CORRECTED Equity vs. Opportunity

Campus Report ^ | February 20, 2008 | Bethany Stotts

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Equity vs. Opportunity and the AP

by: Bethany Stotts, February 20, 2008

Despite ongoing criticisms about the racial achievement gap found in Advance Placement exam results, the College Board recently issued its 2008 Annual Report, asserting that steps toward minority academic proficiency are the responsibility of individual school districts rather than the AP test designers....

Research has demonstrated that an AP score of 5 corresponds to A level proficiency, whereas students earning 4 or 3 would likely have earned a B or C in college...

However, if the AP exam outcomes are indicative of college preparedness, minorities—especially African-Americans—continue to face difficult barriers in higher education. According to the 2008 report, African-Americans compose 14% of the national student population yet only 7.4% took AP exams. Of this 7.4%, only 3.3% of African-Americans received a passing score of 3 or above in 2007, an insignificant increase from 2.8% in 2002.

The state with the largest equity gap was Mississippi, which has a 47 % African-American student population, yet only 11.5% of its successful exam-taking students (scoring a 3 or above) were African-American. The District of Columbia scored even worse, with an 83.7% African-American student population while only 24.3% of successful test-takers were African-American.

Hawaii was the only state in the union that produced a demographically-proportionate number of African-American students earning 3 or more on the AP exam...The District of Columbia eliminated its equity and excellence gap for Latinos in 2002, 2006, and 2007—a stark contrast to the District’s poor performance with African-Americans.

Despite these negative results, the College Board asserts that “With 75 percent of U.S. high school graduates entering college, the nation is steadily democratizing entrance to college.”

[Jedidah]

There’s nothing inherently wrong with black students that makes them unable to learn or master college-level material.

The problem is in their culture, and it goes back to kindergarten.

Schooling and academic achievement is not, for the most part, a high priority in current black culture.

The higher the educational level and economic status of parents, the more likely the kids are to succeed, but even then they are likely to be ridiculed by underachieving black peers, which is tough to take when you’re a teenager and social status in supremely important.

I’ve seen it first hand. This is not theory, it’s fact.

That, folks, is what No Child Left Behind is about. Catching low-achieving kids in early grades when they’re still learning to read and write and making sure they become literate so they can handle the harder academics down the road.

It’s an effort to keep the rest of us from having to support them when they’re grown.

Re-writing tests to make subject matter easier for under-achievers is just plain stupid.