The Advanced Placement (AP) program offers an opportunity for students to earn college credit and develop college-ready skills in high school. The curriculum was initially designed for "superior" students at exclusive private schools. Recently, however, the AP program has expanded to serve more students from marginalized backgrounds, and equitable access has become one of its core objectives. Scholars have questioned whether AP can continue to offer effective college preparation while expanding beyond the populations it was initially designed to serve. This literature review summarizes existing research on whether the AP program has achieved its dual goals of equal access and effectiveness. The extant literature suggests that, despite impressive gains in access to AP, significant barriers remain to its becoming a program that ensures equal access for all students and effectively prepares them for college coursework. Assessing whether these barriers can be overcome, however, demands new approaches to AP research.
Rigorous learning opportunities at high schools in low-income neighborhoods are limited and ineffective, and in these settings the Advanced Placement (AP) program has mostly eluded successful implementation. In this study, Suneal Kolluri analyzes two schools in the same low-income, Latinx neighborhood that, despite comparable numerical gains, have adopted very different approaches to AP. One school emphasizes competition and dominant cultural norms, while the other stresses collectivism and community cultural wealth. This analysis elaborates the theory of organizational habitus to suggest that schools can look beyond local postsecondary opportunity structures when designing policies and curricula. Ultimately, Kolluri argues, a school's organizational habitus will profoundly impact how students engage with AP classes.
Deficit framings of marginalized students, though maintaining widespread social influence, are thoroughly condemned in recent educational scholarship. The goal of this “counter-deficit” scholarship is to challenge racism in schools and improve opportunities for marginalized youth. To meet the lofty ambition of racial equity in education, how scholarship understands racial oppression is a central concern. Sociologists of race have emphasized the duality of racial oppression. Racism is ideological and structural. Ideologically, racism shapes how communities of color are perceived and how they are treated in educational settings. Structurally, racism is embedded in histories and policies that systematically disadvantage racially minoritized people. Both processes matter to educational inequality. However, in this review of counter-deficit literature, we find that racism is primarily understood by way of ideology and seldom by way of structures. This framing has important implications for how schools can support racially minoritized students to overcome racism in schools and communities.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.