better access to poor students.
“Prior to last year, we didn’t ask students to take advanced academic tests because we couldn’t ask them to pay. Or they would opt out due to the cost,” said Laura-Lee Morin, Metro Nashville Public Schools advanced academics director.
“When we removed the cost barrier … we had some minor attrition from those classes at the beginning of the year, but the ones that stayed throughout the year participated and that resulted in a huge increase.”
The spike didn’t necessarily mean a rise in the number of college credits earned through the Advanced Placement exams, but the district also didn’t backslide.
And, even if the students didn’t earn credit, Morin said, it provides them with valuable experience taking college-level courses and a college-level exam.
To earn college credit at most colleges on an AP exam — which includes college-level subjects such as art history, statistics and Spanish — a student must score a three or higher out of five possible points.
“That (the flat numbers) was anticipated,” Morin said, “When you open access to all students and have that big of an increase, you are going to see scores drop initially until you build the capacity in the teachers and students.”
Nashville public schools’ increase also coincides with a spike in the number of exams taken statewide.
The Tennessee Department of Education, through its version of a federal law, has encouraged districts to focus closely on college and career readiness programs.
Advanced Placement exams fall into the broader category, and, in 2018, districts statewide administered 53,871 tests to 32,222 students, according to education department numbers.
Students eligible for college credit also increased from 16,242 last year to 17,049 this year, a new record high for the state.
More AP tests earn college credit
In Metro Nashville Public Schools, more Advanced Placement tests were taken by students in district-run schools than in any year prior thanks to an effort that makes exams free.
The number of tests that scored a three or above, which is enough to earn college credit, also increased.
- 2017-18: 2,654 that scored high enough to earn college credit, or 36 percent of all exams.
- 2016-17: 2,346 that scored high enough to earn college credit, or 46 percent of all exams.
Programmed for Success
If you’re an 18-year-old student with no children, two college-educated parents and only one task over the next four years — to get a degree — it might not be that difficult to navigate registration, find time to get to the bookstore, or stay late after class for extra help, all leading to a high likelihood that you’ll graduate.
But if you’re a single parent with a full-time job, or the first person in your family to go to college, and are perhaps attending part-time, it’s a different story.
Community college students across the country struggle to complete their programs — only 25 percent of those who start as full-time students at public two-year institutions graduate, according to the United States Department of Education. Only about one of five finishes in two years. Even given twice as long to complete the coursework, just 36 percent of these students graduate.
But in recent years, technological advances have given administrators a chance to offer help when and where students need it, whether it’s reminding them about due dates, nudging them to complete homework or guiding them toward resources that will help them stay enrolled.
“I think all colleges need this kind of help, but community colleges see a significant number of first-time students, people who may not have family understanding of the kinds of things that are necessary,” said Bret Ingerman, vice president for information technology at Tallahassee Community College in Florida.
Students can now expect to get personalized text messages from their college. Instead of a mass email listing the deadlines for payment, a student might receive a text that says: “Dear Ayana, you’re about to be dropped from your fall classes. Click this link to fix that.”
These kinds of technologies allow administrators to nudge their students toward success in a way that wasn’t possible a decade ago. “There’s something about getting a message with that level of personalization, because now you know it applies to you,” Mr. Ingerman said.
He said members of the administration have received messages from students expressing gratitude for the reminder, or asking for help. That opens the door for someone to intervene.
Using software that was originally designed to track technology “help desk” tickets, Mr. Ingerman and his team also route faculty concerns about students who seem to be at risk of dropping out.
“We can have a faculty member identify a student who’s not doing well, maybe they’re sleeping in class because they don’t have housing,” said Mr. Ingerman. “Whatever the issue may be, we know the right people to help.”
Professors also have access to a fuller picture of their students, with information about how often they open their materials, or how long they spent on an assignment.
Some of the most at-risk students who enter community college are those who aren’t considered “college ready” in certain subjects. They have to take remedial courses that won’t count toward a degree, but cost time and money.
“We know that developmental math tends to be the main barrier to college completion. We also know that minority students are disproportionately placed in developmental math education,” said Kevin Li, dean of arts and sciences at Triton College, a public community college in the greater Chicago area.
