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Advanced Placement for Equity and Access

Don’t Let it Pass You By

When I was an assistant principal, I began serving as Lane Tech College Prep High School’s Advanced Placement Coordinator during the 2006 to 2007 school year. AP courses are college level courses that are offered during high school. These courses promote students to build cross-curricular skills, develop critical-thinking and analytical skills, embrace discussion and debate with peers, and to further explore concepts they have only touched upon or have never considered. At the culmination of each AP course, students take an AP exam for which they receive a score of one to five, indicating the recommendation status by the College Board. Generally speaking, a student who achieves a score of three or greater is eligible to earn college credit or placement or both.

 

While leading our curricular and scholar programs, a priority of mine was to ensure our AP program better represented our diverse student body, was more inclusive, and expanded while welcoming and better supporting students of every background. An issue that was apparent and easily recognizable to anyone who visited our school was you could tell which classrooms were offering AP classes by simply walking past and looking at the students’ faces. Lane Tech is an extremely diverse school and one I attended as a student myself many years ago.

The majority of the students, and the friends I had when I was a student back then, were first generation learners and represented a variety of racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds. The diversity of the school afforded students untold opportunities to learn with other students unlike themselves. However, when I was attending Lane Tech as a student, the majority of learners enrolled in honors classes and Advanced Placement courses were white and Asian, with most of the white students not being first generation or immigrant learners. When I began leading as the school’s AP Coordinator during the 2006 to 2007 school year, the school remained diverse but the disproportionate overrepresentation of specific student subgroups in AP was no different. 

Lane Tech had approximately 4,500 students but there were just hundreds of students enrolled in Advanced Placement courses. The students who were participating were still overrepresented by white and Asian student subgroups. In addition, our pass rate was only 46 percent while little more than 10 percent of the student body was participating in AP course offerings. I began an aggressive campaign to address equity, access, and growth via collaborative efforts with staff, students, and grant writing to expand our program further. My goal was to develop a welcoming, equitable, and supportive program that would last far into the future.

Apple Painting

Take Chances
A major hurdle was working with department chairs to remove barriers for enrolling students, as each department had created independent obstacles (they were called policies) and requirements for students to be considered or permitted to sign up to enroll in an AP course. These barriers included a variety of hurdles, such as students needing to sign-up but then needing to later write an essay and provide additional artifacts to receive final approval for enrollment. In another case, a teacher had decided to only allow heritage speakers to enroll in an AP world language course, thereby greatly impeding access. Other impediments included a variety of requirements, including GPAs above a certain threshold (for example, 3.5 and higher), reduced numbers of students allowed seats in a classroom, and other prerequisite electives and/or coursework before being authorized to enroll in an AP course.

As one can imagine, an unintended message was being sent to the majority of students that communicated, “You are not welcome,” Additionally, even after enrolling, a number of students would later be informed of the need to drop an AP course and choose another non-AP course in late summer (right before the new school year began) because of the essay requirement(s) for select departments. This was, of course, creating counseling and programming nightmares with the onset of each new school year.

In an effort to develop a data-informed understanding of student and teacher perceptions, I initiated a variety of input opportunities for gathering thoughts and devising solutions and strategies. I created a student advisory board to provide perspective as well as administered a Needs Analysis for staff regarding our AP program. Students indicated genuine interest but perceived the program as exclusionary. In addition, the school was approximately 45% Hispanic but only heritage speakers were being admitted to enroll in Spanish literature unless they first successfully completed Spanish language, which was also for heritage speakers. As a result of these barriers, there were barely enough eligible students to fill one section of Spanish literature (28 students) even though there were over two thousand Hispanic students enrolled in the school. The chances of a Hispanic student enrolling in AP Spanish language was only 1.4 percent.

Digital Desk Painting

As a staff, we learned from the Needs Analysis there was a significant number of staff who wanted to teach AP but because course sections were few, opportunities were limited and perceived as guarded. We also learned many teachers did not speak up publicly as a result and state a desire to teach AP. Teachers perceived AP was only for certain teachers to teach, as the barriers resulted in a limited number of seats and sections available, and therefore, new teachers were primarily added when a teacher left, not because sections were increasing. Apparently, the message that “You are not welcome” extended to a considerable number of staff. Our Needs Analysis data concluded many of the issues present were professionally created, contributing factors with respect to the program not growing in the most healthy, desirable manner.

