AP Courses That Look Good-- on Paper

Nothing could have prepared Jeff Porter for his first year as a teacher at Locke High in South-Central Los Angeles.

Not his upbringing in suburban Dallas, or the Teach for America “boot camp” that gave him a crash course in instructional techniques. Not the four years he spent in college science classes, or the summers building homes for poor villagers in Mexico, or the days accompanying his social worker mother on her rounds through inner-city Dallas.

And certainly not the interview with the principal (who has since moved on) who hired Porter on the spot and assigned the novice teacher five classes in three subjects--including Advanced Placement chemistry. And then set him up in a portable trailer, with no lab equipment, supplies or textbooks.

“I was amazed that I got hired,” he said. “And I was floored by what I found.” The materials had been locked away during a campus renovation, “and no one knew where they were,” he said. So his students went three months without chemistry books or equipment, working on assignments Porter photocopied from the college texts he’d used as a nutritional biochemistry major.

What’s worse is it hardly seemed to matter. Few of his Advanced Placement students had ever studied chemistry. Many of them read at grade-school level, and couldn’t do basic algebra. Some refused to read outside of class and most of them balked at homework assignments. And these were high-achieving students at the inner-city school.

“I had 55 minutes a day to teach 17 chapters of college science to kids ... and I wound up giving reading lessons and math lessons. They were good kids,” he said. “I didn’t have any discipline problems.” But--like their teacher--they had been thrust unprepared into a demanding class where failure was acceptable.

Advanced Placement classes were originally designed to challenge students who have already mastered standard high-school subjects. After each AP course, students are given standardized tests; if they do well, they can earn college credit in the subject. Because grades in AP courses are weighted to count more than regular classes, they boost GPAs, a key to college entrance.

And now they are often regarded as a barometer of our commitment to high expectations. Three years ago, the state of California was sued for shortchanging minority students by not offering enough AP classes at their schools. Since then, districts have rushed to add AP classes, particularly in inner-city schools. But the practice makes sense on paper only. Even the best schools have difficulty finding teachers qualified to run the high-level classes. A school like Locke, which turns over about one-sixth of its teaching staff every year, is often forced to rely on newcomers like Porter.

Even students notice that their classes have been dumbed-down to accommodate academic deficiencies. In an AP English class at one South Los Angeles high school, a student complained that they didn’t read a single book in an entire semester. The final assignment was to write a “friendly letter.”

The discrepancy between what the classes can and should accomplish shows up on the tests AP students take each spring. Statewide, only about one-third of black and Latino students who take AP tests score high enough to earn college credit, while two-thirds of white and Asian kids do.

There is no shortage of AP courses at Locke, which is virtually all black and Latino. “They have about a dozen,” Porter says. That’s more than double the number at the suburban high school he attended 10 years ago.

But there’s a difference in offering the classes and preparing students to succeed in them. In the last three years, none of the Advanced Placement chemistry students at Locke has scored above a 2 on the year-end test, which is graded on a scale of 1 to 5. A 3 is the minimum score most colleges require to grant course credit.

“You’re not even expected to get the kids to pass this test,” Porter says. “On paper we have all these classes, but we don’t have the faculty or the facility to push our students.”

Porter said his pace in class had to be slow, because homework was so seldom done and they had to cover in class what should have been studied at home. “I expected them to read at night, so we could discuss in class. It never happened. I assigned them two chapters to read over Christmas vacation. When they returned, only two [students] had done the work.”

But it isn’t only students who are to blame. “The kids are adaptable and smart enough, but they had never been pushed hard enough--not even in kindergarten,” he said. Instead, they were allowed to slide through school by uninvolved parents, frustrated teachers, a lackadaisical administration and a culture that tells them that education has little to do with success.

“Why do they get Air Jordans every two months, but they can’t buy a calculator for my class?” Porter wondered. “They complain that they can’t spend money on poster board, yet they come to class in brand new FUBU [clothing].”

Porter’s two-year stint at Locke ended last week, and he began packing the day of graduation. Last weekend he headed up to San Francisco, where he has a sales job waiting with a wine company. He admits to “postpartum guilt” over his decision not to return to teaching next fall. “I really enjoyed the kids, and the art of teaching,” he says. “But frustration took its toll.”

Still, he sees glimmers of hope at Locke. A new principal arrived last fall, a Locke alumnus who has the respect of the community and is working to convince teachers to stay and parents to get involved. And district officials say they’re pouring money--most from grants with an alphabet soup of names--into the school’s efforts to train more teachers and provide help for students trying to make the grade.

“It’s going to turn around at Locke,” Porter says. “But it’s going to take awhile.”

And “awhile” is just one more thing these kids don’t have.

Sandy Banks’ column is published Tuesdays and Sundays. Her e-mail address is sandy.banks@latimes. com.