“To send a student off to college without having had an AP, IB, or Cambridge course and test is like insisting that a child learn to ride a bike without ever taking off the training wheels. It is dumb, and in my view a form of educational malpractice. But most American high schools still do it.” – Jay Mathews, The Washington Post

I recently spoke at a conference on the new Common Core Standards and our need to improve the literacy skills, not of just our lowest performing students, but of all students. In my talk, I indicated that less than 20% of high school students pass an Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate exam before graduating, which corresponded closely to the percent of ninth graders who graduate from college ten years later.

Shortly after our session had ended, I received the following email:

"I was very curious about the AP statistics you cited near the end of your talk, as they didn't align to my current understanding of the passage rates. If my memory serves me correct, I believe (our) passage rate in 2009 was around 38%, which is why I was surprised when I heard we might be above the national average!

While USA Today may certainly not be the most robust source for the data, a February 2010 article stated that the 2009 national failure rate (score or 1 or 2) was 41.5%.  As such, the national passage rate was 58.5%.

The article provides, in true USA Today fashion, a colorful map of the state-by-state failure rates (ranging from 26.5% to 70.3%)."

My first reaction was that I had somehow misstated the facts. So, I immediately checked my computer for a recent article on AP pass rates. As it turns out, when I indicated that less than 20% of graduates took and passed an AP exam, that was an overstatement. The percentage of high school graduates who pass at least one AP exam is 15.9%. Keep in mind that the 15.9% represents those students who actually took the AP exam. It is no secret that many students enroll in AP courses but do not sit for the exam.

Remember, high school students enrolled in these courses have a full school year to complete the work, while their college counterparts have a single semester. Therefore, in less than ninety days these graduates will be enrolled in college courses that are moving at twice the speed of an AP or IB course. How do you think graduates who cannot pass an AP or IB exam will do in college? My guess is that they will struggle.

The bottom line is that we have a lot of work to do to get even our best students college-ready. If you don’t believe me, give your students a diagnostic reading test that reports in lexiles. The new Common Core Standards (Appendix A) indicate that a 1300 lexile reading level for seniors equates to being college-ready. We did assess all of our students and we were shocked at how few were even in range of being college-ready. We all have work to do!

Fact: Only 6% of 27,000 U.S. high schools have half of their graduates take at least one AP or IB course in both their junior and senior year.