Background: Early Colleges (ECs) are a type of rapidly growing dual enrollment program proven to be successful in helping underrepresented students get a jumpstart on their postsecondary education. To date, the most rigorous evidence on the impact of ECs has come from two lottery-based natural experiments conducted by the SERVE Center (Edmunds et…

This article presents an analysis of the participation of Texas public school districts in the Advanced Placement (AP) program for academic years ending 2013 through 2019. We develop and estimate to a panel of school district data a hurdle count model composed of: (1) a first stage fixed effect binomial logistic regression model of the probability…

The performance of White students and Hispanic students from California, Texas, and Arizona on the advanced placement (AP) biology exam was compared using archival data from the College Board from 2016 through 2019. Pearson Chi-square tests yielded statistically significant differences in all 4 year comparisons of white and Hispanic students in…

The expansion and increasing popularity of Advanced Placement (AP) programs have led to a new and significant trend: students are taking AP courses earlier in their high school journey, with a notable increase in enrollment among freshmen and sophomores. This study examines the effects of early engagement in AP courses for students deemed…

Latina/o rural students are underrepresented in college and the research of their college choice process. Using Bourdieu's habitus, and Yosso's Community Cultural Wealth Conceptual Model, this qualitative study used interviews with 24 Latina/o rural high school students. Our findings explored how school habitus limits college options. Students use…

Background/Context: There were over 500,000 open computing jobs across the country in 2018, but only 35% of U.S. high schools offer computer science classes, and only 8-10% of STEM graduates study computer science (Code.org, 2018). In 2021, only 5.1% of all Bachelor's degrees conferred were in Computer and Information Sciences (IPEDS, 2018). STEM…

The first College Acceleration Playbook, "Accelerating Students from High School to College and Careers: A Playbook for State Policymakers" (ED612490) identifies a series of non-negotiables that states, colleges, universities and schools can use to strengthen their college acceleration programs to benefit all students --especially those…

This research explores the positive impact of service-learning on the disposition of students in mathematics. This was a qualitative case study of high school AP Statistics students who completed a service-learning project. Data were gathered from student interviews, reflection journals, and field observations. The framework for the analysis…

This paper considers an unavoidable feature of the school environment, class rank. What are the long run effects of a student's ordinal rank in elementary school? Using administrative data from all public school students in Texas, we show that students with a higher third grade academic rank, conditional on achievement and classroom fixed effects,…

When calculating class rank, high schools often give additional weight to grades earned in College Board Advanced Placement (AP) courses as an incentive for students to take hard courses. This paper examines changes in student course-taking behavior after an increase in AP grade weights at Texas high schools. We find that raising the magnitude of…

In this investigation, the authors analyzed the cost effectiveness of receiving passing scores for Black students on Advanced Placement exams in three states (Texas, New York, and Florida) for a 16-year period (e.g., 1997 through 2012). College Board data were downloaded and analyzed for all Advanced Placement exams for Black students in these…

Many assume low-income, emergent bilingual Latinos have poor reading attitudes. To investigate this issue, we surveyed 1,503 Texas public high school students through stratified cluster sampling to determine their reading attitudes. Most represented Latinos and mixed-race Latinos/Whites who heard Spanish at home and whose mother tongue was…

This report presents key findings from "Learning in the Fast Lane: The Past, Present, and Future of Advanced Placement," by Chester E. Finn, Jr. and Andrew E. Scanlan, and published by Princeton University Press in 2019. American education has long been plagued by excellence gaps among the young people who make it into the highest levels…

The National Math + Science Initiative (NMSI) is a nonprofit organization committed to improving educational outcomes that traces its roots back to the early 1990s. NMSI's College Readiness Program (CRP) is a long-standing program with the goal of promoting STEM education in high schools to improve students' preparation for college. The three-year…

The challenge and promise of postsecondary education is greater in a large, fast-growing, diverse state like Texas where the fastest-growing segments of the population are economically disadvantaged and come from communities historically underserved by higher education institutions. Recognizing this reality, the Texas Higher Education Coordinating…