Rand met his wife, Shirlee, in high school he was football captain and she head cheerleader. He set up and taught after-school Bible classes, preparing his students for missions, once they turned 19, to bring the Book of Mormon to the world. His father, Rand, worked for the Church Educational System of the Mormon Church. Packer grew up in a family that took religion seriously. Their only similarities - other than devotion to AP - are that both spent their early years in lakeside towns on mountain plateaus (Escalante’s Bolivian hometown, Achacachi, is much higher than Provo, Utah) and were the sons of educators who had little money. But the results of the 1987 tests, which had no irregularities, were astounding.Įscalante is Packer’s hero, though they never met before Escalante’s death in 2010. Escalante had solidified his reputation as a fine teacher despite accusations that his students had cheated on an AP test in 1982 - the subject of the movie. That year, his big barrio school, Garfield High in East Los Angeles, produced 27 percent of all the Mexican American students in the United States who passed an AP calculus exam. The movement to unleash the potential of impoverished American teenagers through AP began with Escalante’s 1987 miracle. Often, the addition of so many impoverished participants causes average standardized test scores to drop, but the average AP score has remained fairly stable and was higher in 2018 than it was a decade ago, when more than 1 million fewer students took the tests. 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. 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.
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