Offering high school students college courses as a way to prepare them for the rigors of higher-level thinking and writing seems like a no-brainer. Yet Advanced Placement has always fought an uphill battle to gain acceptance in high schools and in the media. I’ve seen it in the three Fairfax high schools I’ve taught in, and I saw it last week in the New York Times. Why is such a successful program the target of so much negativity?

When I started teaching high school students after 10 years of college teaching, I realized that these students — only one year younger than most of the college students I’d taught — were capable of far more than was expected of them. At my first school, most students had no one in their families who had gone to college, yet they read Chaucer in Middle English and Jane Austen. They were “game” as long as my approach was laid-back and emphasized that reading was fun.