The Advanced Placement (AP) program was created in the 1950s to provide a rigorous learning experience for high-achieving secondary school students. Even today, AP experience is used by college admissions as a main indicator of future success at the postsecondary level and is thought to improve the likelihood of college completion by providing strong academic preparation. Unfortunately, referral and enrollment into AP courses are among the many outcomes for which black and Latino students continue to experience equity gaps. Because of this disparity, researchers and practitioners have considered ways to improve minority representation in AP programs. Prior research demonstrates that race-matched role models promote minority student participation in AP programs, which suggests that an educator’s racial/ethnic background plays a substantive role in whether minority students enroll in AP courses.

This study analyzes the relationship between a teachers’ racial/ethnic background and minority referral in AP programs by drawing on the political science and public administration literature related to the theory of representative bureaucracy. Research on representative bureaucracies proposes that bureaucratic organizations are better situated to serve their client populations when their employees share the same descriptive characteristics as their clients.  Being that the public schooling system is the largest component of the public sector in the U.S., education is an applicable domain to test the principles of bureaucratic representation, since teachers – i.e., bureaucrats – affect outcomes for students – i.e., the client population. Numerous studies have applied this theory to analyze education outcomes for minorities, but have largely focused on disciplinary outcomes as well as placement into gifted and talented programs, eligibility for special education services, and student performance on standardized tests (e.g., Meier & Stewart, 1992; Nicholson-Crotty et al., 2011).

Drawing on the tenets of the theory of representative bureaucracy and using nationally representative data from the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002, this study tests the hypothesis that minority students are more likely to be referred to an AP course when their teacher shares the same racial descriptive characteristics. Preliminary findings suggest that even after controlling for school, teacher, and student background characteristics (including prior academic achievement), the predicted likelihood that disadvantaged minority students are referred to an AP subject course is greater when their teacher is of the same racial/ethnic background. Additional analyses examine moderations of the influence of teacher-student racial congruence on AP program referral across different school settings.

Meier, K., & Stewart, J. (1992). The Impact of Representative Bureaucracies: Educational Systems and Public Policies. The American Review of Public Administration, 22(3), 157–171.

Nicholson-Crotty, J., Grissom, J., & Nicholson-Crotty, S. (2011). Bureaucratic Representation, Distributional Equity, and Democratic Values in the Administration of Public Programs. The Journal of Politics, 73(2), 582–596.