But, minority opportunity remains an issue AdvanceKentucky remains important motivator for improvement in AP statistics

New performance results for Advanced Placement (AP) courses have been released by the Kentucky Department of Education, and there is some good news tempered by some continuing questions about equity and access in these numbers.

To start this discussion, we need to point out that AP course taking in Kentucky has been impacted in important ways by a program we’ve been fans of for years. The AdvanceKentucky program has been generating important contributions to Kentucky’s overall AP picture ever since this program started about a decade ago as a purely privately funded effort to boost the availability of Advanced Placement (AP) courses and participation of Kentucky students in those courses.

An important part of the overall increase in AP participation in Kentucky has come from the 119 high schools that now are part of the AdvanceKentucky effort. Thus, AdvanceKentucky now serves about half of the regular (Class A1) high schools in the state. This program provides extra training for teachers who want to teach AP courses and includes monetary incentives for both teachers and students to succeed, as well.

The program has generated important benefits beyond just test scores as Figure 1, which comes from AdvanceKentucky, shows.

Figure 1

For the Kentucky high school class of 2009, the college going rate for students who took part in AdvanceKentucky’s AP programs was 95 percent while in the general Kentucky public high school graduate population it was only 63 percent. A very high 95 percent of those students who went on to college after participation in AdvanceKentucky were still in college after two years. A notably lower 80 percent of the non-AdvanceKentucky grads who went on to college were still there after two years.

Most importantly, 40 percent of AdvanceKentucky participants from the high school class of 2009 graduated in four years. Only 24 percent of the students who didn’t participate graduated after four years, a really dramatic difference.

AdvanceKentucky’s reports also show students who participate have higher grade point averages in college and that minority participants have much higher college going rates and lower college remedial course requirements, too. The 2016 AdvanceKentucky Annual Report shows the program produces dramatic increases in AP scores of 3, 4 or 5 even in the first year after the program is adopted in a school.

Now, the overall statewide 2017 Advanced Placement data is starting to arrive, and it is clear that AdvanceKentucky and other initiatives are creating progress.

Table 1, taken from the Kentucky Department of Education’s News Release 17-130, shows the total number of all of Kentucky’s Advanced Placement test-takers in recent years (AdvanceKentucky plus others) along with the number of tests taken and number of tests scored with a 3, 4 or 5. Those higher scores usually allow students to obtain college credit for that course, which can result in significant reductions to the cost of college.

Table 1

As you can see in Table 1, the AP trends have been generally all positive except for a slight reduction in test-takers and tests taken in 2016. Most significantly, the number of tests scored 3 or higher has risen in every year since 2014.Table 2 breaks down the 2017 AP test taker statistics by race. Most of the data in Table 2 are also from the department’s News Release, but one column showing the general racial mix in Kentucky’s schools comes from the LEARNING_ENVIRONMENTS, STUDENTS tab in the 2017 Kentucky School Report Card for the state and the two far right columns were calculated from other columns of data in the table.

Table 2

The news here is a little more cautionary.

Table 2 makes it clear that the state has a way to go to get equitable levels of AP participation and performance for all the racial groups.

Not surprisingly, Asian students participate in AP courses at a notably higher percentage than their overall percentage of the Kentucky school population. Asians comprise 4.05 percent of all AP test takers but make up only 1.70 percent of Kentucky’s general public school population

In notable contrast, both African-Americans and Hispanics are under-represented in the total percentage of AP course takers. African-Americans comprised only 6.35 percent of AP test takers but make up 10.6 percent of the state’s population. Hispanics were only 4.17 percent of the AP test taking group but now comprise 6.40 percent of the total public school population.

When we look at the AP success rates by race for scores of 3 or higher versus numbers of students taking the tests, more disparities become apparent.

Asians sweep this contest.

When we divide the number of AP tests taken by Asians that were scored 3 or higher by the number of Asian test takers, it turns out there are more tests with successful scores than Asians. On average, the Asian group is thus taking more than one test each and scoring a college-qualifying grade on a notable percentage of those tests. Overall, Kentucky’s Asian students are scoring college-credit-level performances on the AP on 65.1 percent of all the tests they take.

At the other end of the success spectrum, African-Americans have far less success on AP tests although they do take a considerable number of AP exams. While African-Americans took 2,926 AP exams in the past school year, they achieved college-credit-level scores on only 27 percent of those tests. Still, in the past African-American participation in AP coursework was very low, so things are improving – slowly – even for this student racial group.

One final point needs to be made. The AP information is very important, but it only covers Kentucky’s higher performing students. According to the DELIVERY_TARGETS, PROFICIENCY/GAP tab in the 2017 Kentucky School Report Card for the state the percentage of high school students scoring Proficient or more in reading dropped between 2016 and 2017 from 56.5 to 55.8, which means the percentage scoring Novice plus Apprentice grew slightly from 43.5 percent to 44.2 percent.

In high school math, the growth in the Novice plus Apprentice percentage was more notable. With the proficiency rate dropping from 42.3 to 38.1 percent, the percentage of lower-performing students rose from 57.7 percent to 61.9 percent.

So, while higher performing students involved with AP made progress, Kentucky has a more somber situation to consider at the other end of the high school student performance spectrum.