Destroying the Textbook Tower

Textbooks are the cornerstone of higher education. College Board stated in a study that the national average for one text is $153 per course, and over the course of a year, the average college student spends more than $1,200 on books and materials. Endless debates have posed the question of how students enrolled in higher education institutions can afford the rising cost of textbooks without it interfering in their education. Open education resources have provided one answer to this debate. The following chapter will discuss three main benefits of OER which are free access, standardization, and equity concerns. Lastly, the chapter will address the challenges pertaining to OER.

Foreign Language Curricula and the Influence of Immigrant-Origin Groups

Despite theoretical claims that assimilation is a multidirectional process, most studies assess the behaviors of immigrants and their children. The author departs from this tradition to ask whether immigrant-origin populations influence the availability of Advanced Placement Spanish and Chinese/Japanese language courses. Building on past work, the author treats foreign language programs as a marker of institutional change and a greater acceptance of immigrant culture. County-level data are pooled from the American Community Survey, the Common Core of Data, the Voting and Elections Collection (CQ Press), and the College Board between 2000 and 2017. The results indicate that Hispanic and Chinese/Japanese populations exert an influence on school curricula, but this relation varies depending on historical patterns of immigrant settlement. The author also finds that Spanish and Asian foreign language programs are most likely to be demanded in locations with highly educated populations. This article provides evidence that mainstream institutions can move toward immigrant and minority culture.

Project Accelerate (3-Year Review): Closing the Access Gap to Physical Science Careers and Academic Programs

Project Accelerate is a National Science Foundation funded program providing access to a rigorous introductory college level College Board Advanced Placement physics course to students attending high schools where this opportunity is not part of the regular high school program of study. High schools in the United States not offering this opportunity in general are either small rural schools or high schools in districts serving a larger than average proportion of economically disadvantaged families. Students in Project Accelerate do as well on the AP exam as their peer groups enrolled in traditional AP® Physics 1 classrooms. In addition, students in Project Accelerate show a marked increase in interest in pursuing post high school academic programs in science.

Why Rural Matters 2018-2019: The Time is Now: Interview with Authors Jerry Johnson, Daniel Showalter, and Sara Hartman

TRE editor Erin McHenry-Sorber recently spoke with three of the authors of the biennial report on the status of rural education published by the Rural School and Community Trust in partnership with the College Board and AASA: The School Superintendents’ Organization. Why Rural Matters 2018-2019 The Time is Now examines the state of rural education in each of the 50 states in the United States. The authors describe the significance of the report and its implications for policy and practice.

Using found poetry to cultivate student literacy, empathy, and creativity

Purpose The emphasis on primary sources and disciplinary literacy skills in not only the Common Core State Standards, but other national curricula (i.e. College Board exams and the NCSS C3 Framework) requires that teachers continue to find ways to integrate these skills into their elementary and secondary classrooms. The paper aims to discuss this issue. Design/methodology/approach This paper introduces a cross-disciplinary approach that integrates primary source reading skills and the arts to cultivate student literacy and creativity though the writing of found poems. Findings Found poetry activities based on social studies primary sources allow students to practice literacy skills, engage more deeply with social studies content, and also may encourage the development of historical empathy toward the experiences and perspectives of distant peoples and events. Practical implications After reading and analyzing primary sources, students can create and present their found poems in diverse formats which allows for student expression and creativity in the classroom. Teachers can easily modify found poetry activities to meet the needs of diverse learners. Originality/value This paper fulfills the identified need to increase literacy skills and incorporate more student participation in the classroom. Using the strategy of student-inspired found poems, primary sources become more tangible and meaningful to students. Found poems offer yet another way to integrate the arts into social studies education.

Growing AP in Gotham

This chapter assesses how the nation's largest school district, New York City, is tackling its own Advanced Placement (AP) challenge. In 2018, the city's Department of Education (DOE) housed more AP students than all but a dozen states. It is therefore not surprising that the challenge of effecting any major change in how AP works in Gotham is gargantuan when placed alongside a city like Fort Worth. Yet the story of AP in the Big Apple shares many of the same dynamics seen in Texas. As recently as 2015–16, more than a hundred of the city's four-hundred-plus high schools offered no AP courses at all—and many of those schools are located in poor neighborhoods full of African American, Hispanic, and immigrant youngsters. Over the years, municipal leaders sought in various ways to rectify this obvious inequity, even as they undertook myriad other high school reforms. One such growth initiative came in September of 2013, when the DOE joined forces with the College Board and the National Math and Science Initiative (NMSI) to launch an “AP Expansion” program meant to last three years. Two years later, Mayor Bill de Blasio declared—as part of his own ambitious education initiatives—that AP would be introduced into every high school that did not already have it. The chapter then analyzes in detail these two citywide initiatives, including their early results and some lessons that may be drawn from their experience to date.

Growth Industry

This chapter looks at more recent developments and the present state of Advanced Placement (AP). Advanced Placement's recent decades are notable for the program's stunning growth on multiple dimensions. Many more schools, students, and subjects joined in, and they did so at accelerating rates. At least five factors have fueled the AP program's expansion in recent years. First, the use of AP participation to rate and rank high schools has impelled more of them to increase their student numbers so as to boost their standings. Second, schools and districts were induced to add more AP courses because they wanted to challenge their students intellectually, tone up their curricula, hold on to their best teachers, attract and retain more middle-class families, draw more sophisticated employers to the area, and respond to demands from parents of gifted kids. Third, the country's mounting concern about equalizing opportunity for poor and minority youngsters and getting more of them into and through college inevitably drew greater attention to AP's potential contribution. Fourth, stiffening competition to enter top colleges and more scrambling by kids to advantage themselves in the admissions process also continued to pump air into the AP balloon. The fifth factor is the forceful marketing and lobbying activities of the College Board itself. As AP has expanded, it has done so unevenly, however, giving rise to multiple issues of fairness. The chapter then considers these inequalities.