In the spring of this year, Triton opened the iLaunch Lab for math students, designed to pivot away from the lecture-based classroom and toward adaptive and individualized learning.
Students sit at clusters of computers, where their progress is assessed in real-time using Aleks from McGraw-Hill, educational software that uses artificial intelligence to continuously analyze the progress of the students and adapt learning to their needs.
“The change is tremendous. At my college, using technology, we’ve already proven how we can get students through remedial content in a much quicker manner,” said Mr. Li.
“But in a larger picture, when we talk about competency-based education, we will be able to leverage technology to take on the assessment portion of learning,” he said. “I think that is potentially the crux of how we can really achieve competency-based education to benefit the diverse student populations.”
Why 12 Nashville charter school organizations are forming a collaborative
Twelve charter school organizations, within Nashville public schools, are forming a collective in an effort to learn from one another and leverage resources.
The Nashville Charter School Collaborative, an effort launched Thursday, is expected to help the 12 organizations — representing 32 schools — share resources, ideas and support each other in educating students.
It’s also an effort meant to help the organizations better communicate with Metro Nashville Public Schools, which contracts with the publicly funded, privately operated schools.
“The collaborative is an idea that is 12 or 13 years in the making,” said Randy Dowell, KIPP Nashville executive director. “Over the years we have casually collaborated as needed. We have decided over the last year to go from a casual, informal group to a more regular dialogue where we can collaborate and share best practices.”
The collaborative will also serve as a way for the group of charter operators to elevate their work, Dowell said.
Lagra Newman, Purpose Prep founder, said certain Nashville charter schools also specialize in teaching groups of students, which provides an avenue to learn from each other.
For example, she said, STEM Preparatory Academy predominantly serves English-learning students and the collaborative members have begun to learn from the school’s efforts.
“It gives us more opportunities to evolve to what is going on, look at areas of improvement, see what schools offer and then vice versa,” she said.
Dowell said there are many other ways to work together, including “how to help our people develop in their roles, as well as cross train, share training resources and look at how we plan.”
The collaborative wants to use its collective voice as a way to better communicate with the district, Dowell said. Since last spring, representatives from charter schools have been invited to Director of Schools Shawn Joseph’s executive team meetings.
By having one representative from the collaborative at the meetings, Dowell said it will help streamline how the charters react to big district goals and initiatives.
“It helps everybody move in the same direction,” Dowell said.
The 12 Nashville charter school organizations
- Intrepid College Prep
- KIPP Nashville
- LEAD Public Schools
- The Martha O’Bryan Center
- Nashville Classical
- Purpose Preparatory Academy
- RePublic Schools
- Rocketship Public Schools
- Smithson Craighead Academy
- Strive Collegiate Academy
- STEM Preparatory Academy
- Valor Collegiate Academies
A High School Education and College Degree All in One
Chigozie Okorie likes to say that he’s the “high school student who never left high school.” He’s kidding, sort of: Not only did Mr. Okorie graduate from high school, he also collected an associate degree and a full-time job at IBM within four years. And he’s now studying communications at Baruch College and expects to graduate next year.
Not bad for someone who’s not even 20.
No one is more surprised than he. “When you say things out loud it becomes so much more shocking,” said Mr. Okorie, who grew up in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn. “I say it in my head, but it doesn’t impact me unless I say it around other people: ‘Wow, I’m going to graduate within a year with a bachelor’s and it only took me how many years?’”
Mr. Okorie’s job as a program associate in education at IBM requires him to spend much of his day at his alma mater, Pathways in Technology Early College High School, or P-Tech, in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. P-Tech was started in 2011 as a partnership between the New York City Department of Education, the New York City College of Technology and IBM. It is a six-year program that gives students from lower-income backgrounds the chance to earn a high school diploma along with a cost-free associate degree in a STEM field. Some, like Mr. Okorie, do it in even less time.
