High School Classes May Be Advanced in Name Only

This is the title of a NYT article which says more high school students in the US are taking rigorous-sounding courses, but their results on national and international tests are lagging. The title betrays the basic spin of the story – many (maybe even most) of these courses are in fact not advanced at all: College Preparatory Biology is mere basic Biology, etc. On closer reading, though, a study (I assume, truly rigorous) found out that in only 15 per cent of advanced math classes “the textbook covered less advanced areas of math than the course name suggested.” Which indicates that 85 per cent of these classes were truly advance in content, yet most students were somehow unable to get much out of them. Oh, and in Arkansas 70 percent of high school students who took Advanced Placement classes scored 2.0 or below on a 5-point scale. Could it be, then, that it’s not the rigor of the classes that is lacking but something else?