Conference Highlights
"Houston in July?" was doubtless a query heard by many of the more than 2,500 people who descended on the sultry Texas city this summer for the fourth annual AP National Conference (APNC). But attend they did, streaming to the Hilton Americas Hotel and the George R. Brown Convention Center for three days of workshops, sessions, receptions, and enlightening plenary speakers.
Following Friday's workshops, the main conference began with a welcome from College Board President Gaston Caperton. His remarks officially kicked off a year of celebration of the 50th Anniversary of the AP Program. "We're here today to celebrate our teachers, who are the core, the center, the heart, the soul, the hope, and the joy of AP," said Caperton.
After listening to Dr. Calvin Mackie's inspiring plenary on Friday, attendees gathered to hear acclaimed journalist Juan Williams on Saturday, and scientist Mae Jemison, the first African American woman in space, on Sunday.
AP Celebrates its 50th Anniversary
In celebration of AP's 50th anniversary in 2005-2006, an exhibition documenting AP's history was unveiled at the APNC. The exhibition included a chronological and thematic history of AP, including a special feature on AP teachers and the AP Reading. Also on display were the original free-response sections of the twelve AP subjects offered in AP's first exam administration in 1956, among other historical documents and images. Throughout the 2005-2006 year the exhibition will travel to the national and each regional College Board forum.
On Friday night the short film, AP: Fifty Years of Higher Standards, Higher Learning, was introduced by the College Board President Gaston Caperton. The film is about the evolution of AP's rigorous course work and how the Program has expanded to reach increasing numbers of students throughout the country and around the world.
On Saturday night, a party was thrown in honor of AP at the Houston Museum of Natural Science. The museum's Cullen Hall of Gems and Minerals, in particular, drew visitors. The hall houses one of the world's finest collections of precious and semi-precious gems and geologic specimens. As some guests explored the displays on natural history, ecology, and even ancient Egypt, others balanced plates of roast beef, pasta, and vegetables while they chatted under looming dinosaur fossils. After a busy day of sessions, it was a chance to speak with colleagues at length. It was a true celebration of the spirit of AP.
Opening Plenary
Friday, July 15College Board President Gaston Caperton kicked off the AP National Conference in Houston with a welcome to all attendees. The conference, he noted, marked the launch of the celebration of the 50th Anniversary of the AP Program
"One of the things I'm the most proud of today is our sense of globalization," said Caperton, noting AP's expansion into subjects like World History, Geography, Comparative Government, and the new language courses: Chinese, Italian, Japanese, and Russian. "It is important that young people around the world understand each other because they share the same future."
Caperton was followed at the podium by Keith Miller, director of the Office of Overseas Schools for the U.S. Department of State. "What a thrill it is to be in Houston to take part in celebrating 50 years of the legendary AP Program, which has become such an important part of the fabric of American education," he said.
He outlined the international schools that his agency aids and encourages, which serve over 100,000 students in 130 countries. "These students come from many walks of life overseas, but they all want an American-type education," said Dr. Miller.
AP has become increasingly popular with international students, he said. The number of AP Exams taken overseas has increased by 50 percent in the past four years, and students abroad consistently earn high scores.
"We know that shared educational experiences produce leaders who are able to respect cultural diversity and cross cultural borders comfortably," said Miller. "And AP is one of the greatest shared educational experiences in the world, and has a critical role to play in international education."
The next speaker was Ray Simon, deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of Education. He began his remarks by holding up a long, thin object and asking if the audience could identify it.
"A slide rule," came the answer from the floor.
"That's right," said Simon. He explained that the slide rule had its origins in the 17th century and that over the course of the last four centuries, all serious students of mathematics and science had learned to use one. The slide rule was difficult to master, he said, and if a person did not practice regularly, he or she was likely to forget how to use it.
"This instrument, that carried us from the Renaissance to the moon, was rendered obsolete overnight," said Simon, holding aloft a calculator. "This particular machine could do calculations infinitely more accurate and infinitely faster than the slide rule."
Simon's demonstration was a cautionary tale: "Without the high expectation and rigor that AP is all about, we take an ever-increasing chance that we graduate students with slide-rule skills in an era of the calculator, where they too can be rendered obsolete overnight."
Simon went on to describe the Department of Education's ongoing commitment to elementary, middle, and high school reforms. "These young adults want to be challenged," he said. "They want to be calculators and not slide rules."
The afternoon's final speaker was Calvin Mackie, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Tulane University. He thanked the audience, and said "Seventeen years ago, nobody would have made a dollar bet that [I] would have been standing before anybody, talking about anything, let alone a room full of AP teachers."
Dr. Mackie described his experiences as a student in New Orleans in the 1970s and 80s, where he believed that basketball would be his life's pursuit. Instead, he suffered an injury that ended his career in high school, and he decided instead to become an engineer. He soon found out he had to take the SAT® in order to get into college.
"I thought it was the Saturday test," joked Mackie.
Mackie scored a weak 800 on the college entrance examination, and Morehouse College in Atlanta accepted him conditionally. The first course he took was a remedial reading class. "Can you imagine the pain and indignation I felt when the rest of my friends were taking world literature and English Comp, and I had to go down to the basement with the middle school kids?" said Mackie of that first year.
The embarrassment spurred him to study harder, and he graduated in three years with a degree in mathematics. He earned a second bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from Georgia Tech, where he also completed a master's degree and a Ph.D. In 1996, he was one of only 11 African American men and women to receive a doctorate in the subject.
"People say that terrorism is the greatest threat to national security," said Mackie, "but I believe the greatest threat to national security is an underprepared citizenry."
