Which teachers do you remember -- the ones who challenged you, or the ones who let you slide by? No one begins a teaching career with an aim to provide a mediocre education. But teachers too often learn that upholding high standards brings trouble from parents and sometimes from school leaders, too. The result is that too many students are allowed to just get by.

One remedy is standardized tests that put a floor on acceptable performance. Washington state has created the WASLs to enforce a floor, and now requires students to achieve at the 10th-grade level in order to graduate from high school.

The idea of requiring 10th-grade achievement for a 12th-grade diploma seems less than uplifting. Let's's call it the low-road approach.

The example I'm going to cite of the high road approach is the Bellevue School District, but most of what it has done could be done by any city in Washington state, large or small, poor or rich.

Bellevue decided to focus on the positive, creating a challenge for its high schoolers. Every student is strongly encouraged to take at least one Advanced Placement (AP) or International Baccalaureate (IB) class, and to take the corresponding national test.

Students are pointed toward an accomplishment to achieve rather than away from a failure to avoid. Teachers are protected from pressure to dumb down their classes because the students are going to take a national test. If they dumb it down, the results will show it.

AP tests are created by committees of college professors and high school teachers to match the material and rigor of an introductory college course. The tests are graded from a top score of 5 down to 1, with 3 generally being considered a passing grade. Most American colleges give college credit for AP classes. For example, the UW economics department (my department), gives credit to students who score a 4 or 5. IB tests differ in detail, but are similarly rigorous.

Can this work for students who aren't "academically gifted?" For reasons I'll never really understand, as soon as an educator talks about tough academic material, someone objects, because they think being tough makes kids feel like failures. We needn't engage in these hypothetical arguments. The bottom line is that Bellevue pushes students to take hard AP and IB classes -- and it works.

Five of Bellevue's six high schools rank in the top 1 percent of high schools in the United States as measured by AP and IB tests per student. No other Washington high school makes the top 1 percent. Seattle's vaunted Garfield High School is the only other Washington school to break into the top 2 percent.

In most high schools, only students with the best academic performance get the chance to take these college-level classes. What happens when most students, not just the especially talented few take the tests?

Here's the answer from Bellevue superintendent Mike Riley: "I'm very proud that while we [Bellevue] have a higher percentage of kids in AP and IB than any other district in the country, our kids still score at the national average, hitting success rates as high as many districts that keep kids out of these tough classes."

What about students from groups that are often not well served by our schools? How do they handle academic challenge? Three out of five free/reduced lunch students -- students from families at the bottom end of the income distribution -- take an AP or IB class. The same fraction of English-as-a-second-language students takes one of these college level classes. The fraction of African American students in these advanced classes is even higher. And, probably not coincidentally, the Bellevue dropout rate has plummeted from 18 percent to 8 percent.

The Bellevue School District says it aims to provide "all its students with the kind of education typically reserved for America's elite class." I'd rather have schools that come close to achieving this high-road goal, than schools that are completely successful at providing a 12th-grade diploma for a 10th-grade education.

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Dick Startz is Castor Professor of Economics and Davis Distinguished Scholar at the University of Washington. He can be reached at econcol@u.washington.edu.

This column appeared in the following publications:

Bellingham Herald, Sept. 4, 2005

Everett Herald, Sept. 21, 2005