Jay Mathews was a Washington Post reporter and columnist from 1971 to 2022. His books include “An Optimist’s Guide to American Public Education.”
The latest report on U.S. public schools has the usual bad news. The Education Scorecard put out by research centers at Harvard and Stanford universities says reading and math scores have been in steady decline since 2013.
Why bother to even mention it? Because something important is changing. Resourceful teachers are creating a different trend, rumbling almost unnoticed beneath the test score disappointments.
I first noticed this 30 years ago when I created a new kind of top high schools list, mostly to promote a book I had written. I called it the Challenge Index. I was inspired by what I was seeing in low-income public schools where students were getting college-level courses in math, English, science and history and taking the final exams despite the dumbing down common in many high schools.
The list provided a ratio for each school: the number of these tough final exams given each year, mostly by the College Board’s Advanced Placement program, divided by the size of each school’s graduating class. The first time I did it, only 1 percent of high schools — just 243 of them — gave more of the exams than the number of graduating seniors.
But that number kept growing. Newsweek magazine and then The Post were publishing the latest Challenge Index list annually, and over time the number of schools giving more exams than they had seniors increased. By 2019, the Challenge Index included nearly 12 percent of U.S. high schools.
Something else changed, too. In 1998, the top 20 schools served mostly children from affluent families, such as Richard Montgomery High in Rockville, Maryland, or North Hollywood High in California. Two decades later, the top of the list included mostly low-income schools, many of them charter schools such as the KIPP schools founded by Dave Levin and Mike Feinberg or the IDEA schools started by JoAnn Gama and Tom Torkelson.
According to the College Board, the growth has been huge, though largely little noticed. Just 94,000 students from low-income families took AP exams in 2003. By 2025 the number was nearly nine times as large — 845,000. In 2003, 11.6 percent of AP students came from low-income families. By 2025 that number was 27 percent.
I found clues of this transformation at Garfield High School in Los Angeles, where I watched the work of classroom magician Jaime Escalante, who was celebrated in the film “Stand and Deliver.” I noticed there were many other teachers at that school who lacked Escalante’s charisma but found ways to accustom students to longer school days and more demanding lessons.
Throughout the country, more and more teachers helped students build skills that produced good scores on AP tests, as well as college-level exams like International Baccalaureate. Many students told me that even when they failed to pass AP or IB exams, they still learned more by struggling with the challenge.
It has taken a while for educators and parents who feared pushing kids too hard to appreciate this. Some principals told me they could make their courses just as demanding as AP. Often this proved untrue. Teachers found it difficult to make final exams as hard as AP’s.
Most schools erected barriers to taking AP. At Garfield, students making C’s in their ninth and 10th-grade classes were encouraged to try AP. But in wealthy Westchester County, New York, where I spent much time, C students were barred from college-level courses. I still found students who rebelled against that. One Westchester student with a mediocre record decided to take AP U.S. history on her own. She got the textbook, borrowed friends’ assignments and passed the test, the College Board being happy to give its demanding tests to whoever would pay the fee.
Darren Johnston at Carmel High School in California told me he and his colleagues had to fight to remove barriers to AP enrollment for ordinary students. But the results were clear: After four years, the number of AP students had increased by 50 percent and the school’s passing rate on the exams improved.
A 2008 study by Texas researchers Linda Hargrove, Donn Godin and Barbara Dodd debunked the theory that AP students do better in college only because they are naturally better students. The study showed that in English, calculus, biology and history, students with low SAT scores who received only twos on their AP exams, below the passing level of three on the exams’ five-point scale, did better in those subjects in college than students with similar SAT scores who did not take AP.
Chloe Kilzi, then a senior at Issaquah High School in Washington state, told me she felt lucky, despite weak grades in science and math, that her school encouraged her to take AP physics and AP calculus BC. At her previous school in Chicago, she would have needed good grades and teacher recommendations, a common bar to AP participation. She went on to study engineering physics in college.
American schools continue to suffer from the tendency to tolerate mediocrity. Compromises are sometimes seen as the only way to get through the day. But the steady movement of demanding college courses into high school is changing attitudes, making American schools in many places better than they were.
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