A couple of years prior I had provided citywide professional learning for high school AP teachers across the district on access and equity for Advanced Placement. I used the professional planning exercises, approaches, and best practices I shared as a presenter for removing barriers and creating collaborative schools by applying them firsthand to cultivate our program (practice what you preach!). The goal was to reflect on data and perceptions gathered/learned, address department policies, and develop the AP program as a robust student-centered endeavor. The goal was to work as one Advanced Placement team.

In addition to barriers, I worked with our counseling department and programmer and noted that students required additional guidance in choosing courses. Students were sometimes loading up on courses that were extremely challenging (for example, physics, calculus, and statistics) and because the courses were all being taken at the same time they were contributing to stress, anxiety, and depression. These students then needed to sometimes drop courses midyear. We also coordinated efforts to actively utilize AP Potential data, provide communications home in languages other than English to provide information and recruit students, and proactively make students aware of PSAT AP Potential data indicating AP courses students would likely excel if they enrolled. The recruitment and counseling efforts were individualized and welcoming to every student in the school. No student was excluded.

Formulas Painting

I also created what I termed the “AP Colloquium” by working with teachers to learn which types of courses fit nicely together when enrolling in multiple AP classes. The AP Colloquium also included increased counseling supports and annual AP Fairs to learn more about Advanced Placement course offerings. For example, students taking statistics and looking to enroll in additional courses were encouraged to take psychology. Students taking French were encouraged to consider European history. Students taking multiple courses with European history took biology and literature. Essentially, we created a list of courses that lent themselves nicely to cross-curricular collaboration for skills development, interrelated critical-thinking and analytical skills across the curriculum, and embracing discussion and debate with peers via interdisciplinary course planning. The result was increased collaboration among staff and enhanced student social and emotional supports through courses where teachers were openly sharing and aware of one another’s curricular long plans.

Make Advances
As a result of our efforts, we were able to increase enrollment from just several hundred students in 2006 with a pass rate of only 46% to administering 1,946 exams with a pass rate of 66% by 2010. By 2015 we were administering well over 5,000 exams with a pass rate of 71 percent. As our participation rates increased, so did access and equity. In concert, these efforts resulted in more and more students of diverse backgrounds enrolling in Advanced Placement.

Our growth resulted in us creating the largest advanced placement in the state and nation in less than ten years. We experienced a 700 percent increase in the growth of our AP program, all the while increasing student cognitive and social-emotional success. I believe this is noteworthy because when we began this work there were many staff who believed our success rates were going to plummet, which is the opposite of what occurred. We made capitalizing on our diversity a reality, rather than just a potential opportunity. 

We continued employing professional learning via grant writing and utilizing AP Potential data to actively seek and recruit all learners to participate in college coursework while still in high school. We also began offering every AP course available through the College Board AP Program. Our teachers further developed expertise in their content area and utilized professional learning to ensure students were provided with all of the resources necessary to succeed in the classroom.

We also created improved programs of sequence to provide specific courses at each grade level for student participation (for example, human geography for freshman) and removed barriers to enrollment. As a result, our AP growth facilitated increased, diverse student enrollment and performance. These foundational efforts resulted in developing an incredibly strong, enduring Advanced Placement program for all students to feel welcomed and succeed for many years to come.

Chris

Referenced links and documents:
4 Dimensions of Instructional Leadership. Center for Educational Leadership.

Hold Back by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards

Interdisciplinary Teaching Practices: Reflections from a Teaching Triangle, D’Souza et al. Journal of Nursing Education and Practice 2021, Vol. 11, No. 5.

Position Statement: Promoting Rigorous Courses for Each Student, NASSP Policy and Advocacy Center. National Association of Secondary School Principals. July 2019

Research on the Academic Benefits of the Advanced Placement Program: Taking Stock and Looking Forward, Russell T. Warne. SAGE Open, January-March 2017: 1–16

Successful School Leadership, Christopher Day and Pamela Sammons. Education Development Trust

The Alchemist by Chris Dignam

CANE Dubh Publishing

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