An article last week in the New York Times from Leeds, England, explained how kids who had mostly dropped out of school and were at risk of not-so-petty criminal activity were “sentenced to dance” in the UK’s Dance United program, where professional instructors train them in an atmosphere like a boot camp.
Photo: Brian Slater for Dance United
When asked what he had learned in the dance class, one student, Trey, showed off a sideways leap, but as Katrin Bennhold wrote, the real lessons go much deeper:
He has also learned about getting up in the morning, even when his mother is still asleep, and how to follow a healthy diet. The dancers eat cereal for breakfast and tofu Bolognese for lunch. Soda is banned; there is water and juice. And Trey has learned about books and the power to take control of your own story.
The dance class attendance had fallen a bit, from 24 to 18, but the remaining students in the court-ordered class gave their recital on the stage of London’s prestigious Riley Theater. This gave kids something to work for: not just an appreciation of the arts but a feeling of personal accomplishment that can only be attained through hard work toward a focused goal and often with good teachers.
And then this morning, I open up the Baltimore Sun and see, in huge headlines on the front page, a well researched story by education reporter Liz Bowie. She reports that students feel disappointed when they take Advanced Placement, or AP, exams for which they haven’t been well prepared. Many in Maryland don’t achieve a score of 3 or higher, which, on a scale of 1 to 5, is generally considered the threshold at which many colleges start accepting the exam results as college credit.
Ms Bowie focused on two different students, one at a school in Baltimore City and one at a more affluent school in Baltimore County. The Baltimore City student, Destiny, had struggled in an AP biology class at Woodlawn High School and got a score of only 2 on the AP exam. Josh, a student at Dulaney High in Baltimore County, like Destiny, wants to pursue a career in medicine or science. He got a 4 in biology.
Students at the highest-performing high schools in the Baltimore area, such as Dulaney High, Severna Park in Anne Arundel County, and River Hill in Howard County, are taking many AP classes and passing them at rates far higher than the national average. But top students at other schools earned potential college credit on the AP tests at much lower rates, even when they got good grades in their classes, the Sun reported.
Destiny was deeply disappointed in her scores but felt optimistic on one front: She scored a 2 in biology. … “I was very happy I got the high score in biology. It showed that I had learned something and that science really is my niche in academics,” she said. … She won’t get college credit, but it gave her hope that when she goes off to Tuskegee University in Alabama this month she won’t have to give up her dream.
The similarities between the dance story and the AP story almost knocked me off my chair. Yes, college is hard, and if students expect to get college credit while they’re still in high school, they might not be able to get too many hours in at a low-wage job. The rigors of the AP class may not allow a lot of part-time work, but many low-income families, which send students to the low-performing schools Ms Bowie wrote about, depend on the money earned by those students for basic life needs.
It was apparent from the article that Destiny has every bit of raw intelligence as Josh might have—the article cited her SAT scores, which could get her into a good college, for sure—but Josh has had many more opportunities in his day to study the actual material. Destiny, on the other hand, has mastered the art of finding good shortcuts out of simple time-management necessity.
Not all kids hit that college-ready mark at 17- or 18-years-old. I think it’s good Destiny is going away to college, because sometimes, being immersed in the college experience is helpful. Dealing with day-to-day family life and a part-time, low-wage job is a distraction from the academic rigor needed to pass a college-level course.
Dance United, at several locations throughout the UK, has shown a stunning success rate: 8 of every 10 troubled kids get back into mainstream education or work. The “sentence” costs about $3,000 a year but saves the government an estimated $128,000 a year in welfare costs, on average, the Times reported. Kids train six hours a day for six weeks with professional contemporary coaches. At the end, they give a performance, attended by a few people, but that feeling of pride in one’s own accomplishment doesn’t necessarily require an audience.
In the AP classes, it’s kind of the same thing. At the end, kids take a test, and if the score is high enough, they earn potential college credit, which can make college go faster and cost less money. But the work ethic required to succeed in college courses, which is completely different from the work ethic required to pass a high school regular or honors level course in the same subject, is the lesson learned: Destiny approached college with extreme optimism, the Sun article implied. Kind of like hearing that applause at the end of a performance, the AP test represented the best of what she could give, and that is all anyone can ask.
Simply put, there’s a time for part-time work and a time for college study. Those times couldn’t possibly be the same for every kid in every situation. I do caution against using the word “fail” to mean achieving a score less than 3 on an AP test, though, especially when comparing one test-taker to another.
It would be nice to see more 3-point earners on AP tests, but far more important than the credit is the lesson learned. We can’t expect every high school student to demonstrate success in college courses before they even get there, but we can expect them to prepare their minds for college-level work if that’s where they’re headed. This is about taking control of one’s own story and writing it with a flair.
