Drop the AP classes. It would be far better to have enrichment and tutoring opportunities for students who excel. AP is just an excuse to control the curriculum. For things like high-level science projects, achieve it through clubs. There’s no point in AP if it’s watered down for affirmative action considerations.
My kid (HS junior) has dropped all of his AP classes and now doing duel enrollment at the local college. Scored a 30 on the ACT. He LOVES it and is thinking about graduating early.
Two fallacies achieved critical mass in the 1960's. First was the "everybody should go to college" nonsense. This led to the dumbing down of academic standards in many high schools so that poorer students could take nominally "academic prep" courses, and make grades. Of course, they graduated with a credential that wasn't worth the paper it was printed on. Colleges responded, for the most part, by reducing their own academic rigor to accommodate the new flood of pseudo-scholars drifting over from the high schools. Then racial angst got into the mix and magnified these tendencies.
This might have been manageable if traditional ability grouping had been preserved, but this became difficult in the brave new world of racial hysteria. In many cities, including mine, it was verboten for advanced classes to be too white or Asian, and for the remedial track to be overwhelmingly ... well, you know. The race police with their pigment meters took tracking off the table.
How then to sneak academic rigor back into the curriculum at the typical, non-elite high school? Gifted and talented programs were an earlier attempt. The problem there is simply the name. All parents want their kids to be gifted and talented, and the race police were on the case. Then AP and IB programs began to be popularized. The key for these approaches is that they opened recruitment with the pitch that "this is an opportunity to earn college credit by doing a whole lot more work!!!!" This pitch naturally led to voluntary adverse selection by the usual suspects, and voila! ... de facto tracking has sneaked back into the system.
As far as I know, there is no way NYC can undercut the grading rubric on AP exams. It's perfectly fine for NYC to try to increase minority enrollment, and NYC can teach these courses with as much rigor as the traffic will bear. But at the end of the day, the kids are going to have to sit for a national AP exam, scored on national standards, with colorblind judging on anything not reducible to an open and shut, right or wrong answer. (AP art, for example, where kids submit a portfolio.) NYC and the DeBlasio gang can try to treat AP enrollment as a racial entitlement, but they are no more able to influence exam scoring than they are able to control SAT or ACT scores.
Take it you didn’t do so hot on you APs?