The AP peak: Public schools offering Advanced Placement, 2000–12

Key Points

• The percentage of public high schools offering Advanced Placement (AP) courses is declining, with lower percentages offering AP in 2012 than in 2008.
• The overall declines in AP programs after 2008 were driven by small, rural, and high-poverty schools, the same types of schools that saw the greatest increases leading up to 2008.
• Students’ academic preparedness drives demand for AP programs, and schools with higher average achievement offer more AP courses, have higher participation, and have better AP exam passing rates.

Read the PDF.

Executive Summary

The Advanced Placement (AP) program is valued across the US public education system. Students value the AP credential because it opens doors to postsecondary opportunities and confers college credits. Schools and school districts use AP offerings to signal quality education. College and universities, popular media, and federal and state leaders consistently show their belief in AP programs by granting college credit, rating schools with AP highly, or calling to expand AP programs in public schools.

The AP program has grown in importance across states in large part because states have not focused on advanced coursework. In state education systems focused on raising the performance of low-achieving students, AP courses have become the primary avenue for delivering advanced coursework in public high schools.

In a previous report, AP at Scale: Public School Students in Advanced Placement, 1990–2013, I looked at AP participation at the student level from 1990 to 2013. That report showed a remarkable and steady increase in the number of high school graduates earning AP credit but also persistent gaps in AP participation for some demographic groups. This paper takes a similar tack but looks instead at the public schools that offer AP programs. Using the same approach as in the student-level analyses, I describe the public schools that have, and have not, offered AP courses using national data from 1999–2000 through 2011–12. The paper answers four key questions.

What Percentage of Public High Schools Offered AP between 2000 and 2012? Between 2000 and 2008, the percentage of schools offering AP increased from 71 to 79 percent, in keeping with the increases in student participation. Between 2008 and 2012, that percentage decreased at the same rate, perhaps marking the first meaningful decline in public school AP offerings.

How Did the Percentage of Schools Offering AP Differ by School Type? The data show small, rural, and high-poverty schools were the least likely to offer AP in all years. In addition, these same types of schools showed the largest increases between 2000 and 2008 and also drove the national declines in AP offerings between 2008 and 2012.

How Do Schools Differ by Their History of AP Programs? Detailed data from 2012 reveal stark differences in the scope of AP programs and students’ academic preparedness, between expansion AP schools—those that began providing AP courses after 2000—­and established AP schools—those with AP programs that predated 2000.

How Do AP Programs Differ by Schools’ Average Student Performance? By looking at schools by their average student performance, the final results show the strong relationship between student preparedness and viability of AP programs. Schools with higher academic achievement offered more AP courses, had higher student-participation rates, and had higher AP exam passage rates than lower-performing schools.

Taken together, the answers to these questions provide an unprecedented national look at AP programs in public schools over a dozen years and provide insight on how school, district, and state leaders can sustainably provide AP courses moving forward.

Introduction

The Advanced Placement (AP) program holds a unique place in US secondary schooling. After decades of steady and remarkable growth, millions of students receive college-level instruction in high school through AP-authorized courses and take AP exams to prove their mastery in an array of subjects. Students who pass AP exams receive a valuable credential, which can give them an edge in an increasingly competitive college-admissions contest and will earn many students college credit before their first day of college.

Students are the primary beneficiary of AP credentials, but the program is valued across the education system. Schools and school districts cite their AP offerings as indicators of educational quality, and higher education institutions, policymakers, and media outlets buy into that indicator. High school ranking systems, such as the annual US News & World Report system, use AP participation rates as a final measure of school quality.[1] Policymakers from President Barack Obama to New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio promote providing AP access in every school as a key point in their plans to improve secondary schools.[2]

Beyond its widely perceived value, the AP program plays a prominent role in providing opportunities for advanced coursework in a public education system that has long focused on bringing up the performance of low-achieving public school students. In a system that invests comparatively little focus on high achievers, AP programs have become the primary means for providing students with advanced coursework in public schools. For instance, while just half of all US public high schools offered gifted and talented programs in 2012, roughly 7 in 10 offered AP courses. In the decentralized and federalist US public education system, AP has become the standard curricular feature for advanced coursework in high schools across the nation.

As the AP program has grown into this unique role, it has also grown in scale. According to data from the College Board (figure 1), 2.1 million students took AP exams in 2011–12, up from less than 800,000 in 2000. The number of schools offering AP programs also grew during this period by more than 40 percent.

Despite this growth, the benefits of AP courses are not evenly distributed. Even the College Board, the private company administering AP programs, has explicitly stated that “underserved minority and low-income students remain underrepresented in AP classrooms.”[3] As reported in a companion paper, AP at Scale: Public School Students in Advanced Placement, 1990–2013, substantial gaps in AP course participation have persisted for years.

Issues of access and equity are particularly important for public schools, because public policy can shape the development, quality control, and equity of public school AP programs. Unfortunately, existing studies have provided a limited understanding of AP programs in public schools. College Board data on AP are not often released to independent researchers, and its national reports present data for the program as a whole and does not focus on public schools.[4] Independent research on public school AP programs has been limited in scope, covering only particular districts or states, a single point in time, or both. Without a national and longitudinal perspective on AP programs in public schools, an important gap in the research on AP remains.

This study is a first step in filling that gap. This paper integrates several sources of national data on public schools to examine the expansion of the AP program in public schools from 2000 to 2012. These data afford an unprecedented national look at AP programs in US public high schools over a long period of substantial growth. They reveal how many and what kind of schools offer AP courses and how those schools have changed over time.

This paper describes AP programs in public high schools by answering four key questions. First it addresses “What percentage of public high schools offered AP between 2000 and 2012?” and shows that after increases between 2000 and 2008, the percentage of schools offering AP decreased significantly by 2012. In contrast with continual AP growth among public school graduates, detailed in companion paper, AP at Scale: Public School Students in Advanced Placement, 1990–2013, it may be that AP programs in public high schools hit a high point around 2008.

The second section digs deeper into this decline by looking across types of schools, asking, “How did the percentage of schools offering AP differ by school type?” The types of schools least likely to offer AP, primarily small, rural, and high-poverty schools, are also the types driving recent national declines in AP programs.

The third section compares high schools by how long they offered AP programs, if at all, to answer “How do schools differ by their history of AP programs?” Detailed data from 2012 reveal stark differences, in terms of the scope of AP programs and the academic achievement of students, between expansion AP schools—those that began providing AP courses after 2000—and established AP schools, whose AP programs predated 2000.

The final section focuses on the relationship between schools’ academic achievement and AP offerings, asking, “How do AP programs differ by schools’ average student performance?” This final set of results demonstrates a strong relationship between student preparedness and viability of AP programs. Taken together, the answers to these questions provide an unprecedented national look at AP programs in schools over a dozen years and provide insight into how public schools can sustainably provide AP courses moving forward.

Read the full report.

Notes

1. “Best High Schools,” US News & World Report, http://ift.tt/14ZsNtO.
2. “Equity and Excellence: Mayor de Blasio Announces Reforms to Raise Achievement Across All Public Schools,” City of New York, September 16, 2015, http://ift.tt/1KnTIii.
3. College Board, The 8th Annual AP Report to the Nation, February 8, 2012, http://ift.tt/1ZxuIls.
4. Steve Farkas and Ann Duffett, Growing Pains in the Advanced Placement Program: Do Tough Trade-Offs Lie Ahead, Thomas B. Fordham Institute,April 29, 2009; and CollegeBoard, The 10th Annual AP Report to the Nation, February 11, 2014, http://ift.tt/1gtVaBR.

from AEI » Latest Content http://ift.tt/1PtywJP