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It’s probably more important in the modern world to push up your top students. World is getting more scalable. And a countries tech development depends far more on the top. For civil society matters some to have a well educated populace that understands what’s going on.
But there’s another solution since you say lower performers need more individual attention. You could probably teach the AP at scale like intro college courses. And shift to smaller classes on the lower performers. The only issue is a lot of teachers don’t like teaching lower performing and like to have a student who they feel will go somewhere.
You could also cut teaching pay and boost number of teachers in some of the blue areas doing this. Chicagos around 100k a year for a teacher. If you pay Florida wages you could shrink class sizes.
I actually don’t think the AP would scale well at all. Think about how many people fail out of college because they don’t go to lectures or keep up with assignments. Then take away their financial skin in the game, deduct a couple years of life experience such as intro jobs, and force them to stay on “campus” all day. It’d be a bloodbath.
The staffing issue isn’t great either. I’ve never met a professor who’d rather teach freshman lectures than more selective classes. Is that because of the interest of the subject, or because monologuing to 200 people is boring and/or stressful? Either way, there’d be less desire to maximize AP class sizes.
High school also precludes the usual university staffing solution of underpaid TAs. Schedule flexibility is much lower, and there’s no carrot of scholarships or research spots. Without TAs, good luck grading the assignments of giant lecture sections.
In my opinion, one of the more valuable skills from AP is an asking-questions kind of relationship with the teacher. That’s the kind of thing which gets people going to office hours or research assistants in college. Large lectures are a hard limit to that given a high-school schedule.
Most of these problems are much, much worse if you’re simultaneously slashing wages. The market price for a teacher in Chicago accounts for cost of living, Union efforts, enjoyability of the job and the leisure time…force that to match Florida, and you’ll find people would rather be in Florida.
Cost of living isn’t much higher in Chicago/Illinois. And Florida has better academic performance when adjusting for race. It’s mostly just unions.
I’m seeing Chicago as slightly cheaper than Miami, but more expensive than all the other listed Florida cities, which are more comparable to Houston or Richmond.
But my point stands. You are paying teachers to live in Illinois rather than somewhere with a comparable cost but no snow, better beaches, and different politics. I’m sure we can model some of the difference as due to unions, and some fraction of that as self-perpetuating overhead rather than an actual service that people would pay for. How much? I think if you cut wages to Florida levels, the marginal teach would feel much better about moving to Florida. Or Albequerque, or anywhere with similar pay.
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I think most teachers would be happy teaching lower performers in a setting in which they can do so successfully (ie, in a setting in which students show actual progress). And of course in high schools, a teacher could have some classes with higher performers and some with lower performers.
Yes, there is definitely a tradeoff between salary and class sizes. Of course, there is also the problem that lower ciass sizes = more teachers = need to scrape the bottom of the barrel to find all those extra teachers. OTOH, there are plenty of teachers who are not effective in large non-honors classes but who would be effective in smaller classes (eg: a teacher who is not great at classroom management). Again, it is a complex problem.
Even that has tradeoffs -- larger classes = more time grading homework (a big deal for any class which requires writing: 100 essays at 15 min per essay = 25 hours of grading), so teachers of larger classes might end up assigning less demanding work.
It is really a more complex problem than is normally assumed.
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