Students, teachers offered $250 as test bonus

WASHINGTON — The Advanced Placement program has long offered college credit to high-school students who show mastery of a subject. Now, a group of educators and business executives is dangling another incentive in front of AP students and teachers in selected schools across the country: $250 for each passing score on science, English and math tests.

The offer, announced Friday by a group with $125 million in funding from the ExxonMobil Foundation, is stoking debate over the wisdom of cash bonuses for achievement. The group behind the offer says it aims to raise AP achievement in certain public schools where an incentive might make a difference.

Natasha Savranskaya, a senior at Walter Johnson High School in Bethesda, Md., which has a strong AP program, said she thought bonuses would be "a wonderful incentive" for students in schools where AP programs are weak — and a well-deserved reward for hard-working teachers.

Savranskaya said she has passed two tests herself. That would have earned her $500 at a participating school. "And I can think of a lot of things to do with that money," she said.

But Mike Grill, the AP coordinator at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Va., panned the idea. Grill said his school's goal "is for everyone to play a role in getting kids to succeed at the most challenging level possible, and that level will not necessarily be AP for all students. Singling out AP teachers and AP students by compensating them for success in AP would completely undermine our ethos as a school."

A nonprofit organization called the National Math and Science Initiative announced the program in New York. The idea is based on an 11-year-old Texas program begun by philanthropist Peter O'Donnell. In 10 Dallas high schools that pay the bonuses, the number of passing AP scores (3 or higher on a 5-point scale) has increased from 71 in 1995 to 877 in 2006.

More than 2.3 million AP tests were given in 2006 in 37 subjects, according to the College Board.

But the program would target only 13 tests: Calculus AB; Calculus BC; Computer Science A; Computer Science AB; Statistics; Biology; Chemistry; Environmental Science; Physics B; Physics C: Electricity and Magnetism; Physics C: Mechanics; English Language; and English Literature.