![]() The portion of low-income test takers increased from 9 percent to 22 percent. By this year, that number had jumped to 608,707, a 540 percent increase. ![]() In 2003, 95,065 students from low-income families took an AP exam. That is the stuff that makes me happiest.” “When I started as head of AP in 2003, one in 10 kids in AP classrooms were low-income,” he says. But his main focus has been opening AP to participation by students from disadvantaged families. He is an active member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, serving as Sunday school teacher at his congregation in Manhattan.Ī dynamo in pursuing his objectives, Packer has built an army of inspired teachers that has grown from about 87,000 when he took over 15 years ago to 165,000 today. He has a longtime girlfriend but has never married and has no children, although he does have 23 nieces and nephews. He once taught freshman college English but never a high school class. Packer’s official title is College Board senior vice president for Advanced Placement and instruction. Trevor Packer has been director of the College Board’s Advanced Placement program since 2003. Most of all, they don’t know Trevor Packer. They don’t appear to know much about the students from low-income families pouring into AP classes. The reality is that many elite college educators have little contact with the public high schools where AP is booming. Some might see these moves as a threat to AP’s foothold, but so far they’ve had little effect on the program’s continuing growth. And earlier this year, seven Washington-area prep schools said they would be eliminating AP courses from their curriculums. In 2013, Dartmouth College announced that it would no longer give incoming students credit toward graduation for high school AP courses. The public schools with AP educate 89 percent of all public high-schoolers. But some educators at private institutions think that a program this popular can’t be right for their students. And his leadership is a critical factor at a time when AP is both undergoing rapid expansion and facing criticism and nascent challenges.Ībout 16,000 public and private schools offer AP courses. Packer, but He is also - along with the late Jaime Escalante, the East Los Angeles math teacher who was the subject of the 1988 film “Stand and Deliver” - the man most responsible for making the Advanced Placement program the most powerful educational tool in the country. He is the fabled bookworm emperor of AP Land. Tens of thousands of teenagers follow him on Twitter. ![]() ![]() This is the first published article about him and his life. A scholarly, mild-mannered 48-year-old, Packer is pretty much unknown outside the world of AP. Tierney's comments brought a defense of the advanced placement system from Trevor Packer, senior vice president for the College Board's AP program, who said that while it "is not a silver bullet," the program helps high school students who are "ready and waiting for the sort of rigor that would prepare them for what they would encounter in college.Thirty years later, due to a string of unlikely events, Packer is national director of the AP program and determined to make its fruits accessible to kids from modest backgrounds like his own. He also called the system a "sacred cow" that doesn't face enough scrutiny. The AP system came under fire recently, when Rob Jenkins asked in a column for The Chronicle of Higher Education, "Can we please dispense with the fiction that Advanced Placement courses in any way resemble college courses?"Īnd former teacher John Tierney called the AP program a "scam" in The Atlantic and during a recent interview with NPR's Talk of the Nation. Kate Lyon, who graduated from the school in 2005, tells the Associated Press that the decision "seems to show very little regard for the fact that students struggle to pay for college," noting that her family saved about $15,000 because of her AP credits. Dartmouth says that beginning with the class of 2018, AP exams will be used to place students in the proper classes, not to replace college credit. Run by the College Board, the Advanced Placement program includes more than 30 courses in languages, history, calculus, and science. Advanced Placement exams, which many high school students use to gain course credits when they attend college, will no longer be accepted for credit at Dartmouth College, the Associated Press reports.
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