A long look at AP students in public schools

This morning, I released a paper looking at the growth of Advanced Placement (AP) course-taking in public schools between 1990 and 2012. AP programs are valued by students looking for early college credit and an edge in the college admissions race. But the AP brand is valued by high schools seeking to burnish their image, by college admissions department looking for signs of excellence, by media outlets rating high school quality, and by policymakers regularly calling to expand AP access.

In the past two decades, AP certainly has expanded, with the College Board reporting more than 2 million students taking AP exams in 2013 — twice the number just ten years earlier. In fact, in an education system long focused on helping low-performing students, AP has filled a vacuum of attention to high performers, growing into the default program for advanced coursework in public high schools.

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Given the importance of AP programs, I wanted to look at AP participation among public schools graduates to address two primary criticisms that have been leveled at AP over the years: first, inequity in AP participation by race and poverty; and second, whether AP is expanding too quickly and watering down its rigor.

Unfortunately, College Board data don’t make it easy to look at the growth in AP courses in public schools, where most students receive advanced coursework. And other independent research on AP has not taken a national longitudinal view on public schools programs. This report is a start in filling that gap. I drew on nationally representative data on public school graduates between 1990 and 2013.  To my knowledge, this report provides the largest longitudinal data review on AP students to date.

I found three main results. First, I found that AP course-taking in public schools has grown tremendously, probably more than any other (voluntary) curricular program. About one in eight students graduating from public school in 1990 earned AP credits. In 2013, more than three in eight had. Growth in AP participation was consistent and large across the board, evident in all states and for students of all races.

With such substantial growth, I tried to evaluate whether the caliber of AP course-takers watered down as participation grew.  While there is no ideal way to do this, I took advantage of 12^th grade mathematics scores from the National Assessment of Education Progress.  In 2000, 2005, and 2009, these scores were linked to students’ transcripts and allowed me to compare the achievement of students with AP credit over time. If critics assertions that the quality of AP students, or the effect of AP courses, were watered down with expansion, we would expect their achievement scores to decline over time.  Despite a 35% increase in participation in just nine years, AP course takers NAEP scores were virtually unchanged.

A remaining concern about AP are the gaps in participation, particularly gaps by race. While participation increased dramatically for students of all race groups, the gaps in participation that were evident early on in 1990 or 1994 remained or grew over time. In 2013, 70% of Asian graduates earned AP course credits in 2013, compared to 40% of white and 27% of black students. Substantial gaps are also evident between students whose parents earned college degrees and their peers whose parents did not.

(Click here for a demographics interactive.)

Though the data don’t permit causal conclusions, I looked at whether they were consistent with these gaps being issues of access to AP courses, or of racial differences. I show that 85 to 90% of students attend high schools that offer AP courses, with little differences in access by race. In comparison, race-based gaps on 12th grade NAEP math tests — a good measure of academic preparation — suggest AP participation gaps are driven primarily by academic preparation, and not by gaps in course access.

There are more details and important findings in the full report, and a second forthcoming report looks at national longitudinal data on schools that offer AP. All together, I hope these reports will provide both a clear historical perspective and some hard data that can inform AP critics and proponents alike on this important program, now so thoroughly ingrained in our public education system.

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