Schools aim to have more students consider AP classes

The rigorous standards of advanced placement courses mean that a high school teacher like Mike Murr has his work cut out for him.

In his AP European history class, for example, Murr has to get from the High Renaissance to the present by the time students sit for a worldwide exam in May, and the assignments are no cakewalk.

"There's an expectation when you come in that you can write an essay. Some students can't," said Murr, who teaches at Simley High School in Inver Grove Heights. But every time he has to explain what a good topic sentence looks like, "that's time that we weren't learning about the content of the French Revolution."

Giving students the support they need to excel is just one of the challenges faced by AP teachers at Simley and other Minnesota schools. Many are fighting to bring the demographics of their AP classrooms in line with overall student populations by recruiting more minority and low-income students. And many educators who have seen research on the benefits want more kids, period, to sign up.

Two south-metro school districts, Inver Grove Heights and Burnsville-Eagan-Savage, are among 21 districts or schools statewide that are giving AP programs a shot in the arm with $6 million in grant money from the Minnesota Department of Education. The money, allocated by the Legislature in 2007, allows schools to launch initiatives such as new courses, study halls and recruitment efforts in an effort to get more students taking AP classes and earning college credit by scoring well on the exams.

The two-year grants, which run through June, come at a time when interest in the College Board's AP program is exploding worldwide. More than 1.4 million students took AP exams in 2007, compared with 537,000 in 1996.

In Minnesota, 24,400 public school students took nearly 39,000 AP exams this spring. "There are a lot of students out there who want to be taking rigorous courses, who can do well in rigorous courses," said Karen Klinzing, assistant commissioner at the Minnesota Department of Education, who said the increase in test takers has not led to a significant drop in the percentage of students who score well on the exams. "We just need to encourage them."

Preparing from junior high

The Burnsville-Eagan-Savage district, which was awarded nearly $400,000 in state grant funding for AP initiatives, is targeting junior high students with the goal of getting more of them ready to take and pass AP exams down the road. Eagle Ridge Junior High School in Savage, for example, is offering tougher sections of English, math, science and social studies for students who do well in school but don't quite qualify for honors classes.

Inver Grove Heights has spent some of its $155,000 grant to launch its 11th AP course, in psychology, as well as new study halls that pair AP students with their teachers for extra help during the day and test-prep sessions that teachers hold after school or on weekends. Simley also started a "Pathways to Advanced Placement" class for freshmen. The class made a difference, said Danny Joyce, a 10th-grader at Simley who took Pathways last year and went on to AP U.S. history. "The reading material was a lot harder, and you needed to know how to take notes and stuff," he said.

Some schools require students to apply or have certain grades or test scores if they wish to take AP classes, said Simley counselor Jodi Wendel, but in Inver Grove Heights, "If they want to try it, we're going to let them try it." That's not to say that she would send a student who's failing every subject into an AP class, she said, but "we try to encourage them, realistically."

Sometimes that means talking to students who just haven't considered that they might do well in a course, and even nudging native Spanish-speaking students to sign up for AP Spanish. "Why not?" Wendel said, if it can get students thinking, "OK, how can I use this second language that I'm fluent in?"