Plenary
Saturday, July 16
On Saturday afternoon, attendees again came together in the Hilton's Ballroom of the Americas. Nina Shokraii Rees, assistant deputy secretary of the Office of Innovation and Improvement of the U.S. Department of Education, opened the plenary session. She touted the results of the recently-announced National Assessment of Educational Progress, better known as the "Nation's Report Card." The report showed significant gains in both math and reading by nine-year-olds, and a dramatic shrinking of the achievement gap between white and minority students.
"However, none of the progress that we've seen so far will really mean anything if we haven't put in place the structure necessary for students to graduate from high school ready to enter college or the work force," said Rees.
She went on to describe how results for the nation's high school students were much less hopeful. "Too many of our students are leaving high school simply unprepared," she said. "This is why, in our view, we must restore the meaning of a high school diploma."
Rigorous course work, she continued, is often an important predictor of later success. "This is why programs such as Advanced Placement are so vitally important to the high school reform piece.
"As you all know, we don't have a perfect educational system, even in the United States, which is one of the richest countries in the world," concluded Rees. "There are tens of thousands of students who simply don't have access to Advanced Placement's high quality programs. So I challenge each of you to continue your hard work, but also to stand up and speak out for expanded quality educational options for those students who need them most."
Rees was followed by Juan Williams, a noted author and journalist. Williams, a senior correspondent for NPR and a political analyst for Fox Television, has written extensively about politics and the Civil Rights movement. He began his remarks by invoking the landmark Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which desegregated America's public schools and had just celebrated its own 50th anniversary. "[The decision] was a shift in the way we relate as Americans across racial lines and in whether we live up to our democratic ideals," said Williams.
Today will likely go down as another significant historic period. "All of you are playing a key role in this transformative moment in American education at the start of a new century," he said. "You have to see the power that each of you have as history makers at this moment, in this era.
"There's just no end to the power that you have to impact and change society as you go about your daily jobs," continued Williams. "My worry is that, in your lives as educators, you may feel overwhelmed and you may not have any sense of your place in history. Every day, you're dealing with budgets; you're dealing with increased demands for your time; you're dealing with demands from political forces. You have so many pressures on you. I know that people can lose a sense of their own power and where they are in history."
Williams went on to describe the time he spent with Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, interviewing the legendary lawyer for a biography that Williams published in 2000. Marshall did not spring fully formed from his middle-class suburb of Baltimore. His political consciousness developed slowly, over the course of his time in college, law school, and as a young Civil Rights attorney. As Williams listened to Marshall describing his education and development, he said "I could see the young person growing. I could see him becoming aware of the world around him, and the power that he had to create social change."
Though Justice Marshall understood well the importance of the Brown decision, he may not have known just how beloved he was by all Americans. They lined up around the block to pay their respects after he died, and great men spoke at his funeral.
Williams concluded that he wanted the audience to have a strong sense, in their lifetime, of the importance of their work. "You are in the fight for the future of American education," he said. "I see you as history makers, as people who are keeping alive the spirit of a Justice Marshall, as people who have their eyes on the prize."
Closing Plenary
Sunday, July 17APNC came to a close on Sunday, July 17th. Peter Negroni, the College Board's senior vice president for K-12 Education, thanked the audience for attending. "Every time I come to this conference, I am more convinced than ever that you are the answer to reform in America," said Negroni.
The Executive Director of the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for Hispanic Americans, Adam Chavarria, spoke about his office's efforts to close the achievement gap between white and Hispanic students, and to reach out to Hispanic families and include them in their children's education. "Nobody has a monopoly on talent, and we know that Hispanic students are capable of excelling at the highest levels," said Chavarria.
The conference's final speaker was Mae Jemison. Dr. Jemison was raised in Chicago and attended Stanford University and Cornell Medical school. Her childhood ambition had been to go into space, and she blasted into orbit aboard the space shuttle Endeavor on September 12, 1992, the first woman of color to do so.
She encouraged the audience to teach their students to ask questions. "What are we trying to educate them for?" she said. "What tasks will they have to perform?"
Science, she continued, was increasingly important to everyone's lives, whether they understood physics, chemistry, and biology, or not. "In a world that's impacted more and more by the pace of scientific discovery, we participate whether we're paying attention or not," she said. "At the heart of science are the words 'I think, I wonder, and I understand.' Science is a search for understanding, and technology is part of putting that understanding to practical use."
Jemison urged the teachers in the audience to involve their students in the science that is reported every day by the media. "This is not about training 10 million nuclear physicists, because we don't need that," she said. "But we do need a hundred million people who can read an article in the newspaper about the environment or health care and vote responsibly. So many people think of social issues and science and technology as separate, but what we decide to research or investigate says a lot about how we think of ourselves as a people. How do we get our students thinking about these things and thinking about their responsibilities and rights?
"The ability to make a moral decision and to commit to an idea is the real challenge of education today," concluded Jemison. "If we use our time as individuals and educators to improve education and to continue the learning environment outside the classroom, we will produce individuals who will make this world into a place that we are proud to pass on to the next generation."
AP Studio Art Exhibit 2005
Exhibit Hall
Opening Reception: Thursday, July 14, 5-8 p.m.Artworks by 30 AP studio art students were on display in the exhibit hall during the conference. Selected from more than 25,000 portfolios that were submitted for evaluation for the three AP art exams this year, the artworks represent the best of the best.
At the AP Exam Reading in early June 2005, college, university, and secondary school art instructors carefully reviewed the portfolios using rigorous standards. Their evaluations enabled colleges and universities to acknowledge and encourage students' accomplishments by granting appropriate college credit and placement.
This exhibition of accomplished work by AP Studio Art students featured art executed in a variety of media and represented extraordinary clarity of thought and a great diversity of content, style, and technique. It indicated the sophisticated level of achievement that students can attain while taking an AP course.