“The question was, how do you better connect students with the future of work and create a seamless pathway for them to enroll in college?” said Rashid Davis, the founding principal of Brooklyn P-Tech. “When we started, more than 70 percent of students entering the City University of New York were graduates from the New York City Department of Education. However, more than 70 percent of those students needed remediation — meaning, they’re not completing a two-year degree in real two-year time. So the thought was, if you have this public-private partnership, could an early start lead to better outcomes?”
P-Tech’s mission is to do just that. During their time at P-Tech, students are paired with a professional mentor and are eligible for a paid internship at IBM. (Mr. Okorie helps run the mentorship program). On graduation, many go on to four-year colleges; others take full-time jobs at IBM, although they’re not required to.
“We’re not preparing kids for jobs necessarily at IBM, we’re preparing them for jobs in the IT industry,” said Grace Suh, vice president for IBM Education. “We’d love them to come work at IBM, but the idea is that we’re giving them the skills they require to do whatever kind of job and work in whatever place — whether it’s IBM or a start-up.””
So far, 110 schools in eight states and Australia, Morocco, and Taiwan fall under the P-Tech umbrella; California, Colombia and Singapore are set to open schools soon. More than 500 industry partners and 77 community colleges also participate.
P-Tech is filling a necessary void. According to June 2018 data from the Federal Reserve, American students and their families carry more than $1.5 trillion in student loan debt. A Brookings study found that nearly 40 percent of student borrowers may default on their student loans by 2023.
P-Tech students graduate with no debt.
What’s more, college graduation rates among low-income students haven’t changed very much in 40 years. A 2016 report by the Pell Institute and the University of Pennsylvania’s Alliance for Higher Education and Democracy noted that the percentage of students from the poorest families who had gotten college degrees was 6 percent in 1970. By 2013, that number had increased only to 9 percent. And only 6 percent of college graduates from low-income, minority urban schools completed a STEM degree within six years, according to the National Student Clearinghouse.
Yet dual-enrollment programs like P-Tech, in which high school students take college or university courses, have been found to help students complete college.
“It’s not enough just to say ‘free college,’” Mr. Davis said. “There’s free high school across the country, but that doesn’t mean that everyone is finishing with the skills they need to be prepared to move on. So it really is the industry involved that actually can say ‘We know that students need more research skills, we know that students really need to know how to present projects, make an argument.’ That makes a difference when they’re trying to get a job.”
So far, 110 schools in eight states and Australia, Morocco, and Taiwan fall under the P-Tech umbrella; California, Colombia and Singapore are set to open schools soon. More than 500 industry partners and 77 community colleges also participate.
P-Tech is filling a necessary void. According to June 2018 data from the Federal Reserve, American students and their families carry more than $1.5 trillion in student loan debt. A Brookings study found that nearly 40 percent of student borrowers may default on their student loans by 2023.
P-Tech students graduate with no debt.
What’s more, college graduation rates among low-income students haven’t changed very much in 40 years. A 2016 report by the Pell Institute and the University of Pennsylvania’s Alliance for Higher Education and Democracy noted that the percentage of students from the poorest families who had gotten college degrees was 6 percent in 1970. By 2013, that number had increased only to 9 percent. And only 6 percent of college graduates from low-income, minority urban schools completed a STEM degree within six years, according to the National Student Clearinghouse.
Yet dual-enrollment programs like P-Tech, in which high school students take college or university courses, have been found to help students complete college.
“It’s not enough just to say ‘free college,’” Mr. Davis said. “There’s free high school across the country, but that doesn’t mean that everyone is finishing with the skills they need to be prepared to move on. So it really is the industry involved that actually can say ‘We know that students need more research skills, we know that students really need to know how to present projects, make an argument.’ That makes a difference when they’re trying to get a job.”
But beyond learning what they do want to do, P-Tech students learn what they don’t want to do.
Morsaline Mozahid, 17, will graduate from P-Tech in December with his associate degree. He thought he wanted to have a career as a video game designer, but after taking a computer and coding class at P-Tech he realized that he “kind of hated it.”
“It was boring for me,” he said.
He’s grateful to P-Tech for giving him the chance to discover this sooner rather than later and hopes to study medicine at Johns Hopkins University. Otherwise, he said, “I would have spent a year in college trying to figure it out.”
[Read more at the New York Times]