English Curriculum Coordinator John Andrews posted a Canvas announcement on Wednesday, Oct. 1, that the high school will not be offering AP English for the 2026-27 school year.
“After reviewing exam results, exploring the AP curriculum and discussing the idea as a department, we have decided not to add an AP English course at this time,” Andrews wrote in his announcement. He said the reasoning for this decision was that students studying for the AP English exams independently are already scoring highly, and with recent changes in district leadership, now isn’t an opportune time to start a new course.
“Our students are already doing exceptionally well on both AP English exams without a dedicated class. In 2025, 82 students took the AP Language exam with a 95% success rate, and 40 students took the AP Literature exam with a 97.5% success rate—among the very highest [pass rates on an AP exam] at BHS. These results show that our current rigorous courses are preparing students more than adequately,” Andrews wrote. “We also want to be mindful of timing. With district leadership currently in transition, this is not the moment to launch new and complex courses.”
Student reactions to the news have been varied.
Junior Harper Litwack said she is already signed up for the AP English Language and Composition exam and that students are empowered to self-study for the exams independently, even without a formal class.
“From the email they sent out, it seems that BHS students do pretty well [on the AP English exams] without taking the class,” Litwack said. “I think the resources they’re saying they’ll provide for us and that they have provided for us seem to be helpful.”
In his announcement, Andrews said the English department offers a wide range of rigorous English classes paired with exam prep workshops and will continue to support students interested in taking AP English exams independently.
Senior Lila Hoffman said that even if students self-study for the exams, a formal, institutionalized AP English class would give them more structure in their preparations.
“I was able to do well on the exams with the curriculum at BHS, but I was also putting in a lot of work outside of school: writing practice essays and doing practice multiple choice questions. It would have been nice to have that structure in school,” Hoffman said.
Junior Arya Kheder said they’re a humanities-oriented student and the decision not to offer AP English demonstrates a larger undervaluing of the humanities.
“BHS is such a STEM-oriented place, and that’s good, but a lot of people complain that [the administration] should care about the humanities as well,” Kheder said. “I think it’s really disappointing that a generally good school and a well-respected school is favoring STEM students.”
The English Department spent time during the 2024-2025 school year exploring whether or not to greenlight an AP Language and Composition course at the 11th grade level which, if added, would have been the first AP course offered by the English department. Their discussions hinged on a few key topics.
Community demand
According to Assistant Head of School Hal Mason, the high school currently offers 21 AP courses, and in the 2024-25 school year, 712 students took 1611 AP tests. The English department and the Special Education departments are the only departments that don’t offer any AP courses.
English teacher Nicholas Rothstein has been running unofficial after-school AP English prep sessions for three years. These sessions prepare students for both the AP Language and Composition and AP Literature and Composition exams. Rothstein said in the years since he began his prep sessions, the school has seen an increase in the number of students who take AP English exams.
Learning First Brookline (LFB), a collection of Brookline parents that originally formed to work against the ninth-grade deleveling plan, has since taken up advocating for AP English. Shlomit Azgad-Tromer, one of the founders of LFB, said that the group, made up of data scientists, education experts and media specialists, seeks to support excellence in education.
“With that campaign, we are hoping to resonate with the administration that actually, the community is very much interested in having [AP English] options at the school,” Azgad-Tromer said.
In fall of 2024, Andrews said that student advocacy for AP English would be a major factor in whether or not the class was offered.
“We tend to respond to student interest when it’s articulated very clearly. So I think that’s the change I’m waiting to see, and I’m ready to help if that’s what students want,” Andrews said. “I think [AP English] would benefit kids here, but I don’t have the adult level of interest yet to mobilize on it, and until I hear from the students that it’s there, we can’t seem to move forward.”
Equity and AP
Educators have long questioned the equity of AP classes: who gets access and who the exams themselves are designed for. Teachers and administrators have grappled with whether adding AP English would widen or combat opportunity gaps.
This past fall, Andrews said that when the English department took a stance against AP English in the 1990s, much of their reasoning had to do with a perception of inequity intrinsic to AP courses and tests.
“I think there was an era where there were some questions about [AP] tests and whether [AP] tests had racist biases built into them and whether it was essential to have a test like that to get into college. There just was resistance to that level of test intensity,” Andrews said.
To Rothstein, equity was at the core of his vision for the after-school AP English prep sessions. He first offered these sessions to students in the African-American and Latino Scholars Program, the METCO Program and Steps to Success. He later opened it up to mainstream students who wanted to participate.
“I would argue that the main reason why a lot of people have a problem with AP is that traditionally it’s been used to keep people out, and I believe that I’m not,” Rothstein said. “I’m no advocate for the AP system. I’m no advocate for the College Board. What I am an advocate for is using those tools to have an opportunity for students to get where they want to go.”
Rothstein envisioned a course that brought in students who were traditionally marginalized.
