HISTORICALLY EXCLUDED STUDENTS AND THE PATH TO ADVANCED PLACEMENT ENROLLMENT

<p dir="ltr">Equity in public education is a popular paradigm as schools become more diverse and academic access demonstrates a gap between historically excluded students and their White counterparts. To tackle this problem, school districts across the country are creating equity offices in an effort to develop solutions. Specifically, school districts have made gifted education and its derivative, the Advanced Placement (AP) program a target for equitable access and opportunity (Samuels, 2019). Literature on this topic is clear. Missing from the research are the voices of parents and proven strategies of family engagement in increasing AP enrollment for underrepresented student groups. Chief amongst those determinants in increasing student access are family (used interchangeably with the term, parent) dynamics and school engagement. In this work, qualitative methods were explored through interviews with parents of underrepresented students on the factors that contributed to their children's enrollment in a Pacific Northwest school district's AP courses. Utilizing an anti-racist premise as both theory and method, the counternarratives of families were analyzed and organized into seven themes. Bridging the home and school connection, the themes and Dual Capacity-Building Framework for Home-School Partnerships model were used in an intervention with one high school's AP leadership team. The results showed that current practices of family engagement, gifted pipeline, and patterns of investment are not aligned with the goal of increasing AP access and equity. The larger impact of this work will assist United States school districts and their agency partners in developing strategies for equity leveraging caretaker engagement in addressing access for and enrollment in AP courses for historically excluded students.</p>