Florida’s black students on the road to bachelor’s degree-level STEM careers: Underrepresentation in STEM-track math courses intensifies in high school

Taking Algebra 1 in middle school and a first calculus course in high school are two of the mile markers on the road to entering college well-prepared to major in fields like engineering, computer science and the physical, life and health sciences.

In Florida, black students are significantly underrepresented in middle school Algebra 1 courses. But the underrepresentation among students taking the first Advanced Placement calculus course is much more severe, signalling that the high school years are a nearly insurmountable barrier for black students who might otherwise be interested in and successful at careers in engineering and the sciences. This is an issue that has attracted little attention among policy-makers and educators.

A record 84,000 Florida public middle school students passed the state’s Algebra 1 end of course exam this past spring (of 95,000 middle school students who took the exam). While 22% of the state’s public K-12 students are black, only 12.7% of those who passed the exam (and only 13.9% of those who took the exam) were black.

As bad as the middle school situation is, the situation four years farther down the road in the first Advanced Placement calculus course (Calculus AB) is much, much worse. Only 4.1% of Florida students who passed the AP Calculus AB exam in May of 2019 (and 6.2% of those who took the exam) were black. [Note: The middle school algebra numbers include only public school students. The AP Calculus numbers include private school and homeschooled students as well as public school students.]

As the plot of underrepresentation among Florida State University System bachelor’s degree graduates in engineering, computer science, mathematics and statistics, and physics farther down shows, the issue in AP courses in high school propogates through to the bachelor’s degree level. To solve the bachelor’s degree problem, we must solve the middle and high school problems.

Why am I only focusing on AP calculus here and not including IB, dual enrollment and non-honors calculus courses here? In part because I do not have the data by race for those other categories. However, in Spring 2019 AP Calculus courses (including the second-year course Calculus BC) accounted for 72% of all calculus enrollments in Florida’s public schools.

Percentages of black and Hispanic students among middle school takers and passers of Florida’s Algebra 1 end of course exam and takers and passers of the AP Calculus AB exam in the Spring of 2019. Those percentages (shown in blue) are compared to the percentages of black and Hispanic students among Florida’s public school population, which are shown in red. Algebra 1 EOC and K-12 population numbers are from the Florida Department of Education. The AP numbers are from the College Board’s Participation and Performance page.

Percentages of black and Hispanic graduates among those receiving bachelors’ degrees in engineering, computing, mathematics and statistics and physics in Florida’s State University System during the 2016-17 academic year. From IPEDS.