At a school board meeting earlier this month, an Evanston Township High School assistant superintendent raised concern about enrollment in Advanced Placement courses, while board members looked to larger disparities in the school’s AP programs.
A sense of urgency drove Assistant Superintendent Pete Bavis’ presentation to the board Feb. 7, which showed a sustained drop in the number of students both taking AP classes and sitting for the exams since the COVID-19 pandemic closed school buildings in March 2020.
“I don’t want to call it a crisis in the making, but I want to come very close to calling it a crisis in the making,” Bavis said.
Advanced Placement classes offer students an opportunity to take courses that give them college credit. After taking specific courses in a school year, students can sit for an AP exam which assess mastery of the subject, according to the ilapcredit.org website. The exams are scored on a 1 to 5 scale, and scores of 3 or higher are required to get college credit for the course.
In 2021, the fewest ETHS students sat for AP exams since the 2012-2013 school year, school documents showed, a drop that held across all racial and ethnic groups. The data also indicated the number of students receiving a 3 or higher on the exams also declined to lows not seen in a decade.
According to ETHS data, Black students saw a 40% decrease in exam participation and a 51% decrease in scores of 3 or higher. Latino students also saw larger losses in participation and scores.
“We’re hitting reset on all the expectations,” Bavis said. “It’s super important we do this.”
ETHS considers its student body’s high participation rate in AP courses and exams a point of pride – literally, it’s the first item listed on the school’s “Points of Pride” webpage. But the concern over test scores was in part economic, since earning a 3 or higher can provide a semester’s worth of credit for students who attend public colleges and universities in Illinois, potentially saving students thousands of dollars.
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To address the drop in participation and test scores, the school is taking several initiatives to encourage students to take AP courses, including a virtual “summer camp” and online forum hosted in 2021, as well as holding ongoing lunch meetings and planning a “spring training” event for freshmen and sophomores interested in taking advanced placement courses next school year.
In addition, staff has planned to interview later this spring senior students of color who didn’t take AP classes this school year, and a new Black affinity space for AP students was started.
But board members pushed back against Bavis’ emphasis on test scores and asked broader questions about the overall racial disparity in AP participation.
Board member Mirah Anti questioned the emphasis on a score benchmark, arguing that the pressure to take the exam and achieve a certain score could, alone, constitute a barrier to AP participation.
ETHS’s comparably high levels of Black and Latino student participation in AP classes has earned the school national recognition, but white students still dominate classes, with 56% of white juniors and seniors taking at least one AP class in the 2020-2021 school year compared to 28% of Latino students and 17% of Black students.
Board member Monique Parsons drew a contrast between the students served by the school’s literacy program, which was also discussed at the Monday night board meeting, and AP participation, saying the school needs to change perceptions of who is served by each effort.
“I’m all for resetting, I’m all for disrupting,” Parsons said. “Somehow the reset needs to dig deeper.”
Board member Stephanie Teterycz drew a link between the ongoing call among teachers for the school to hire more non-white educators and furthering inclusion in AP classes. Her assessment was supported by English teacher Jody Elliott-Schrimmer, who leads the new Black affinity space.
Elliott-Schrimmer said Black students interested in taking AP English courses would approach her about taking AP classes and often asked if they could specifically be in her classroom. Elliott-Schrimmer is Black.
“They feel a sense of camaraderie or safety in knowing that or hoping that they will have a teacher of color,” Elliott-Schrimmer said. “There is a certain amount of fear in being one of the few students of color in an AP class, and there is power in students being able to see themselves in the educators they have.”
Joshua Irvine is a freelancer.