<p>A few more thoughts on this situation: there are few if any schools with sufficient resources to have an AP Chemistry teacher who is solely devoted to AP Chemistry (perhaps some of the science magnets do).</p>
<p>There were 7 students in the OP’s class. I would surmise that there were no other AP Chemistry classes. This means that besides teaching AP Chemistry, the chemistry teacher is probably covering multiple sections of honors chemistry, regular college-prep chemistry, and/or a kind of survey-level chemistry course. Possibly the teacher is handling a section of general science or biology as well. This means multiple distinct preparations per day. </p>
<p>Schools with sufficient resources can purchase AP Chemistry lab kits to cover the experiments in the AP curriculum. In the schools without those resources, the teacher generally has to acquire the chemicals and equipment, somehow. In either case, there would normally be a lot of work preparing solutions with precisely known compositions, analyzing the “unknowns” that will be given to the students, maintaining the equipment . . . This work comes on top of the normal homework, lab report, and examination grading. There is rarely an assistant who can help with any of this.</p>
<p>I think there is a point in holding a teacher responsible in some part for the students’ outcomes. However, I think this needs to taper off as the students approach college age, and the responsibility needs to shift to the student. This argues in favor of the teacher spending the most effort on teaching the weakest students.</p>
<p>The students in college chemistry classes should be spending 12-16 hours per week on the lecture course, on average, with an additional 6-9 hours on the associated lab course, if they want to build an appropriate foundation for further study. No teacher, no matter how great a coach, can cause the students to accomplish 18-25 hours of learning per week in a class that meets 5 hours a week. The students have to put in serious effort outside the class time.</p>
<p>A friend of mine teaches AP Chem, Honors Chem, AP Anatomy and Physiology, and regular Biology. She has never had a student get lower than a 3 on any AP test in the 12 years she has been teaching AP courses. In her HS, taking the AP test is a requirement of taking the course. It is not in an affluent school district.</p>
<p>What the auditors find is that AP course success is 90% teacher variation and 10% student variation. It is easy to blame the incompetence on the students, but there is too much evidence here to the contrary. Get your parents to file a formal complaint with the principal and with the school board.</p>
<p>Magnetron, do you have a reference on the study by the “auditors”? I am very disinclined to believe that result. The variation in students must have been confined to a very narrow window. Seeing the continuity in the results with a turnover in teachers locally, I think a lot of it has to do with the nature of the students, and their willingness to put in the effort that is needed, as well as their pre-AP preparation.</p>
<p>School districts that are not affluent come in many varieties. Our area could be described as “not affluent,” but locally, about 90% of the students in APUSH and AP Calc BC score 5’s on the AP exam. I am not sure about the fractions in the other courses. On the one hand, some of the teachers are truly admirable. On the other hand, I do not believe that that same teachers would have similar results if they moved to a school district not far away, where the average ACT composite score hovers around 16.</p>
<p>To give an example of the difficulty of separating the effects of the teachers from the effects of the students: I imagine that the students at HH Dow High School have a pretty impressive record in AP Chemistry. At the same time, the school board in that area has a pick of hyper-qualified people to teach AP Chemistry. So the two are linked. However, I am inclined to think that if you forced the Dow scientists’ offspring to transfer to a different school district, they would still perform quite well in AP Chemistry, due to the life-long acquisition of related background. If you moved the Dow High AP Chem teacher to some of the schools in Detroit, it would take many years and collaborative efforts with many more teachers before you began to see a spate of 5’s.</p>
<p>Let’s just say I saw all of the compiled data for the state of WA with the auditor’s notes - not from her - not exactly sure if it was supposed to be publicly available or not. Her school district is top 3 in the state for overall pass rate despite not being outstanding in anything else, mostly due to a few highly effective teachers. I know her well enough to have compared my son’s syllabus with her’s, and have seen examples of lab reports and tests. </p>
<p>I also got to see the average scores and pass rates for my wealthy suburban school loaded with geniuses, broken down by teacher and subject. We know which teachers to avoid.</p>
<p>Colleges routinely collect data on performance of students based on school district and HS attended measured against HS performance. As a fictional example, a highly selective college may find the 50th ranked kid from Newport HS may be a better admissions bet than the valedictorian of Sammamish HS 5 miles away. A college professor friend hates to see students from my kids’ HS registered for one of her classes because she knows the teacher has not prepared them well, but has no problem having them for other classes where they would have had a different teacher.</p>
<p>In our local high school, the AP pass rate is quite strong. However, for most of the subjects there is a single AP teacher, and the only way to avoid the teacher is to avoid that AP or to self-study. In the one case where there is more than one AP teacher (APUSH), the score distributions are largely equivalent between the two people.</p>
<p>When you write about avoiding a teacher, do you mean that there are different teachers teaching the same AP course, with significantly different pass rates? If so, does the school practice tracking in some form? Or even if not, is there a kind of accidental tracking, where the need to fit AP Physics C and AP Literature into the schedule causes those student who are taking both of those classes to wind up in the same AP Gov class?</p>
<p>It seems to me that in the case you cite–the college professor who doesn’t mind having students from your kid’s high school in one of the classes, but feels that they are inadequately prepared for the other–there must be a difference in the content of the classes that complicates the comparison. For example, I could see a possibility that a physics prof would feel that students from a particular school were well prepared for non-calc-based physics, but not for the introductory physics with calculus. Or the prof might feel that the students coming into the introductory physics with calculus were well-prepared, but the students who had taken AP Phys C were not ready for classical mechanics. I can’t think of a case where a direct comparison is possible.</p>
<p>Many people self study for the exams. This teacher sounds better than any teacher my children have had during their high school careers. I am unsure what you are expecting, but even AP Physics here, and AP Chem…well…none of the AP classes have labs. </p>
<p>You can complain, but if your schools are like ours, it won’t matter at all. If anything, it will turn the teacher against you and get you a lower grade.</p>
<p>Just wanted to clarify: I am not blaming the students in the poorer district I mentioned. Rather, I mean that the district has serious problems: the pre-AP education leaves the students without the necessary foundation to handle the AP work, yet AP classes may still be offered. The AP teacher does not have a realistic hope of teaching the background material + the AP material in a single year. </p>
<p>“Stand and Deliver” gave a false portrayal of Escalante teaching students to do well on the AP Calculus exam, within a single year. Actually, he started with a group in 9th or 10th grade, to prepare them to take the AP exam. Then they had a foundation that he could build upon. </p>
<p>The OP’s circumstances seem quite different from this.</p>