I’m really glad to see more attention paid to getting minority kids into AP classes, but yesterday’s WaPo story praising the tony public school systems in Fairfax (VA) and Montgomery (MD) for having relatively more black students taking AP courses than places like Baltimore, Philadelphia, or Los Angeles hardly had me jumping up and down. The article flirts at the black – white gap and that’s the one I’m more concerned about, nationally and within these districts, than whether black kids in our nation’s wealthiest communities do better than those in our most challenged on AP. The data for the big cities are pretty grim and hardly much of a benchmark.
So the progress is very good, commendable, and a credit to the educators in those counties and the work they’re doing, but a long way to go here overall. And, what’s the point of the quote at the end from the student who doesn’t test well? Is that the problem here behind these numbers and the racial gap? C’mon….might it be the systemic issues, some of which Ed Trust’s Daria Hall mentions?