At Barnsdall High School in northeastern Oklahoma, teacher James Cole prompts his Advanced Placement English students to write an opinion essay about the recent presidential election and what direction the country should go.
A student chooses to take the stance of “indifferent,” but isn’t sure how to develop the required counterarguments for the essay.
“You’re 15. In four years, you’ll be 19,” Cole offers. “You’re a legal adult. You’ve graduated high school in four years, you’re in the working real world. So you’re not old enough now, but in four years, you will be, and you’ll be affected greatly because of it. Okay? So that’s an argument I would say.”
It’s Cole’s first year teaching AP, and he said he loves that it allows him to delve deeper with students. Before him, media specialist Wilma Logue taught it. She’s been at Barnsdall for about 70 years and started the school’s AP program in the early 2000s.
“It’s rigorous. It’s challenging. And it’s making people think,” Logue said. “And we’re living in a world right now that we’d better do a lot of thinking. And I think AP lends itself to that.”
AP has been around for more than 70 years, with a significant expansion nationwide in the early 2000s. The coursework is demanding, and students have the option of earning college credit by passing a test at the end. The tests are graded on a scale of 1-5, and a 3 is considered a passing grade.
According to the Oklahoma State Department of Education’s Advanced Placement Annual Report, 26,399 AP exams were taken by Oklahoma students last year. About 54% of those resulted in passing grades.
Four years ago, lawmakers passed House Bill 3400, which requires all Oklahoma public high schools to offer at least four Advanced Placement courses. It went into effect this fall.
Barnsdall is currently teaching AP English and Biology. It stays in compliance with the new policy by making other courses available online. But Superintendent Sayra Bryant says the law hasn’t resulted in much of a change in her district.
“We can offer them,” Bryant said. “Getting students to take them is the hard part.”
That’s the case at many Oklahoma schools. According to data from the College Board, analyzed by StateImpact, though schools stay in compliance by offering courses, more than 60% of high schools are currently teaching zero AP courses this year. Only a quarter are teaching four or more.
The issue is exacerbated in rural schools — in districts with enrollment of less than 1,000, nearly 80% are teaching zero AP courses, and 94% are teaching less than four.
The law may have had an impact, albeit modest, on the number of AP courses currently being taught since it was passed in 2020. Then, 192 high schools taught zero courses. This year, 27 of those are now teaching AP courses, and five of those are teaching four or more AP courses.
Rural schools face obstacles to AP buy-in
Red Oak Public Schools in southeastern Oklahoma serves less than 300 students. Bryan Deatherage, the district’s superintendent, said the demand for AP is nonexistent. And even if there was a demand, a shortage of teachers means his students would have to take the courses online.
“If you’re going to start trying to teach three and four AP classes, our teachers typically teach seven through twelfth [grade],” Deatherage said. “You had one math teacher, one science teacher, one English teacher, etcetera. So, there’s not room in the day, per se, to offer two or three AP courses just to appease three or four kids. It just is not feasible with the personnel that we have.”
According to the College Board’s data, 14 districts are offering some or all of their AP courses online.
Deatherage said he feels like lawmakers are out-of-touch with the realities of rural communities.
“There’s real things that are happening that we’re having to deal with in rural Oklahoma that consume our days. … Where did the kid stay last night? Were they with mom? Were they with dad? Were they with a foster family? Were they with grandparents? Did they eat? Did they sleep?” Deatherage said. “But somebody is worried whether that kid’s taking an AP class. I’m just glad they got shoes on and could come to school.”
Rep. Rhonda Baker (R-Yukon) authored the legislation. She did not return requests for an interview. In defending the bill on the House Floor in March of 2020, she was asked about its impact on rural districts.
“We do want to make offerings of AP courses available to all districts across the state, even if they only have one or two students that may want to access the course — they can do so virtually,” Baker said. “We’re trying to make sure that there are enough choices available for even one or two students.”
Macomb Public Schools Superintendent Matt Riggs said risking college credit over a high-stakes test, instead of earning the credit through taking a concurrent course, is a gamble his students aren’t willing to take.
“If they put the work in with concurrent, they get high school credit and they can get college credit, and it’s immediate,” Riggs said. “I think a lot of them just look at it like, ‘If I’m going to be doing the work and doing the extra, I want to be guaranteed of the credit, of the reward, that I’m going to receive once I do this work.’”
He said he thinks lawmakers were well-intentioned with the law, and he credits it for continuing a conversation about expanding student pathways. But in his district, he doesn’t think it has done anything to “move the needle.” Instead, he said, it would be more effective to expand course offerings by providing funding to hire more staff.
“I think at the legislature especially, there are good ideas and people, but they don’t involve people in conversations that can bring those other frames of reference,” Riggs said. “And then they also try to frame the conversation around, ‘Well, why would you be against making sure that kids get AP?’ Well, nobody’s against that, nobody is against course offerings. But there’s the practical side of being able to make it work.”
At Barnsdall, science teacher Austin Gann teaches a five-student AP Biology class. He said regardless of the law, he sees value in schools offering advanced courses when they can. While concurrent courses may be more of a “sure thing,” in terms of earning college credit, he believes his students take AP for the rigor and the elevated GPA.
“I think it allows us to differentiate [instruction], but in their own class hour,” Gann said. “And instead of trying to do it all in one group, trying to get people stretched, instead of maybe holding them back if they were in another setting.”
Media specialist Wilma Logue said she’s aware of the hardships that rural students are facing, but she sees AP classes as necessary for developing the next generation through expanding access to higher-level thinking.
“I guess I want to quote [Robert] Browning: ‘A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?’ It’s simply exploring the world and letting the mind reach out and pull in ideas,” Logue said. “They need more than just calling words, reading a book and just reading words, and not thinking, not applying their own ideas to that and doing something with it. And so that, I think, that’s advanced placement.”
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