Washington Monthly - September/October 2021 - 36

Gaps in AP Pass Rates, by Race: 2003-2019
40.6%
32.9%
31.9%
33.3%
Many students in low-income schools don't have the
resources and support they need to succeed in AP course
work, including qualified teachers and a halfway decent
preparatory education in grades K-8. Ideally, says the
College Board, AP teachers should have master's degrees
and at least five years of experience. Numerous studies
find, however, that teachers in lower-income schools
are much less likely to be experienced or have advanced
degrees.
One study that vividly illustrates these hurdles is a
2019 analysis of 23 low-income schools across the country
that added AP Biology or AP Chemistry to their curricula.
" Most of the students in AP Bio are co-enrolled in
Bio for the first time, " the authors quoted a school principal
as saying. " They're really coming in at a deficit in
terms of prior knowledge. "
Challenges like these also likely explain what happened
in Philadelphia, where public high schools dramatically
expanded AP offerings to its students in 2006.
This " surge, " the late William Lichten of Yale University
concluded, " was nearly a total failure. " Among 41 schools
newly offering 179 AP classes, " many schools did not have
a single AP exam score as high as 3, " he wrote in a 2010
analysis, and " only five reported AP exam passing rates
of 10 percent or higher. "
For some students, obstacles to performance are
more subtle yet no less insidious. The Prince William
County students CT and Pressley say that in the AP
courses they did take, there are only a handful of Black
students. " I feel out of place, " said CT. " I feel isolated and
I'm nervous to ask questions. " This leads to a sense of
isolation. " There's only one other Black person in the entire
class, " said Pressley of her AP Chemistry course. " I
36 September/October 2021
feel like kind of an outcast in a way, where I have to prove
myself before people actually talk to me. "
These feelings of loneliness can sabotage a Black
student's chances of success, says Jennifer Jessie, who
runs an AP tutoring and test prep service in northern
Virginia. " If you don't have the support you need or feel
excluded going into the classroom every day, it's not a
great learning environment for you and you're not going
to thrive, " she told me. Jessie, who is Black and herself a
graduate of Prince William County schools, recalls being
one of only two or three Black students in her AP classes.
" It was very lonely, " she said.
T
he answer, however, is not to eliminate Advanced
Placement. When students have access to classes
and the resources to succeed, the program provides
undeniable benefits, as it did for Chloe Pressley. Ending
the program also won't solve the underlying problems
that created educational inequities in the first place. The
disparities manifested by AP, Fordham's Chester Finn
said, are symptoms of an illness, but not the cause. " The
disease is in a K-12 system that is incubating an excellence
gap and sustaining an excellence gap, " he said. " This
is like a thermometer showing you a result you don't like.
You don't throw away the thermometer just because it's
demonstrating a fever. "
Nevertheless, AP's mixed record over the past 20
years should prompt a reexamination of how to provide
high school students with effective and meaningful exposure
to college-level course work. Scholars like San Diego
State's Kolluri, for instance, are looking at ways to
improve the odds for low-income and minority students
taking AP by challenging biases he says are inherent in
Pass rate
Percentage-point gap
Calculations by author based on College Board data
Washington Monthly - September/October 2021

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