Academic Rigor and Challenge in SMMUSD: Our High School Advanced Placement Program

B y José J. Escarce

One of our key goals in the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District (SMMUSD) is to provide high school students with a rigorous and challenging academic experience that will prepare them for success in college. At Santa Monica and Malibu High Schools, we have achieved this goal by developing exceptional Advanced Placement (AP) programs that rank among the best in the nation.

AP courses are college-level courses whose content and curriculum are determined by the College Board; they are widely recognized as the best, most challenging, and most rigorous courses high school students can take. Students who complete AP courses take national AP exams, also developed by the College Board, at the end of the school year. Passing scores on these exams may allow students to place out of introductory courses in college and may even earn them college credit.

In recent years, taking several AP courses during a student’s high school career has become a necessity for admission to highly selective colleges and universities. More important, studies have demonstrated that taking AP courses helps all high school students, including those who are not aiming for highly selective post-secondary schools.

These studies have found that students who take AP courses and pass the corresponding AP exams get better grades in college and are more likely to graduate than otherwise similar students who do not participate in AP. Clearly, high schools that wish to serve their students well must ensure that they offer numerous AP courses and that they provide all motivated students with access to these courses.

The AP programs at Santa Monica and Malibu High Schools rank among the nation’s best and continue to improve every year. Samohi offers 18 AP courses and Malibu High, a much smaller school, offers 11 AP courses in subjects as diverse as biology, chemistry, physics, calculus, statistics, English language and composition, English literature, Spanish language and composition, Spanish literature, French, Latin, European history, U.S. History, U.S. government and politics, psychology, economics, art history, and studio art. Student participation in AP has soared at Santa Monica High School over the past several years. For instance, last year Samohi students took more than 1,800 AP exams, more than three times the number of exams taken by Samohi students eight years ago.

Remarkably, student performance on AP exams has improved even as participation has grown, and last year’s passing rate of 68% exceeded the national rate by 10 percentage points. Students at Malibu High took nearly 500 AP exams last year and achieved a passing rate of 77%.
The enviable national standing of the AP programs at Santa Monica and Malibu High Schools was brought to light a few years ago by Washington Post education reporter, Jay Mathews, who created a measure called the Challenge Index to rank U.S. high schools by their AP programs.

Newsweek uses the Challenge Index to develop its popular annual list of America’s Best High Schools, and our high schools always do extremely well. The most recent Newsweek rankings, released earlier this year, place Malibu High School at number 185 and Samohi at number 203, both well within the top 1% of high schools in the nation.

New initiatives in SMMUSD to enhance the rigor and challenge of the academic experience provided to high school students include a variety of arrangements that are currently in the planning stages to increase our students’ access to courses at Santa Monica College. Nonetheless, the outstanding AP programs offered by Santa Monica and Malibu High Schools will remain a source of pride for our district and the lynchpin of our strategy for helping our students gain admission to four-year colleges and universities and succeed when they get there.