“I’m not really interested in teaching AP unless we have an equitable component in there,” Rothstein said. “In other words, that we ensure that AP is accessible to a number of students that it may ordinarily not be accessible to, and then we make a very concerted effort to make sure that those particular kids are included.”
Last fall, Andrews said that these same concerns about equity have united many community members against AP English in the past few years and have shut down burgeoning conversations about these course offerings.
“There’s also been a push saying the AP tests are racially biased, that the history of testing in America is sort of skewed towards bad outcomes,” Andrews said. “So when I suggested that we have this conversation about AP, word got out, and a letter went to the School Committee [from a committee called Bridge made up of former teachers and students] that the English Department shouldn’t even consider it.”
AP culture
Another facet of the discussion last year was how AP English might impact AP culture.
Some teachers worry that introducing an AP class in the English department will attract too many students who will feel obligated to take it because it’s being offered, regardless of their interest in the subject.
“It really makes me unhappy that in this particular town there will be students who hate English who would take this [if it were offered],” Rothstein said. “I’m interested in helping kids get to where they want to go in life. But if you’re just taking an AP, any AP course, just because you think you need to take it to get where you’re going, I don’t think that’s the best way to live life.”
However, Rothstein said that other high-achieving towns, like Lexington, Wellesley and other towns farther west have managed to incorporate AP English into the curriculum without needing to run many sections to keep up with an exorbitant demand.
Azgad-Tromer said that denying students the opportunity to take AP English disproportionately hurts students interested in the humanities, who might have a harder time distinguishing their course loads as rigorous in college applications.
“Suppose you are an excellent English student, and you are a top-tier humanities candidate, and you want to go to a very good school. You want to signal to the good schools ahead of you and the good colleges that you excel in humanities,” Azgad-Tromer said. “It would be a very significant signal for the college to see that you took the AP in the relevant course subject.”
English teacher Keira Flynn-Carson works in the School Within a School (SWS) program, which serves 113 students and is centered on participatory democratic and alternative learning. SWS is known for its unique, required, honors English courses. Flynn-Carson said that in competitive college admissions, it doesn’t matter whether a student is taking an AP in a given subject as long as they’re taking the highest level of the course offered at their school.
“Right now, everyone who’s in honors can say that they took the highest level English course. As soon as you even have a pilot of two sections of an AP course, then only those two classes get to say that on their transcript, and everyone else now does not get to say that: they have now gotten demerits on their transcript,” Flynn-Carson said.
Flynn-Carson said that self-studying for AP English exams can be a good workaround to not having the class offered formally.
“I don’t think you need to take the course in order to take the test,” Flynn-Carson said. “So I think people who are worried about that can still show [commitment to the humanities] by taking the test on their own, but also by doing well in their course and having your English teacher write your college recommendation, where you talk about the strengths and skills of that student in that discipline.”
Other impacts
Another concern about offering AP English was that it might impact other English courses, forcing teachers to abandon unique and interesting classes.
Last fall, Andrews said that AP English hasn’t been offered at all during his 24 years at the high school for precisely this reason.
“They wanted to offer vibrant, cool classes like Epic, or Fiction and Film, or British Literature and they didn’t want the curriculum to be driven by the College Board,” Andrews said. “So a long time ago, they made that decision, and we’re still living in the world that they created in the 90s.”
Azgad-Tromer said she recognizes that many English teachers go above and beyond to offer unique and unparalleled content at the school.
“I do agree that we have very good teachers. Some of our teachers at BHS are really top tier, because this is who they are, and they’re passionate about English, and they bring to the classroom AP-level, even if it’s titled honors,” Azgad-Tromer said.
Another concern is that AP English classes will displace the SWS program. SWS’s unique semester-long English classes are a hallmark of the program. This year, courses include Hamlet: A Study in Gender, Identity, and Madness, Feminism in Literature and Writing the Short Story. English is the one subject all SWS students are required to take within the program.
Flynn-Carson said offering AP English would fundamentally alter the diverse character of the SWS program, since the highest-achieving students would feel the pressure to take AP English, thus pushing them out of SWS.
“In SWS, the value is really on it being a democratic learning experience for everyone in it, and everyone having a vital role to play in each other’s development,” said Flynn-Carson. “I do think that if all of the kids who could be the most influential leaders [in SWS], decide that, because of college pressure, that they need to take an AP class and they leave SWS, it does change the influence that they have on our mutual back and forth and learning from each other.”
Rothstein said while it might be true that AP English would draw prospective students away from SWS, this is not necessarily a reason not to offer these courses.
“If you’re making choices about what you want to do based on AP, I don’t think that’s the fault of the AP,” Rothstein said. “That’s the fault of living in a culture that’s saying, ‘Yeah, I’d rather do something I don’t want to do because I think it will benefit me than join a program [SWS] that would actually be incredibly beneficial.’”
