New data released yesterday by the College Board shows that Seattle Public Schools is among 388 school districts in the country who have made Advanced Placement (AP) courses widely available to a diverse group of students while helping them improve their scores.
Something the non-profit College Board, which owns the AP exam and the SAT, says rarely happens.
But the data also shows that although minority students in the Seattle school district were making improvements in AP tests, they still remain underrepresented in AP classrooms.
AP exams help high school students pursue college-level studies and even earn them college credit. For some, it’s an indicator of college readiness. Seattle Public Schools uses AP scores to gauge a school’s performance in its annual report card.
College Board released the data as part of its annual AP Achievement List, which includes five more school districts from Washington: Bellevue, Northshore, Olympia, Shoreline, and Snoqualmie Valley.
From 2008 to 2010, the Seattle school district was able to increase the number of students participating in AP from 1,733 to 1,974, while the percentage of students getting AP exam scores of three (the score typically needed to earn college credit) or higher increased from 63 percent to 66 percent during that time.
The number of minority AP students increased from 135 in 2008 to only 165 in 2010, a 22 percent increase over three years or a 10.6 percent growth annually. Given that roughly 37 percent of the district’s 13,301 high school students are African-American, Hispanic, and American Indian—the groups included in AP’s minority data because they are traditionally underrepresented in AP—minority student participation should ideally be higher.
“The percentage of AP students who come from these traditionally under-represent minority populations is about 10 percent, so I would not be surprised if these students are under-represented in AP classrooms in Seattle as they are in most districts nationwide,” says Trevor Packer, VP of the College Board’s AP program. “Which is why we are trying to recognize districts that are improving access and exam scores among these student populations.”
Robert Vaughan, who manages the district’s AP program acknowledged that the district “still has a long way to go” when it comes to increasing minority representation in AP classes. ‘We are not and will not be happy until we achieve equitable outcomes for all our students,” Vaughan said via e-mail.
Vaughan said that the district had won local and federal grants to improve minority student participation and performance in AP and had already implemented new programs.
Trying to get kids into AP programs is difficult.
Single parent families and those without lots of extra resources find it doubly so.
I’ve run into several posts lately, here and elsewhere, that define “minorities” as “African American, Hispanic, and American Indian”. Have Americans of European and Asian descent recently merged into one giant Eurasian grouping? I missed the memo.
Sno. Snoqualmie.
@2,
I guess in terms of determining disenfranchised minorities, yes. I doubt Asians are underrepresented in AP classes.
Asians don’t count as minorities since they work hard, don’t blame others for their failures and take care of their families. in the eyes of leftists, they are as useless as Republicans.