NY's Black, Latino Pupils Face Obstacles To College Prep Classes

NEW YORK, NY — Most students in New York's wealthiest school districts can pick from an extensive menu of courses that will prepare them for college. But their peers in the larger and more diverse New York City school system aren't so lucky.

Just 18 percent of the city's high schools offered at least six Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate courses in the last school year, less than a fifth of the rate for well-off districts with low numbers of poor students, a new report published Thursday says.

That's just one effect of the racial disparities in New York students' access to courses that prepare them for college and their future careers, according to the report by the New York Equity Coalition, a consortium of more than 20 education, political, business and civil rights groups.

"New York’s education system routinely denies students of color equitable access to the courses that will prepare them for college, careers, and active citizenship," Ian Rosenblum, the executive director of The Education Trust-New York, one of the coalition's members, said in a statement. "Addressing these challenges is both an educational justice and an economic imperative, and we call on state leaders to adopt the solutions that will give all students the high-quality education they deserve."

The report used enrollment data for the 2016-17 school year to examine how the number of students taking advanced middle and high school courses such as Algebra I, calculus and computer science varies across ethnic groups and school districts.

The results show that black, Latino and American Indian students are underrepresented in those courses across the state.

For instance, 14.3 percent of all seventh- and eighth-graders statewide took Algebra I last school year. But the rate was just 9.5 percent for black students and 9.3 percent for Latino students.

If the algebra enrollment rate for black and Latino students matched the overall rate in schools where the most students take the course, there would be enough additional black and Latino middle schoolers taking algebra to fill Madison Square Garden one and a half times, according to the Equity Coalition.

But black and Latino students are less likely to go to schools where they could take even those advanced courses, in part because they're concentrated in needier urban districts like New York City's, the report says.

About a third of black and Latino seventh- and eighth-graders across the state attended schools in 2016-17 that didn't offer Algebra I — roughly triple the rate for white students, according to the report. Some 47 percent of New York City middle schools offered algebra classes, half as many as the state's well-off districts.

Even schools that that do offer advanced courses see black and Latino students take them at lower rates than their white peers, the report says. For example, black and Latino students comprise more than half the total population of the city's schools that offer calculus, but made up just 35 percent of the students enrolled in calculus classes.

Addressing these inequities is a "cornerstone" of New York City's education agenda, a Department of Eduation spokesman said. Officials have rolled out several programs in recent years to increase access to advanced courses across the board.

The city's "Algebra for All" initiative aims to offer algebra to every eighth-grader and have every student finish the course by ninth grade by 2022. About 900 teachers citywide have been trained to spend more time on math and strengthen instruction in the subject, the DOE said.

Some 49 percent of city high schools offered two to five Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate courses in 2016-17, the Equity Coalition report says, while 20 percent had none.

The city wants to change that by putting at least five AP courses in every high school by the fall of 2021. More than 150 schools are now offering new AP courses, including 60 that previously had none, the DOE said.

Efforts to teach more kids computer science have led to nearly 4,000 students taking the AP computer science exam last year, an increase of more than 1,100 students, the DOE said. The city aims to give every student instruction in the subject in elementary, middle and high school by 2025.

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