This was going to be a piece about a great new book about Advanced Placement, “AP: A Critical Examination of the Advanced Placement Program.” I promise to summarize its conclusions before this column ends.
But I want to focus on the most interesting contributor to the volume, a Texas economist named Kristin Klopfenstein who is author or co-author of two chapters and one of the four editors of the book. She has become the most articulate and knowledgeable critic of using AP to raise achievement in low-income schools, a movement I have been supporting for a quarter of a century, I decided to call her up, discuss our differences and report what she had to say.
Klopfenstein is an associate professor of economics at Texas Christian University, currently on leave to work as a senior researcher at the Texas Schools Project at the University of Texas-Dallas. In the new book, she is the sole author of a chapter that argues that people who say AP saves taxpayer money and reduces time to college graduation are wrong. Since I am not one of those people, I didn’t ask her about that chapter, but about a chapter of which she is the lead author, with Mississippi State University economist M. Kathleen Thomas as co-author, entitled “Advanced Placement Participation: Evaluating the Policies of States and Colleges.”
Klopfenstein has spent many years looking at AP in public schools, aided by a terrific state data base in Texas that follows students from grade school into college. Other researchers in Texas and California have produced studies that suggest that taking AP courses and exams in high school leads to more success in college than avoiding or being barred from AP, as happens with most college-bound students. Klopfenstein told me those studies should not be given great weight because they show correlation, not causation.