AP program = racially segregated?

Pre-College Issues High School Life
1

<p>Preface to how I'm seeing this now: I go to a weird little school, and don't have traditional AP classes.</p>

<p>I was out to lunch today near a big public high school with some friends; let's call it "Douglas" for the sake of this example. Anyway, our school lets out lunch pretty early, but the restaurant was still packed with kids that I assumed that went to Douglas. </p>

<p>Surprisingly though, these kids were almost all White or Asian, which was strange since most Douglas kids are either Black or Latino. Also, most of them were either pretty nerdy, generic (jeans + bland tee shirt + converse brand shoes), or "scene." Then, I found out it was "AP lunch."</p>

<p>I'm friends with a quite a few Douglas kids, and I know many more. The kids at "AP lunch" were not Douglas kids, or at least not in a traditional sense.</p>

<p>Is this weird social/racial stratification present in most high schools, or is this just Douglas?</p>

2

<p>that’s probably the weirdest thing I’ve ever heard. My school is trying to make AP students mingle with lower students, and would never do anything that appears to be racial segregation</p>

3

<p>Well, as we were leaving normal “Douglas kids” were just starting to walk into the restaurant, but when we got there, it was all these dorky White/Asian kids. Apparently they let AP kids out early for lunch.</p>

4

<p>Yeah, my school is doing the exact opposite. Unfortunately, throwing minorities into AP classes they aren’t ready for does nothing but strengthen the stereotypes.</p>

5

<p>My HS is about 55/45 white/black. There are a few Asians. I think that there are actually literally no Hispanic people, but there might be one or two.</p>

<p>The segregation starts in Honors, I think. My school starts in 7th grade, and at the end, they take the top 80 students, and stick them in the Honors program. All Honors kids have the same first three bells, taught by the same teachers, and they just circle through them. Some team teaching is done, and the program is made to be more interdisciplinary than the regular classes. During my year, there were about 7 black kids in 8th grade Honors and maybe 5 Asian kids. That’s how it usually is. A few students leave and a few new ones come for 9th grade Honors. There were about 10 black students then and the same number of Asians. Because of the fact that nearly half of one’s schedule is within the Honors program, the rest of your classes are nearly completely filled with Honors students. I imagine that, since Honors is disproportionately white, regular classes are likely disproportionately black. Honors also seems to be made up of kids who are pretty much uniformly upper-middle class.</p>

<p>The Honors program ends after 9th grade, at which point students begin to take AP and AA (Advanced Academics, analogous to Honors in most HS) classes. These seats in these classes are, for the most part, taken up by former Honors students and thus show the about same level of racial and social separation. I remember, last year, I once counted up the number of black people I saw daily. It came to a grand total of 8. Well, 9, if I include myself.
I think the one exception might be AP World History, which is predominately black. But that’s not a positive. It’s still racially segregated. Some of the smaller AP classes have demographics that match the school’s more closely. I think my AP chem class represents the school’s racial makeup rather well, being about 20% black, but to make up for that, it has about 14 girls and one, singular guy. We used to have two guys, but one transferred to the other bell of AP chem.</p>

<p>My school doesn’t do anything like AP lunch though, where it seems to deliberately separate students who are already racially divided. It does, however have two places open for lunch, the Commons, which is outside, and the lunchroom. Almost every black student eats in the lunchroom, while the Commons is nearly all white.</p>

6

<p>60% of our upper tier student body in terms of academic ranking consists of Oriental Asians, another 30% consists of the Caucasians (both Whites and Indians), and the rest are a motley between Africans/Native Americans (As opposed to the 20-50-30 ratio for the school as a whole). As our ranking system is weighed by the rigors of the course selection as well as GPA, all of the upper tier students take straight AP courses.</p>

<p>And of course, we all hate our school…</p>

7

<p>It’s weird how the school lets out “AP Students” early to lunch, unless they’re on a completely different schedule.</p>

<p>As for the issue of minorities (ie. Latino(a), Black, Native American, etc) joining AP classes, i’m all for it, yay for diversity!! Until… we’re just shoving them into the classes just to ‘look good’ as a diversity school… or forcing them to take APs that they can’t handle because ‘we should have AP classes that represent the actual population of the school’ …</p>

<p>Being an Asian myself, I can see lots of Asian people taking Honors or AP classes. All of the ones I’ve taken are science (ie phys, bio), math (calc, stats), or close enough to some (ie. psychology, computer science). I take them because I like those types of classes, and haven’t ever given the thought about taking AP Euro or APUSH. However, lots of Caucasians at my school take more history/english/arts type AP classes. We have a good mix of minorities, lots of Filipinos, Latinos, and African Americans. We also have a good mix of how many of each race is enrolled in the AP classes. We have application process to make sure that each person is actually prepared for the class, and face it - some white people struggle in AP Euro. Some Chinese struggle in AP Calc. It just depends on the people, how they’re brought up, etc.</p>

8

<p>My school is like 95% white :confused: no issues with that</p>

9

<p>^I was about to say, “woah, maple, that’s crazy,” but then I realized you lived in Maine. </p>

