Is Our Public School System Racist?

In most traditional school districts, the College Board’s Advanced Placement (AP) Program, and their collected courses, are the “gold standard” when it comes to offering a college-level experience while still in high school.

When I was a middle school and high school principal, one of the reasons we had strong academics is that we persuaded lots of kids to take pre-AP and AP courses while in grades 6 through 12. In fact, I had a roster of my students on my office computer that showed around 70% of kids enrolled at our middle school or high school took a pre-AP or AP course. This statistic was important to us because research showed, and it still shows, that kids who take a College Board-endorsed course are more likely to do well in post-secondary classes than students who don’t.

But when I looked at African-American and Hispanic participation in those pre-AP and AP courses, percentages slipped. In fact, our African-American and Hispanic participation percentage in College Board coursework was far lower than our overall black and brown enrollment figures.

Recently, Trevor Packer, head of the Advanced Placement for the College Board, spoke with EducationWeek online about program concerns and the broader future of AP. Specifically, this is what Packer had to say when asked “How does the College Board plan to increase the representation of Black…students in AP courses nationwide?”:

“For Black students…there is a very different issue: Why are Black students not being encouraged to enroll in these courses? Why have they not been welcomed? Is there something cultural here? Is there a readiness issue? We certainly see examples of adult bias affecting these things.”

“So raising awareness of those biases, providing detailed data reports to schools on the degree to which their AP classrooms look like the hallways of their schools, the lunch rooms of their schools, is a strategy we’re pursuing. We’re releasing this fall, a new school recognition program, we’ve never done this before. But every high school in the country will receive an evaluation from us as to whether or not their AP classrooms look like the demographics of their school. That will give a very public registry for the first time as to whether or not equity is happening.”

“We’ve seen with Hispanic, students who are now represented in AP at rates similar to white students [in some states], part of that is because of very deliberate efforts by organizations like the Texas Education Agency to offer AP Spanish earlier, as a way of signaling to students, you have what it takes to be on a path to college and earn college credits. So the Texas Education Agency very deliberately provided AP Spanish to 9^th grade students…, when students take an AP in 9^th or 10^th grade and do well in it, it boosts dramatically their likelihood of taking other Aps in 10^th, 11^th, and 12^th grade.”

“That’s very much one of the reasons we chose to develop an AP African American studies course. We knew the course would be controversial. But it felt more important to us to do right by this discipline to signal that this discipline can be as important to take in high school as AP World History or AP European History. And by placing this course in 9^th or 10^th grade, will it have the effect that AP Spanish has had on bringing a much larger group of Black students into AP earlier in a way that makes this their culture and not a foreign culture for them.”

“We’ve certainly seen in this very first year of the pilot with the course overwhelmingly serving Black students, providing many students that would have never considered themselves AP students, who have had no other AP courses before, their first and only AP course to date.”

When Packer asks a question like “Is there something cultural here?” and makes a statement like “We certainly see examples of adult biases affecting these things,” he might as well go on an ask the question on everyone’s mind:

“Is our public school system racist?”

When we started placing black and brown students in our pre-AP and AP classes, I cannot tell you the negative responses we received from both parents, mainly white, and teachers, again mainly white. They argued that courses would be “watered down,” that “teachers would have to ‘slow down’ their lessons,” and that “it just wasn’t fair to put these poor black and brown kids into these types of tough academic courses.” I actually had one counselor argue that placing minority kids in advanced classes was akin to child abuse.

These types of attitudes and comments made me sick, but it also made me determined that kids, who never had an opportunity to take courses readying them for a post-secondary experience, would have a chance to succeed while receiving support from their school.

When I was a middle school principal, I told the counselors to schedule every student into at least one pre-AP course.

When I was a high school principal, again every kid was scheduled into at least one pre-AP course, and we used AP Potential (College Board software used to predict AP course success based on the student’s PSAT score) to schedule every kid eligible into at least one Advanced Placement course.

We offered study halls and tutoring sessions to help all kids do their best on their advanced coursework. We counseled students and families alike, encouraging them to stay on course. We confronted teachers who questioned our practices and celebrated and rewarded those who got on board.

In the end, our school was recognized as one of the “Top 20” Advanced Placement high schools in the state. We couldn’t have accomplished this honor if we would have just relied on our white and Asian data to carry the day.

Decision-making, especially when it comes to black and brown kids inside traditional schools, runs the risk of being racist, unless you build in protections. Protections like open enrollment in advanced coursework, especially in the early middle school and high school years. Protections like training adult learning leaders in how a classroom needs to operate when there are both experienced and novice advanced students seated together. Protections like a school-wide tutoring program, where all kids can receive extra time and support so they can compete and achieve.

But I’m afraid the sad ending to this story isn’t like what we did in our schools. I’m afraid the sad ending is like what is happening in Florida, and other Republican-dominated states, these days.

I’m afraid kids wanting a fair opportunity to learn what they want to learn might not get that opportunity – especially if they are black, brown, or poor.

Til tomorrow. SVB