AP Italian Background
The Advanced Placement Program was designed: "...to develop rigorous, college-level course curricula and assessments for high school students." In 2007, according to the College Board, more than 1.4 million students took AP Exams worldwide. Over 3,000 colleges and universities accepted qualifying AP Exam grades from those students for credit and/or placement.
In 2001, after years of lobbying by national Italian American organizations such as Order Sons of Italy in America (OSIA), the American Association of Teachers of Italian, and the National Italian American Foundation, as well as the support of prominent Italian Americans, the College Board conducted a feasibility study for AP Italian Language, surveying school principals and high school teachers of Italian to gauge levels of interest.
After careful consideration, in 2003 the College Board announced the creation of the AP course and examination in Italian language and culture. A national task force was formed to outline the curriculum and draft the AP Italian examination specifications. Finally, the first AP Italian Language and Culture course commenced in the fall of 2005, followed by the first exam in May 2006.
Italian Students AWOL
The College Board, when announcing plans to cut AP Italian (along with Latin literature, French literature and computer science AB), noted that the Italian course, in three years, attracted 1,642
students and 305 teachers nationwide, one-fifth the number who expressed interest before it was created. What makes those statistics especially disconcerting is that a 2002 report from OSIA, using data from the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, revealed that Italian language enrollment in U.S. high schools rose 46 percent between 1994-2000 compared to Spanish enrollment, (26 percent rise). French and German dropped 2.75 percent and 13 percent, respectively. So what happened to all the high school Italian students who initially expressed interest in AP Italian?
Last Chance In Overtime
Even though the May 2009 AP Italian Language and Culture Exam is scheduled to be the final offering of the program, the College Board has left open to slim possibility of granting a reprieve. According to officials:
"We hope that between now and May 2009, external partners will come forward to supplement the College Board's investment and that we are able to announce a three-year extension of AP Italian through May 2012. We are hopeful that if this occurs, advocates of AP Italian will have time to raise awareness and participation among students to the level of other programs, such as AP German. External support, similar to that provided for AP Chinese and AP Japanese, would enable the College Board to fund the conversion of the AP Italian exam administration and scoring model to the Web-based model employed by those subject areas, and would also enable the College Board to perform the necessary maintenance and support of the program."
In effect, much like a soccer match tied after regulation time has expired, AP Italian could find itself in "extra time" with a chance to win again. To make certain that the concerted hard efforts to date of many Italian American organizations, educators, students, and other interested individuals aren't squandered, the Italian language squadra needs a stadium full of i tifosi cheering them on.
