The Advanced Placement Program in Texas — Local Access Offered by Public School Districts is Decreasing While the Breadth of Differentiated Courses Offered is Increasing

Abstract

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 that a school district opts-in to locally offer AP program courses in a given academic years and (2) a second stage fixed effect zero truncated Poisson regression model of the number of unique AP courses offered in a given year by opting-in districts. We find that the number of Texas school districts providing local access to AP courses is decreasing through time; however, we also find that districts that do provide local access to AP courses offer increasingly greater numbers of unique AP courses.