GTP Makes Mississippi National Leader in AP Stem Access
A few days ago, high school students across Mississippi completed their Advanced Placement courses by taking rigorous AP exams.
A decade ago, before Global Teaching Project launched its Advanced STEM Access Program, AP exams were a non-event in most of Mississippi, outside a very few, relatively comfortable enclaves. A 2014 College Board study reported that Mississippi had, by a clear margin, the lowest AP participation and performance levels in the country.
AP courses prepare students for college rigor, enhance admission prospects, and can reduce tuition costs by enabling students to earn college credit prior to enrollment. Yet a Congressional analysis of national data compiled shortly before GTP began its work found that, while 99 percent of large high schools serving affluent communities (fewer than 25 percent of students qualified for free or reduced lunch) offered APs, just 11 percent of small, high-poverty (over 75 percent free or reduced lunch) high schools offered APs.
Those disparities in access to AP courses were most evident in Mississippi, which, when GTP started in 2017, had the nation’s highest poverty rate and the third highest percentage of students who attended school in a rural district.
As GTP enters its 9th year, students in rural, high-poverty Mississippi communities have much greater access to AP STEM courses.
GTP has worked to introduce AP STEM courses in over 40 Mississippi public high schools, concentrated in the state’s most impoverished communities, where promising students had not had access to the rigorous curricula they needed to achieve their full potential.
Now, Mississippi is the national leader in mitigating disparate access to AP STEM courses. In the nation’s 50 most impoverished rural school districts, the only schools to offer AP Physics, and the majority of schools to offer AP Biology, AP Computer Science, and AP Statistics, are Mississippi high schools that work with GTP, according to recent U.S. Census and College Board data.
As we complete one academic year and look forward to the next, we congratulate our students and educators, and resolve to build on their achievements.
