A former student of mine was doing a research paper for an education class she’s taking, and one of the prompts that she had to deal with was the following statement:

"Testing is the best way to measure a students potential to succeed"

So she asked me what I thought about the quote… here’s what I wrote back.

Tests don’t come close to measuring potential. At best, a test measures what a student can repeat back, what content a student can demonstrate at a moment in time. But a test often doesn’t even measure knowledge or ability because it is too often based on the assumptions and biases of the test-makers.

But the problem is even deeper than that. With a test there is a right answer… a finality. Cram for the test, take the test, forget the test, and once the answers are right, what more is there to do? But in project-based learning, the student must find their own entry into the material, their own path and their own end. There’s no such thing as a 100% on a project, because there is always room for revision, reflection. There’s always another question that research creates. Project-based learning can measure the snapshot of what skills and content a student has mastered in a moment better than a test, but more importantly, project-based learning allows students to see learning not as something with an end, but an ever-expanding journey.

What do you all think about the statement?

There has been a lot of talk about the New York Times story about schools like Scarsdale High considering not giving AP classes anymore. It’s something I’ve thought about a lot. SLA is not a test-based school, but it is a college prep school and many parents have asked if we will have AP classes for the kids when they get to junior and senior years. It’s something that we’ve had to consider really carefully.

We don’t have the luxury of being Scarsdale High School or Fieldston (which has done away with AP classes) in that we don’t have a long history with college, and we have to quickly establish our reputation, and AP scores are a quick and easy way to impress colleges.

But it’s an issue that troubles me, because I do feel that AP courses aren’t exactly in line with our mission. I think that Fieldston’s experience would ring true at SLA:

Fieldston tried to make new courses as rigorous and quite sweeping. A.P. European history became European Intellectual History. Students lost some of the “march to the sea” comprehensiveness of a survey course, but spent more time wrestling with the ideas of Luther, Montesquieu, Marx and Freud.

Given the amazing teachers we have at SLA, would I want them necessarily teaching to an AP science class? Is there a reason to teach AP Biology instead of a course in bioengineering? Is there a reason to teach AP Physics instead of a class in astro-physics? And given four years of benchmark projects, a senior year of capstone projects, does it make sense that the last class a student might take at SLA would end in a high-stakes test?

At Beacon, our senior year English courses were all teacher electives. We taught the courses we were most passionate about. My class — Connection and Disconnection in the 20th Century — was as rigorous as any AP course, but I could create meaning with students, we could spend our time on reading and writing, not on test prep. For me, that was more meaningful, and from the feedback I got from our students when they came home from college, I don’t think that course shortchanged them at all. At Beacon, we did give APs, we chose to give them in the sciences, math and foreign languages, although we did keep debating the issue every year.

I don’t have a right answer here. I hate that so much of high school is seen as a sorting mechanism for colleges, but I know that it’s a big part of what we do. In a perfect world, if we created communities where kids love to learn and learn the skills needed to take part in the world ahead of us, the colleges would come calling. We don’t live in that world. We have to market our students, we have to market our schools. AP courses are currently part of that.

We have to, in the end, find a balance. At SLA, we’ll have some science and math APs. We’ll balance that with the capstone class. We’ll balance that with interesting science electives that allow our faculty to share their passion for science with our students. We’ll balance that with dual enrollment at Drexel and other schools. And we’ll balance that with a full-court press with the colleges (starting with Wellesey coming to visit us tomorrow) so that by the time our first class are seniors, the colleges have all heard of SLA.

But yes, the kids will have AP class options, and I’m sure that many kids will take the APs, not because it’s the course that’s the most interesting to them, but because it’s the course that looks best on a college application. And I can’t even argue with that decision. It’s why we’ll offer the classes.

And I wish I felt better about that.