The number of students taking Advanced Placement tests hit a record high last year, but the portion who fail the exams - particularly in the South - is rising as well, a USA TODAY analysis finds.
"The standards don't teach themselves," says Stanford University's Linda Darling-Hammond, a noted teacher-quality expert who says schools shouldn't treat AP as "another silver bullet" that will raise standards and assure academic success.
"You have to build the whole system. You can't just bring in one thing and think that it's going to solve everything," she says.
The newspaper's analysis finds that more than two in five students (41.5%) earned a failing score of 1 or 2, up from 36.5% in 1999. In the South, a Census-defined region that spans from Texas to Delaware, nearly half of all tests - 48.4% - earned a 1 or 2, a failure rate up 7 percentage points from a decade prior and a statistically significant difference from the rest of the country.
Thank Heavens for Mississippi, again. The rest of the article goes on to claw back on the bald claims made by the map, but the outcome, specifically for Texas, can't be gainsaid. It is consistent with the backasswards way in which Rick has funded and supported public education here in the state. Low teacher retention brought on partially by lack of adequate resources brought on by perpetual funding short falls, they all add up. This is simply the canary in the coalmine for the problems of Texas public education.
