Educ. Sec. Touts Increased Funding for Advanced Placement Courses
by Jim Brown
April 6, 2004
(AgapePress) - The Bush Administration wants to make more advanced placement (AP) courses available for disadvantaged and low-income students.President Bush has more than doubled funding for the Advanced Placement Program in the 2005 budget, asking for $52 million -- a $28 million increase over 2004. Education Secretary Rod Paige says the spending hike will "dramatically expand" the number of low-income and minority students prepared to succeed in AP courses and in college.
Paige met recently with AP teachers and urged them to lead reform efforts as they "make a startling statement of inclusion and quality."
"I urge each of you to change your thinking about the education system, to promote the radical idea that all students can learn, to make advance courses available to students that have never had the opportunity before, and take advance courses to school settings that have never had them in the past," Paige said to the group.
The Education Secretary encouraged the teachers to be bold as they lead reform. "Educational reform isn't real reform unless it promotes excellence and expects students to learn," Paige said. "The AP program is the best kind of reform. With higher expectations, it uses the strengths of educational achievement to improve educational quality."
Paige said the Advanced Placement Program can help close the "vast" racial gap in academic achievement. "Through AP classes, Beethoven becomes as familiar as Britney [Spears], Frederick Douglass has a conversation with a student in Compton, and T.S. Eliot speaks to a reader in El Paso," he said.