<p>I went to Acadia/Bar Harbor once with my sister, 4 of my cousins, grandparents, aunt and uncle. We played “Count the black people.” We thought we saw two, but really, there was this one guy we just saw twice.</p>

10

<p>My school is like 30% Asian and 68% Caucasian. The Top 10% is almost exclusively asian.</p>

11

<p>“Yeah, my school is doing the exact opposite. Unfortunately, throwing minorities into AP classes they aren’t ready for does nothing but strengthen the stereotypes.”</p>

<p>Well, while this may be true now (9th-12th grade), White/Asian student are not innately more academically capable than their Black/Latino counterparts. Somewhere along the line, as Millancad describes, tracking culturally and racially segregates people.</p>

<p>Also “minorities” is a serious misnomer. “Douglas” is about 40% Black, 40% Latino, 19% White and like 1% other, including Asian.</p>

12

<p>^^^Two?? really??? haha</p>

<p>Moe’s Barbecue is the best. If you ever go back to Acadia, you should stop there in Ellsworth. Moe is the only african american I see during the summer more than once. He gave me dating advice :] There are maybe 6-8 at my high school, and it has fortunately been increasing in the last few years. I really don’t understand racial tension as a result of my upbringing haha.</p>

13

<p>^^Maybe, but whoever is capable is capable, and whoever is not, is not. Ultimately, it’s much more fair and merit-based than trying to achieve a certain racial balance.</p>

<p>If one tries to stuff students of a certain minority into an AP class just to make it more “diverse”, and said students cannot handle the workload, it’s ultimately a detriment.</p>

14

<p>“If one tries to stuff students of a certain minority into an AP class just to make it more “diverse”, and said students cannot handle the workload, it’s ultimately a detriment.”</p>

<p>Again, as a generalization “minorities” are as innately capable then their peers, just screwed over by tracking/self imposed lack of focus on academics.</p>

15

<p>there are like two African americans in my grade out of nearly 300 and out of nearly 1200 kids only about 16 African Americans in my school
so most classes tend to be racially segregated
i’m so sick of my town.</p>

16

<p>omg and that’s in Pennsylvania! (?) :O</p>

<p>btw, tell me if im wrong. it was semi-gut feeling</p>

17

<p>The Charlotte Observer reported today that white students make up 37% of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school system’s high school students but account for 62% of those taking AP exams. The school board’s citizen advisory committee that gathered this information suggested recruiting AP teachers “of various ethnic backgrounds” and “cluster(ing) students of racial groups in AP courses in order to provide peer support.”</p>

<p>In my opinion, scheduling AP courses by race is a terrible idea, would not improve AP enrollment or success and would cause the school system to waste money on legal fees when various races successfully sue the system.</p>

18

<p>“In my opinion, scheduling AP courses by race is a terrible idea, would not improve AP enrollment or success and would cause the school system to waste money on legal fees when various races successfully sue the system.”</p>

<p>Why does everyone think I’m proposing this?</p>

<p>I just observed how ridiculously homogeneous all the AP kids at a high school were, haha.</p>

19

<p>Huh, my school is about 80% white, 19.99% black, and has 11.5 Asians, including South Asians.</p>

<p>The Gifted class here has 30-ish kids, with all white kids and all the Asian kids in our grade (3 lol). We also have, surprisingly enough, two Hispanic kids, both second-gen here. We used to have an African American girl, but she moved. :/</p>

<p>The Honors class, however, I must say, has a greater selection of races and diversity.</p>

20

<p>I was curious what the demographics of my school was…</p>

<p>Native American: .2%
Caucasian: 60.3%
Hispanic: 3.5%
African-American: 13.3%
Asian: 13.8%
Middle Eastern: 1.5%
Multi-Ethnic: 5.2%
Other: 2.3%</p>

<p>And I think I remember seeing one black person in an AP class… That’s it. Maybe some took APs in the humanities (I didn’t, so I wouldn’t have seen them).</p>

<p>I think they lumped Jews in with “Caucasian”, which they technically are, but then so are Middle Easterners, and South Asians (whom were likely put in with Asian) and I bet many who were counted as African-American… Anyway, I’ll stop ranting (sort of, I’m moving it to list form), and clear up to what I think they meant by this flawed survey of race…</p>

<p>American-Indian, according to those who study the subject and more or less every high-school biology teacher in the world, “Asian” explorers: .2%
“Whites” (Oh boy! Too much to talk about to even bother with this one.) + most of the people who consider themselves Jews: 60.3%
People from Latin America of any race: 3.5%
People who have a majority of their ancestry from sub-Saharan Africa + some who may or may not be considered Middle Eastern because no one agrees on what the Middle East is: 13.3%
South Asian + “Oriental” Asian: 13.8%
Your guess is just as good as mine… Probably Arabs, likely Iranians, maybe Caucasians, who the hell knows about anyone else?: 1.5%
People who are kidding themselves a little less than others: 5.2%
Anyone who doesn’t fit into one of those groups: 2.3%</p>