Advanced Enrollment: A Standard Worth Measuring

The Challenge Index: Created by Washington Post Journalist and Education Author Jay Mathews, this list has ranked America’s ‘Best High Schools’ by AP/IB Participation from 1998-2020. In order to land on the list, you have to have a ratio of 1 or more AP/IB test to every 1 senior in your school. Although Dual Credit is more popular than AP in Idaho, both AP and DC courses grant college credit to high school students. When the list began, only about 500 of the nation’s roughly 18,000 high schools made the list, and by 2019 2,542 of the nation’s 24,000 high schools rank on it. To reach this list, a school has to have about 20% or more of their total students enrolled in Advanced Courses.

Last week the Senate passed Senate Bill 1045 extending a limited version of the Advanced Opportunities Program to students in private schools, and this highlights how much this program has grown in the last several years. If you’re not familiar with the program, AO provides around $4,100 per student that can be used to take college credit, CTE (Career Technical Education), and ‘overload’ (courses past the normal load) courses in order to get a jump start on college and career even while in high school. This program has fueled massive growth in both the amount of these types of courses students are taking and in these types of courses being offered in high schools. 

I believe that the Advanced Opportunities Program is the best thing that’s hit our education system in at least the last 20 years, but here is something that’s important to remember: This program is not required by ESSA, the Federal education act that guides much of what happens in schools. Instead, this Program was created by legislators, fleshed out by the State Board of Education and the State Department of Education, and serves goals that Idahoans set for their own reasons. Not only has it affected how many students are earning college credit and career certificates in high school, but it has actually significantly changed what courses we offer in our high schools. We offer dramatically more Dual Credit, Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate, and CTE courses than we used to, and since all these courses are advanced, that means that this program has increased the rigor of our schools. 

I’ve been a critic of how we use standards based tests like the ISAT not because I believe there’s no place for them but because we focus on these to the detriment of not looking at other things we do in schools that are just as or more important than teaching to the standards. One of these is offering students a robust choice of advanced courses to enroll in so they can get a jump start on their futures. In truth, students have been taking advanced courses like the ones listed above for decades (A student I taught who graduated high school in 2008 had 46 college credits upon graduation!), but not in all schools or districts. Some schools and districts ‘got it’ and offered these types of courses and some didn’t, so the practice was uneven and whether you had the choice to earn college credit in high school largely depended on zip code. What the Advanced Opportunities Program has done was to bring the hit-and-miss offering of college-level courses in high school to the mainstream, and it’s dramatically expanded the number of those courses we are offering and the number of schools offering them. That’s a great thing...it’s led to a measurable increase of opportunities for students.

Important: I say that the number of advanced courses we offer has dramatically increased but I can’t back that up with definitive data because we don’t measure this, which is exactly why offering these courses is so hit-and-miss. But what if we did measure this? Is that possible and what would that do?

The State Department of Education has detailed information about enrollment that is constantly updated because it’s used in school funding. Schools have to submit regular reports to the state throughout the school year on their enrollment in order to get funding for their schools, which means we have all the data we need already. To me, the easiest way to measure advanced enrollment would be to make a list of all the courses we deem ‘advanced’ (I would include honors, dual credit, AP, IB, CTE, advanced math and science courses, and I even believe 2nd year courses like Spanish 2 and the like belong there...they are advanced), and then look at what percentage of a school’s total enrollment is ‘advanced’. If you looked at every high school throughout the state, you’d get a state average % advanced enrollment. Schools at or above the state average are recognized and those below are not. ESSA grants us the flexibility to add a standard like this, and we could even put how schools perform here on the school report cards that we already require.

Would measuring advanced enrollment improve anything? I think so because this is actually a much easier standard to improve than your ISAT score. In education, the two hardest things to change are test scores and grades, and in that order. Changing test scores is the most difficult accomplishment in education, but increasing advanced enrollment is a goal that’s not difficult. First, how many advanced courses do we offer to our students? Are there more we can create? Are we trying to recruit students into these courses? NCLB created the testing regimen we live through today because its authors wanted to ensure that schools taught to state standards and relentlessly measuring every school’s test scores ensured that. If every building and district administrator knew the amount of students enrolled in advanced courses was being measured, they would put time and energy into this. 

I’m almost afraid to write this because I strongly support everything about our Advanced Opportunities program, but giving people money is one way to make things happen and measuring something is also a way to make it happen. We’ve been offering college credit in high schools since the 1970’s, but not uniformly and not on a large scale. The reason it’s been happening for so long is because it’s a good idea and it saves people money. Even if your courses are not paid for through a program, earning 3 college credits for $225 or $95 is a really good deal for students and parents. If we measured schools on their advanced enrollment and made that data public, even more schools would increase their advanced course offerings and more students would take these courses. 

I believe that we can make and attain whatever goals we want in our schools (so long as they’re not unrealistic like having a 60% degree rate when the nation has only 50%) and what those goals are should be decided by the community (school board members, legislators, the State School Board) and then how to measure these goals by educators in the trenches. We have the freedom to do this under federal law, and the rapid growth of Advanced Opportunities is an excellent demonstration that schools are about so much more than standardized exams.