The vast majority of Black high school graduates from the Class of 2011 who could have done well in an AP course never enrolled in one because they were either “left out” or went to a school that didn’t offer the college prep courses.
That’s one of the key findings of the eighth annual AP Report to the Nation released Wednesday by the College Board.
“If there’s one chart that’s the most powerful and the most haunting, this is the one that captures the most attention in my eyes,” said Trevor Packer, senior vice president of AP and College Readiness at the College Board, during a webinar on Wednesday in which he offered commentary on the new report.
He was referring to Figure 6 of the report, which shows that 79.7 percent of Black students who could have done well in an AP course did not take one.
Similarly high numbers of students identified as Hispanic or Latino (70.4 percent) and American Indian or Alaska Native (73.7 percent) also were not accessing the AP courses, whereas a lesser amount of White students (61.6) were left out of AP.
Packer said this is the first time the College Board has examined SAT scores by race and ethnicity to extrapolate the extent to which members of a particular group who could have done well in an AP course were accessing the courses.
Research suggests that the lack of AP courses has profound implications for the students as they transition to their post-secondary educational lives.
