"We believe that all students should be able to take any or all AP courses at our school."
This was the concluding talk of a day-long conference on Proficiency-Based Education which has as one of its guiding tenets that
"Students should not progress to the next proficiency until they have mastered the first one and should not be allowed to move from course 1 to course 2 until they have reached proficiency in all of the predetermined areas in course 1."These two statements seem to directly contradict each other, yet both were met with applause and approval from the assembled. How can you take AP Calculus if you haven't reached proficincy in the topics of precalculus, and before that in algebra 2, and before that in geometry, and before that in algebra 1? (Granted that the geometry course is not strictly in that place across the country.)
What am I missing?
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So hard to take administrators seriously when they say both of these things. And let's ask ourselves: what does a struggling student more good: a curriculum that is built around him or her being able to be proficient at Level A before being pushed into Level B, or getting pushed into AP classes they're not ready for.
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