The AP Class Gap: Black Students Are 15% of Public Schools and 4% of AP Physics

There is a door in American education that opens onto everything — onto college admission, onto scholarship money, onto the signaling mechanisms that tell universities and employers and graduate programs that a young person is serious, is capable, is ready. That door is the Advanced Placement classroom, and for Black students in this country, it is disproportionately, unconscionably, and by documented design, closed. Black students constitute approximately 15% of public school enrollment in the United States. They represent approximately 9% of students who take any AP exam. And in the subjects that matter most for entry into the STEM fields that drive the twenty-first-century economy — physics, calculus, computer science — they represent as little as 4 to 5%. These numbers are not new. They have been known for decades. They have been studied, reported, presented at conferences, published in journals, and incorporated into the talking points of every educational equity organization in the country. And they have barely moved.

I want to be precise about what this means, because the abstraction of percentages can obscure the human reality they represent. In a typical American high school with 2,000 students, of whom 300 are Black, the AP Physics classroom might contain two Black students. The AP Calculus BC section might contain one. The AP Computer Science A course might contain none. These are not hypothetical figures. They are drawn from the College Board’s own data, replicated across thousands of schools, in every state, in every kind of community. And each empty seat represents not merely an individual student who was not enrolled but a pipeline that was never built — a pathway from high school to college to career to economic security that was foreclosed before the student understood what was being denied.

The Access Gap: Schools That Don’t Even Offer the Course

The first and most brutal obstacle is access. The National Center for Education Statistics has documented what anyone who has walked the hallways of an under-resourced school already knows: many majority-Black high schools do not offer AP STEM courses at all. A 2018 report found that high schools serving predominantly Black and Hispanic students were significantly less likely to offer AP courses in mathematics and science than schools serving predominantly white and Asian students. In some districts, the disparity was total: schools on one side of town offered a full menu of AP options while schools on the other side offered none.

This is not a matter of student interest or ability. It is a matter of institutional investment. AP courses require teachers who are trained and certified in the subject, which means schools must recruit and retain teachers with advanced degrees in physics, calculus, and computer science — precisely the teachers who have the most lucrative alternatives outside education. Majority-Black schools, which tend to be located in lower-income communities with smaller tax bases, cannot compete for these teachers. They cannot offer the salaries, the facilities, or the working conditions that attract specialists in high-demand fields. And so the courses are simply not offered, and the students who attend those schools are denied access to the most powerful academic credential available in American secondary education.

“Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in education is the most dangerous. The child who is denied a good education is being denied the chance to be a productive citizen, to be a good parent, to be the person that he or she can be.”
— Lyndon B. Johnson, 1965

The Expectation Gap: Who Gets Recommended

Even in schools that offer AP courses, Black students face a second barrier that is more insidious because it operates not through institutional absence but through individual judgment: the teacher recommendation. In many high schools, enrollment in AP courses requires or strongly encourages a recommendation from a teacher or counselor, and the research on who gets recommended and who does not is as clear as it is uncomfortable.

Studies have consistently found that teachers and counselors are less likely to recommend Black students for advanced coursework than white or Asian students with comparable academic records. A 2014 study by Gershenson, Holt, and Papageorge found that non-Black teachers had significantly lower expectations for Black students than Black teachers did for the same students — and since approximately 80% of public school teachers are white, this expectation gap operates at an enormous scale. The study found that white teachers were about 30% less likely than Black teachers to expect that a Black student would complete a four-year college degree.

This is not, in most cases, conscious racism. It is the documented operation of implicit bias — the tendency to associate academic potential with certain racial and socioeconomic profiles, to see a Black student from a low-income neighborhood and unconsciously calibrate expectations downward. The teacher does not say, “This student is Black and therefore not capable of AP work.” The teacher says, “I’m not sure this student is ready,” or “I want to protect this student from failure,” or “This student might be more comfortable in the regular track.” The language is compassionate. The effect is exclusionary.

The Cultural Barrier: The Cost of Excellence

There is a third barrier that operates not from the institution but from the peer culture, and it is the one that is most painful to name because naming it requires acknowledging that some of the forces holding Black students back come from within their own communities. The “acting white” phenomenon — the social penalty imposed on Black students who pursue academic excellence — has been documented by researchers since Signithia Fordham and John Ogbu’s landmark 1986 study and confirmed in various forms by subsequent research.

Roland Fryer of Harvard, in a 2006 study using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, found that among Black students, higher grade point averages were associated with fewer same-race friends — a pattern that did not hold for white students. The effect was strongest in predominantly Black schools and weakest in integrated ones. Black students who excelled academically paid a measurable social cost that their white peers did not, and this cost intensified at precisely the level of achievement — the honors track, the AP classroom — where the payoff for persistence was greatest.

