Strategies for Progress

We hope schools, districts, states, and colleges and universities will consider the following strategies for increasing rigor, promoting equity, and developing critical knowledge and skills in high school classrooms.

Closing the Opportunity Gap

  • Use AP Potential™ to identify students at your school who are likely to succeed in AP courses. Where there are sufficient numbers of potential students for particular subjects, consider starting new AP courses or sections.
  • Your school may already have the resources it needs to start new AP courses. Find out how your school can launch a new AP course.

Increasing Rigor

  • Use AP Instructional Planning Reports to target areas for increased attention and focus in the curriculum.
  • Develop plans to recruit, retain, train and mentor new and less experienced AP teachers.

Promoting Equity

  • Build emotional and academic support for students through targeted peer mentoring, counseling and tutoring programs.
  • Offer parents a checklist and glossary of the academic opportunities offered at your school, along with a summary of the graduation requirements for their children.
  • Use AP Potential results to invite students and parents from underserved backgrounds to targeted sessions of an AP night at your school that highlights the courses offered.

Developing Critical Knowledge and Skills

  • Adopt rigorous academic standards and curricula that allow students to build a progression of content and skills anchored in AP.
  • Develop and share a road map of the content and skills that students will need to be college and career ready.

Closing the Opportunity Gap

Increasing Rigor

  • Implement summer programs (e.g., summer “boot” or “boost” camps) to help students prepare for specific AP courses.
  • Ensure AP course offerings align with your district’s graduation requirements. (For instance, if a U.S. government course is required for all students, do they have access to AP U.S. Government and Politics?)

Promoting Equity

  • Work with middle and high school counselors to identify students who initially need extra academic and personal support to succeed in AP. Develop an AP inclusion process that involves parent meetings, school visits and tours, and summer bridge programs.
  • Review your district’s AP data, and require schools to review their AP enrollment practices. Together, use this information to ensure that underrepresented students have access to academic pathways that will prepare them for AP, and that your schools see proportionate, equitable AP enrollment and success.

Developing Critical Knowledge and Skills

  • Set clear and measurable goals about college readiness for all students in your district.
  • Make information available to students about whether they are on track to be (or already are) successful in college-level courses by the end of high school.

Closing the Opportunity Gap

  • Build teacher capacity by requiring AP teachers to complete content-specific professional development before or during their first year and to update their training regularly.
  • Make funding available for attending these professional development events.

Increasing Rigor

  • Set a clear, measurable statewide goal for AP participation and success to be incorporated into the state report card.
  • Establish AP participation and performance indicators on state report cards.

Promoting Equity

  • Provide targeted assistance and resources to schools serving traditionally underserved populations: for example, funding for materials, supplies, outreach efforts and tutoring programs.
  • Clearly communicate your state’s graduation requirements, and share information about funding opportunities that enable students to participate and succeed in AP. Communicate the advantages of AP for students attending your state’s universities.

Developing Critical Knowledge and Skills

  • Develop policies that allow AP course work and exam scores to substitute for statewide graduation requirements.
  • Provide resources to schools and districts to support research-based programs that build content knowledge and skills — particularly in literacy and math — to prepare students for success in AP course work, and in college and careers.

Closing the Opportunity Gap

  • Host an AP Summer Institute or other professional development event for AP teachers in your area.
  • Increase recruitment of successful AP students.

Increasing Rigor

  • Encourage and reward faculty involvement in AP course development, exam scoring, course syllabus review and research.
  • Recognize successful AP scores with course-equivalent credit, placement and/or scholarships.

Promoting Equity

  • Target recruitment outreach to underserved students who earn AP scores of 3 or higher.
  • Recognize and collaborate with AP Districts of the Year near your institution. Support their continued progress through collaborative activities such as AP teacher training, college fairs and parent and community outreach.

Developing Critical Knowledge and Skills

  • Provide incentives for faculty to collaborate with local AP teachers to align expectations of what students in college-level courses should know and be able to do.
  • Organize special events for local AP students to visit your institution (e.g., lab tours, author presentations and speakers from your history or English departments). Make admission counselors available to meet with students at these events.