Published in Feb 2017

Do African American students have adequate opportunities to learn?

Gaps exist before children enter school, but inequitable and insufficient opportunities to learn exacerbate the gaps between African American students and their white peers and contribute to African American students’ low performance. For example, only 35 percent of African American students who had high math performance in fifth grade were enrolled in at least Algebra I in eighth grade, compared with more than 60 percent of white fifth-graders with high math performance.

This trend continues into high school. Among African American students with high potential for success in AP math courses, only 3 in 10 took any such course. The same is true in science. Part of this is because 15 percent of African American high school students attend schools that don’t offer at least one AP course in each of the four core subjects: math, English, science, and social studies.

African American students also are highly likely to be disciplined in ways that take them out of the classroom. Although African American students made up 16 percent of students in the 2012 Civil Rights Data Collection, they made up 33 percent of students suspended once, 42 percent of students suspended more than once, and 34 percent of students expelled.

Data Sources

1. Algebra I enrollment:
U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, “Eighth-Grade Algebra:Findings from the Eighth-Grade Round of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998-99 (ECLS-K)” (Washington, D.C.: National Center for Education Statistics, 2010), http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2010/2010016.pdf

2. AP Potential
College Board, “The 9th Annual AP Report to the Nation” (Washington, D.C.: College Board, 2013), http://media. collegeboard.com/digitalServices/pdf/ap/rtn/9th-annual/9th-an- nual-ap-report-single-page.pdf ; College Board, “The 10th Annual AP Report to the Nation” (Washington, D.C.: College Board, 2014), http://media.collegeboard.com/digitalServices/pdf/ap/rtn/10th- annual/10th-annual-ap-report-to-the-nation-single-page.pdf .

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By dtrust.org