This does not mean that every Black student who enrolls in AP Chemistry will be ostracized. The phenomenon is more subtle and more variable than the caricature suggests. But it means that Black students who pursue rigorous academic pathways may face a social tax that their peers in other racial groups do not, and that this tax is high enough, in some environments, to deter students who might otherwise have enrolled. No policy can address this directly. But schools can create AP cohort models — enrolling groups of Black students together rather than placing individual students in isolation — that provide peer support and normalize the pursuit of academic excellence.

The STEM Pipeline Consequences

The AP gap is not merely an educational equity issue. It is an economic pipeline issue with consequences that compound across a lifetime. Students who take AP STEM courses in high school are significantly more likely to major in STEM fields in college, and STEM degrees are the most reliable pathway to economic mobility in the twenty-first century. The National Science Foundation has documented that Black Americans earn only 7% of bachelor’s degrees in engineering, 9% in computer science, and 5% in physics — and the pipeline begins not in college but in the AP classroom where the foundations are laid.

A student who does not take AP Calculus in high school arrives at a competitive engineering program already behind. A student who does not take AP Physics arrives at a pre-med program without the foundational knowledge that her peers have already mastered. The AP gap does not merely deny Black students a line on a college application. It denies them the preparation that makes success in the most lucrative and consequential fields possible. It is, in the language of economics, a bottleneck — a narrow passage through which future opportunity must flow, and one that is, for Black students, artificially constricted.

What Is Working: Programs That Close the Gap

Equal Opportunity Schools, a nonprofit founded in 2010, has pioneered an approach that directly attacks the expectation gap. The organization works with school districts to identify students who have the academic potential for AP courses but are not enrolled — often because they were never recommended, never encouraged, or never believed they belonged. Using data analysis and student surveys, EOS identifies what it calls “missing students” — students whose grades, test scores, and academic behaviors suggest they could succeed in AP but who are absent from AP rosters. The results have been dramatic: partner schools have doubled and tripled their Black and Hispanic AP enrollment while maintaining or improving pass rates.

The National Math and Science Initiative (NMSI) takes a different approach: rather than simply identifying missing students, it builds the support infrastructure that makes AP success possible for students from under-resourced backgrounds. NMSI provides intensive teacher training, Saturday study sessions, mentoring, and exam preparation for students in schools that have historically had low AP participation and pass rates. In its partner schools, NMSI has increased AP STEM exam qualifying scores by an average of 67%, with the largest gains among Black and Hispanic students.

AP for All initiatives, adopted by cities including New York and Chicago, have sought to guarantee that every public high school offers at least a minimum number of AP courses. These programs have expanded access but have also highlighted the difficulty of the enterprise: offering the course is necessary but not sufficient. Without qualified teachers, adequate preparation, and the academic support structures that resource-rich schools take for granted, simply placing a student in an AP classroom can produce frustration rather than achievement.

The Way Forward

The AP gap will not close through aspiration alone. It will close through three simultaneous investments, each of which is necessary and none of which is sufficient on its own.

First, access must be guaranteed. Every public high school in the United States should offer AP courses in mathematics and science. Where schools lack the enrollment to justify a full AP section, technology can provide the answer: online AP courses, shared between schools, taught by qualified instructors, and supplemented by in-school tutoring. The cost is trivial compared to the economic consequences of continuing to deny Black students access to the most powerful academic credential in secondary education.

Second, the recommendation system must be reformed. Teacher and counselor recommendations should be supplemented by data-driven identification systems like those pioneered by Equal Opportunity Schools — systems that flag students with AP potential who have not been recommended, and require schools to actively recruit them rather than passively wait for them to volunteer. The default should be enrollment, not exclusion.

Third, support must be provided at scale. Placing students in AP courses without the academic scaffolding to succeed is not equity. It is theater. The NMSI model — intensive teacher training, supplemental instruction, mentoring, and exam preparation — must be expanded to every school where the AP gap persists. This is an investment that pays for itself many times over through increased college completion, higher lifetime earnings, and the economic contributions of a STEM-literate workforce.

The physicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, one of the most visible Black scientists in America, has spoken often about the moment in his childhood when he looked through a telescope at the moon and decided that the universe would be his life’s work. He has spoken less often, but no less powerfully, about what would have happened if he had attended a school that did not own a telescope, that did not offer a physics course, that did not have a teacher who recognized his potential and pushed him toward it. For every Neil deGrasse Tyson who found his way into the pipeline, there are thousands of Black children of equal potential who never found the door — because the door was not installed in their building. We know where the doors are missing. We know how to install them. We know what happens on the other side. The only question is whether we will do the work, or whether we will continue to admire the gap and call our admiration concern. The children are not waiting for our concern. They are waiting for a physics teacher, a calculus textbook, and an adult who believes they can do the work. Everything else is commentary.