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High Expectations

The Role of Advanced Placement in Bridging Excellence Gaps

Chester E. Finn, Jr.Andrew Scanlan
2.11.2020
2.11.2020

This report presents key findings from Learning in the Fast Lane: The Past, Present, and Future of Advanced Placement, by Chester E. Finn, Jr. and Andrew E. Scanlan, and published by Princeton University Press in 2019.

American education has long been plagued by excellence gaps among the young people who make it into the highest levels of academic performance. Disadvantage, race, and gender matter far more than they should. Narrowing such gaps is imperative for a K–12 system that seeks both excellence and equity, and the Advanced Placement (AP) program is already making a major contribution, albeit one that could and should become even greater. Drawing on Finn’s and Scanlan’s important new book, this report—prepared for the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation—examines AP’s role in helping students from underserved populations achieve high levels of academic success. It looks closely at differences in AP participation and exam success by geography, race/ethnicity, and socioeconomic status, as well as AP’s contribution to and potential for narrowing troubling gaps.

Where students live is strongly correlated with successful AP participation. Rural high school seniors, for example, are only two-thirds as likely to take an AP exam as their suburban and urban peers, and more than half of high-poverty rural schools do not even offer any AP classes.

Socioeconomic status makes a big difference, too. Whereas AP once focused on top students in elite private and public high schools, in recent decades it has sought to help capable disadvantaged youngsters master college-level coursework before graduating. Although they’re still underrepresented, we’ve seen a dramatic increase in their AP participation. Yet students from lower-income families are less successful on the end-of-year AP exams. Though nearly half of low-income graduates who take an AP exam during their time in high school receive scores of 3 or higher, nearly two-thirds of their non-low-income peers earn similar scores.

As for race, AP’s cohorts have become markedly more diverse as participation by black and Hispanic students has grown faster than that of white and Asian students over this period. Yet here, again, we see that students of color do not fare as well on the exams.

The report lauds the gains in AP participation among poor and minority youth while urging greater attention both to further gains on that front and to strengthening their AP performance.  Given AP’s capacity to help students prepare for college, gain admission, and succeed upon arrival there, expanding access to it remains an important national endeavor. States, school districts, philanthropies, and education reformers should redouble their efforts to ensure that students from all backgrounds have access not only to AP coursework but also to the preparation and supports needed to succeed on the exams. To do otherwise would wall off an important path to upward mobility, sustain societal inequalities, and constrain opportunities.


Policy Priority:
High Expectations
Topics:
Accountability & Testing
High Achievers
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Chester E. Finn, Jr., scholar, educator and public servant, has devoted his career to improving education in the United States. At Fordham, he is now Distinguished Senior Fellow and President Emeritus. He’s also a Senior Fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution.

Finn served as Fordham’s President from 1997 to 2014, after many earlier roles in education, academe and government. From 1999 until 2002, he was John M.…

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Andrew Scanlan was a research and policy associate at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. Growing up in Ireland, he graduated from Trinity College Dublin with a B.A. in European Studies before spending two years living in Honduras working as a second grade classroom teacher and school administrator for Bilingual Education for Central America (BECA). Following this, he earned an M.A. in International…

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In The Media

The good and the bad of Advanced Placement, and ‘the fattening hippo of schools’ embracing it

9.5.2019

Not All Gifted Children Are From Affluent Families

9.17.2019

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