A calculus course in high school provides a big boost for college majors in math-intensive fields like engineering and physics. But few Black students make it to calculus in Florida’s public high schools.

Poster on high school preparation for college majors in engineering distributed by the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering.

If you ask the advisors at the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering about high school preparation for college majors in engineering fields, they will tell you that taking a calculus class during the senior year of high school is the “most important” thing a high school student can do to prepare. How do I know this? It is the featured statement on a poster that the College’s recruiting staff distributed a few years ago, as you can see above.

The College takes a particularly intense interest in recruiting and educating Black students – in part because of its affiliation with Florida’s public HBCU, Florida A&M University. So the message to take calculus in high school is directed at the state’s Black high school students as much as at everyone else.

And yet even though 22% of the students in Florida’s public K-12 schools are Black, in the fall of 2020 only 7.5% of the students taking AP Calculus AB in the state’s public high schools were Black.

[The enrollment numbers on racial representation come from the FLDOE’s EDStats portal. The department began posting race-specific course enrollment information on EDStats in the spring of 2020.]

This underrepresentation of Black students in high school calculus classes contributes to the underrepresentation of Black students among Florida State University System graduates in engineering and physics. During the 2018-19 academic year, only 6.4% of the system’s bachelor’s degree graduates in engineering were Black; in physics, a startling 3.9% were Black.

Of course, the calculus problem doesn’t originate in high school. To take a calculus course in high school, a student must take Algebra 1 in middle school. The students who were taking AP Calculus AB in Fall 2020 took Algebra 1 in middle school during the 2016-17 school year. Of the 7th grade students who took Florida’s Algebra 1 end-of-course exam in 2016-17, only 11.3% were Black. Among 8th grade Algebra 1 EOC takers, 12.6% were Black. So Black students were behind in the engineering and physics pipeline in middle school, and fell farther behind during the high school years.

The answer to the shortage of Black students in high school calculus courses isn’t found in high school. Instead, the work to correct this issue must begin at least in middle school, if not before. The Orange County Public Schools Calculus Project attempts to solve this problem by recruiting students from underrepresented groups into 7th grade Algebra 1 classes and then supporting those students with summer boot camps and tutoring after school and on Saturdays during the school year. This past fall, 13.8% of the students taking AP Calculus AB in Orange County’s public high schools were Black. (24.5% of the students in Orange County Public Schools were Black in the Fall of 2020) It is highly likely that the Calculus Project has contributed to this encouraging result. Nevertheless, there is more work to do in Orange County.

There is even more work to do in the rest of Florida.