Does Dedham High’s AP grant program make the grade?

Morton Orlov said that last school year Dedham High had 99 students enrolled in the Advanced Placement math, science and English courses covered by his grant program, the Mass Math & Science Initiative. This year, that number was 134 – a 35 percent increase.

“That’s a pretty good outcome for their first year in the program,” he said.

And Orlov, the president of the Mass Math & Science Initiative, is “pretty confident that this school will do pretty well” when AP scores are released in July.

In 2008-2009, when 10 schools were taking part in the program, “every school showed an improvement in qualifying scores,” or AP scores of 3 or higher, for the three content areas, Orlov said.

The overall increase of such scores at the schools was 39 percent between 2008 and 2009, compared to a 3.5 percent uptick among all Massachusetts schools, and a 5.7 percent increase in U.S. public schools, Orlov said.

“We’re pretty comfortable that we’ll have another great year,” he said. “Hard for me to say exactly how Dedham will do.”

The initiative has three main goals – greater student participation in AP math, science and English courses, more scores of 3, 4, or 5 on AP exams, and increased college success.

In spring 2009, the initiative awarded Dedham a five-year grant, worth a total of $575,000, to attain such excellence in those three subjects, and in turn “transform school culture.”

A big aim of the program is to expand the pool of AP students, beyond the academic stars who already tend to take multiple advanced classes. Orlov said that when he was in high school, years ago, he did not take an AP course – but he did take the exam for U.S. history (and earned a qualifying score) when a teacher pushed him to do so.

His program works to break down “the typical self-selecting behavior (that) happens in many of our high schools” for AP courses, he said. “We want to try and get teachers to look at students through a different lens.”

Instead of “an attrition model,” the initiative promotes a more inclusive, “investment approach” to Advanced Placement enrollments. Better to expand the pool of students and presumably up the number of qualifying scores, even if some students don’t get them, Orlov said.

“Even if they do get a 2, at least they have a sense of where they are, before they roll into Northeastern or wherever,” he said.

Student involvement

English Department head John LaFlamme, who is a “lead teacher” for the program, said he loves recruiting students to AP classes – asking them if they have thought about taking AP, and then seeing them consider it and then enroll.

“We want to find those kids, and then work with them and pull them into the stream of AP coursework,” Superintendent of Schools June Doe said at a group interview of Dedham educators in March.

In part because of the grant, Dedham High School offered AP biology, chemistry and physics at the same time this year; in the past, it had just one such science class each year.

The grant follows another recent initiative, the high-reaching Freshman Academy, which is in its second year. Before, barely any freshmen and sophomores were taking AP classes, and few juniors, said School Committee member Tracy Driscoll. But the Freshman Academy has provided a support system where 30 to 40 kids can take honors classes together: “We’ve really, in the last few years, kind of exploded changing the academic rigor of the high school.”

The school had more sophomores than ever before taking AP classes, said Principal Jake Santamaria.

“The mindset now is which AP am I going to take. Am I going to take AP biology or AP history?” said Joanne McCormick, the guidance director for the school district. “Whereas in the past, I don’t think that thought was even there.”

Santamaria added that the AP grant program “raises the academic expectations of all of the kids.”

“It’s school-wide. It’s not just this one focus group. It’s raising the bar for everyone,” he said.

The program includes Saturday prep sessions for students, and vertical team meetings to try and align pre-AP teachers (such as in the middle school) and AP teachers on how best to prepare students, Orlov said. It also features seven to nine days of professional development a year for teachers, which Orlov called “just an enormous amount of high-quality professional development compared to what most teachers get.”

The teachers union

However, the Dedham teachers union strongly objects to the program, especially the attached pay from an outside organization that is apart from its contract. “In our eyes, it’s certainly not worth the price of destroying our collective bargaining,” said the union’s president, Tim Dwyer. 

Administrators did not respond to the Transcript’s request to attend the March prep session, which would have provided an up-close look at the program.

Valedictorian Matthew Mariano, who took four AP classes this year, said he went to calculus and physics Saturday prep sessions but did not find them “very helpful. I felt the calculus one was a waste of time and I felt that a Saturday was not enough time to effectively review physics.”

“I like the idea of the $100 because I’m broke, but I feel that it is a shameless bribe for kids to take AP classes,” Mariano said in an e-mail, adding that “kids should be self-motivated” to take them.

Salutatorian Carmine Ballarano said the sessions he attended for chemistry and calculus on three different Saturdays were useful, and that those two exams, when he took them in May, turned out to be “much easier than I thought.”

“If I didn’t have those sessions, I would have had to do more review. They were good,” said Ballarano, who took a total of four AP courses this year.

He said the lure of $100 motivated him especially for the English literature and composition test.

“I’m not really planning to do anything with English in college,” Ballarano said, “but I kind of wanted to get a 3 so I can get $100 out of it.”

Dedham Transcript staff writer Edward B. Colby can be reached at 781-433-8336 or ecolby@cnc.com.