College Prep Participation: A Census of Racial Equity and Disparity Across American High Schools

• In Event: Racialized Tracking: Interrogating the Structures, Culture, and Policies That Produce Inequality

Abstract

This study extracts the census of curricular data from the US Office of Civil Rights Civil Rights Data Collection to examine which high school students participate in AP or IB courses. Equitable participation is virtually absent and inequality is highly racialized. This study shows how districts’ human and material resources impact the magnitude of racial disparities; some districts hoard resources within schools to create a college prep “track” while other districts instead pile-up their resources on a single college prep “school”. In either, these strategies especially exclude Black and indigenous students disproportionately to their non-Hispanic White peers. Racialized tracking in single-high school districts and charter schools is much more prevalent than in multi-high school districts with more equitable curricular access designs.

Author

• Heather E. Price, Learning Policy Institute