John David Bennett
Dean of Curricular Innovation and Director of Springboard
"The school that I’m describing is a sort of playground of ideas that cultivates deep, resilient, useful learning—a school where the proof of a student’s knowledge and mastery isn’t just a test score."
— John David Bennett
A Hopeful, Practical Look at the AP Decision
Last October, I had a phone call with the director of college counseling at a respected independent school that had dissolved its affiliation with Advanced Placement (AP). Near the end of the call, after the college counselor had gushed for half-an-hour about her school’s decision to move “beyond AP,” I asked her to sum up, in just a few words, the impact of the move.
“Our kids are happier,” she said, “and the colleges are more impressed by what they’re doing.”
A few months prior to that call, Mercersburg Academy convened an “Advanced Placement Research Group” made up of faculty members from various disciplines, offices, and perspectives. By the end of our research, we’d spoken with 31 schools that had either intentionally kept or removed the AP designation from their curricula.
The information we’d gathered provided a clear conclusion: we could continue with AP or move on without it. Either way, we can still attract students and prepare them well for college admission.
However, there was a noticeable difference in the conversations I had with the schools that had dropped the AP designation: they were often twice as long because the academic deans and college counselors I spoke with wanted to tell stories about the new richness in their programming and the efficacy that their schools had reclaimed.
Thirteen years ago, Mercersburg hired me to teach AP English Language and Composition. I was thrilled and eager to offer everything I knew about teaching an English course that would also generate high scores; but I soon saw what the kids could learn and experience if we didn’t have to spend almost 40 percent of the waning weeks of the winter term and half of our classes in the spring preparing for the exam.
Then, in May, when the two weeks of AP exams began, my classes were essentially derailed. At their best, they became a compressed denouement with inconsistent attendance due to students taking other AP exams. In short, to accommodate AP exams, we were losing the bulk of the last month of school.
It’s important to note that I’m not anti-AP. Before I came to Mercersburg, I was an Advanced Placement Lead English Teacher for the Dallas Independent School District; I taught at a public magnet school that has been honored by Newsweek and U.S. News and World Report for its extraordinary dedication to AP success; and I still work with the National Math and Science Initiative, training AP teachers and students in public schools across the country. But I’ve come to understand, especially after our research, that Mercersburg Academy is poised to make a transition, one that appreciates our decades-long relationship with AP but realizes the dynamic future that our faculty and students have the wherewithal to envision and build.
By moving beyond AP—we’ll have new flexibility and enhanced agility. We can more intentionally prepare our kids for happiness and fulfillment in a world that will continually ask them to be more flexible and agile. And with a clear understanding of our place in the global educational landscape, our work can contribute to the growing knowledge of effective pedagogy and curriculum.
In the immediate future, some of our highest-level courses won’t change that much, but many will, and when I think of what our students are already producing in MAPS and Springboard, I get giddy imagining what students will create, when the way they learn chemistry, statistics, and the craft of writing directly prepares them for the iterative work in our capstone programs—not for standardized tests. The potential power surge in complex-problem solving, critical thinking, and creativity will boost their resourcefulness, curiosity, and inventiveness so that our kids will immerse themselves in joyful rigor—the sort that inspires them to find the right book, reach out to knowledgable alumni, and get into the lab or out in the field.
The school that I’m describing is a sort of playground of ideas that cultivates deep, resilient, useful learning—a school where the proof of a student’s knowledge and mastery isn’t just a test score. Instead, the proof is in their tangible creations like robots, works of long-form fiction, organized film festivals, beautifully engineered solutions, and enhanced emotional intelligence. We already see these things at Mercersburg. Imagine, then, what we can become with our new flexibility and enhanced agility. Imagine a place where our kids are even “happier and colleges are more impressed by what they’re doing.”