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This chapter looks at more recent developments and the present state of Advanced Placement (AP). Advanced Placement's recent decades are notable for the program's stunning growth on multiple dimensions. Many more schools, students, and subjects joined in, and they did so at accelerating rates. At least five factors have fueled the AP program's expansion in recent years. First, the use of AP participation to rate and rank high schools has impelled more of them to increase their student numbers so as to boost their standings. Second, schools and districts were induced to add more AP courses because they wanted to challenge their students intellectually, tone up their curricula, hold on to their best teachers, attract and retain more middle-class families, draw more sophisticated employers to the area, and respond to demands from parents of gifted kids. Third, the country's mounting concern about equalizing opportunity for poor and minority youngsters and getting more of them into and through college inevitably drew greater attention to AP's potential contribution. Fourth, stiffening competition to enter top colleges and more scrambling by kids to advantage themselves in the admissions process also continued to pump air into the AP balloon. The fifth factor is the forceful marketing and lobbying activities of the College Board itself. As AP has expanded, it has done so unevenly, however, giving rise to multiple issues of fairness. The chapter then considers these inequalities.

This chapter examines the developments in Advanced Placement (AP) from the years following its first two decades up to the mid-1990s. By the late 1970s, a profound directional shift began with the gradual emergence of a second major AP mission: assisting able disadvantaged students to engage with and master college-level academic challenges during high school; boosting their confidence that they might in fact be “college material” even if family members and neighbors had never matriculated; and—as with their more privileged age-mates—holding out the possibility of exam scores that would elevate their admissions prospects and kick-start their progress toward degrees. As the participation of minority youngsters expanded faster than the program as a whole, particularly toward the end of the 1980s, the national AP population began to diversify. State legislators began to pass laws that encouraged AP participation and expanded access to it. These years also saw the College Board adding more subjects to the AP catalog. Some of the new classes were accessible to younger high school students without a lot of prerequisites, and some appeared less daunting than physics and calculus. Ultimately, during this period, “AP became a national program to a degree which even its most fervent supporters in the early years could not have imagined.”

This chapter focuses on the Advanced Placement (AP) program in Texas. No place in America offers a larger or more vivid example of AP's recent history, its widening mission, and the challenges of carrying out that mission than Texas. The Lone Star State illustrates the complex interplay of traditional AP success in upscale schools; ambitious efforts to extend it to more disadvantaged youngsters; robust, AP-centric charter schools; and an exceptionally bumptious and varied array of dual-credit alternatives. As in most of the nation, AP participation has surged in Texas for four straight decades, and the upward slope has recently steepened. The number of exams per pupil rose, too, spurred by governmental and philanthropic moves to grow the program as well as intensifying college competition among high school students. The chapter then evaluates the National Math and Science Initiative (NMSI). The Fort Worth experience with NMSI—and the Texas experience more generally—illustrates the challenge of expanding AP to students who have not historically had much access to it or enjoyed great success with it.