As technology and finance continue to shape the modern world, students may soon have new opportunities to prepare for these fields in high school. The College Board has introduced three new Advanced Placement (AP) courses—Cyber: Security, Cyber: Networking, and Business: Principles of Finance—through its AP Career Kickstart program, according to College Board’s website.
AP Computer Science A (AP CSA) teacher Charles Castleman had a positive initial reaction to the addition of the new cyber courses, he said.
“If you talk to most people and ask ‘What’s your biggest fear, or what’s one of your biggest fears?’ I think a lot of people would say having my information hacked or having someone open up a credit card in my name or act in other ways that could be harmful,” Castleman said. “Organizations fear their cybersecurity getting compromised and harmful things being done as a result of that. So I think it’s (courses) important. I think there’s a lot of opportunities in the field, and I think it’s a good thing that College Board is offering classes on this.”
Principles of Finance teacher Dhruvangi Shah was also intrigued by the new AP Business class but foresees potential concerns about the course, she said.
“I actually thought that (the new course) was pretty cool,” Shah said. “I feel like business classes do lend themselves better as college classes that high school students can take, but I also was thinking about how practical the curriculum will be.”
Potential AP teachers need to undergo a training program for their course before they gain the appropriate credentials to teach the course, Castleman said. For Castleman, it was a week-long summer course at Palo Alto High for AP CSA, he added.
“I would add that that’s the level of training that’s required for you to officially be able to teach the class,” Castleman said. “But in my experience, teaching a new AP class that has never been taught here at the school before also requires several years to really gel and really get it down. So it’s one thing to be able to take a week of training and be able to efficiently teach it; it’s another thing to really be able to get it down well and teach it well, and I think that requires more experience than just a week.”
The process for adding AP courses to the high school—or any other course for that matter— is relatively simple and only requires two main components, Assistant Principal Jonathan Mach said.
“The two big factors are ‘Do you have a qualified teacher that will teach it (a specific subject) or will want to go out and get trained to be able to teach it?’ and two, ‘Do we have enough students that want to take it’,” Mach said.
The school administration and the wider school district do not push for additional AP courses, and the only time they would get involved is if they believe the basic requirements to pass high school are somehow being jeopardized, Mach said. Besides that, the school district believes in supporting students and teachers, he added.
“It’s all up to the teacher to learn the material, the teacher to make sure they have the resources, the teacher to let us know what they need, and the students to fill the course,” Mach said. “If and only if we have room to offer new courses, then we can add it.”
Shah thinks that if the new AP business course is added to the school, it needs to remain student-centered and have the funding to maintain learning resources, Shah said.
“There will be a curriculum, and there are standards we have to meet once they (College Board) flesh it out, but try to cater it towards the students,” Shah said. “What are they super interested in? And I think that helps because students talk to each other, and if there’s a really cool class, they’re like ‘Oh my god, you have to take this class, it’s super cool’ or if there’s a terrible class, ‘Don’t take it’.
Castleman believes that patience and a commitment to growth are necessary for a new AP course to be successfully adopted by a school, and then for it to succeed year after year, he said.
“The reality is the first year that we’re offering a new AP course is probably not going to be the best year,” Castleman said. “We’re going to be looking at the end of the year going ‘Gosh, here are all the things that we felt could have been better. Here are all the changes that we want to make next year.’ That’s going to be a big process, especially the first few years of teaching a course that’s never been taught here before. So we have to have the growth mentality, but we also have to have patience.”