Story at a glance
- Advanced Placement classes often require recommendations from school counselors for participation.
- A new study found that Black female students are less likely to be recommended for these classes than their peers.
- The results have ramifications not only for education but also college eligibility and employment.
High school counselors are less likely to recommend Black girls and teenagers to Advanced Placement (AP) classes than their peers, a new study found, even when their transcripts are identical.
School counselors were asked to evaluate student transcripts that had been randomly assigned racially coded names — “Deja Jackson” or “DeAndre Washington” versus “Hannah Douglas” or “Jake Connor” — based on previous research using California birth certificate data. The findings revealed that Black female students were less likely to be recommended for AP calculus and were rated as being the least prepared.
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Meanwhile, recommendations for Black male students were relatively similar to white students, both male and female, suggesting a gender gap. The study found female students were less likely than male students to be penalized for having borderline behavioral records, but more likely to be penalized for borderline academic records.
“These frustrating results underscore the prevalence of implicit biases even among school guidance counselors,” said Jason Sheltzer, a researcher at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory who broke down the study on Twitter.
Thank you @JSheltzer for this wonderful thread highlighting our research and providing excellent context as well. I’m hopeful we can address these types of structural barriers and appreciate your amplifying the work. https://t.co/N0Ha04vPAE
— Dania Francis (@DaniaFrancis) February 2, 2021
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AP classes in high school can boost students’ prospects for attending college, but Black and Hispanic students are underrepresented.
“Racial disparities in AP participation at the high school level are more pronounced in courses involving science, technology, engineering and math,” the study noted, which correlates to the lack of working representation in STEM fields.
“I think about these results in terms of the ‘cumulative advantage’ theory of inequality: one decision (like taking AP Calc) may not be huge by itself, but a lifetime of being 20 percent less likely to recommended for honors, promotions, etc. can add up to a lot,” Sheltzer said.
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