Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Chicago Public Schools, the third largest school district in the US, offers Advanced Placement (AP) courses that are sponsored by the College Board. These courses develop benchmarks of college-level curricula and examinations to well-performing high school students, which can lead to earning college credit. African American high school students in CPS enroll in AP courses at about half the rate of white students. Pedro Noguera, Distinguished Professor of Education at UCLA has extensive research on reforming the racial achievement gap in public schools that translates social theory into concise, direct language with emotional impact and intellectual rigor. His research, along with the interdisciplinary research of Kenneth J. Meier of Texas A&M, will lend itself to assist in finding key outcomes to this evaluation. The goal is to assess any disparities of the ever growing achievement gap between black and white students in Chicago, discover and gauge the city government’s role in how schools select students for these advanced courses, and to investigate a microeconomic model of the AP participation decision and what factors are the most important behind the minority AP participation gap, particularly in CPS selective enrollment schools. This research will highlight this growing problem in other major city school systems and their approach(es) for implementation.