AP® Equity Self-Assessment

The AP Equity Self-Assessment is an important step in seeking to ensure that all students in your school/district have equitable access to your AP program. This tool will help you identify the extent to which your school/district uses money, time, program, policies, and people to meet the needs of historically underserved students including those who identify as Black, Latino, and those experiencing poverty.

AP programs are supported by a number of factors working with variable degrees of effectiveness. The self-assessment will help coordinators, administrators, and teachers examine structural conditions that can create unseen barriers to access and success for historically underserved students in order to highlight where your AP programs are strong and where opportunities lie to make them stronger.

This informative self-assessment can be utilized by school teams to spark conversations around AP best practices. Once you and your team submit the self-assessment, you will receive a full report summarizing strengths, opportunities, and actionable findings for each condition. This report will help you and your team delineate next steps for equitable AP participation and success in your school and/or district.

Before you start the self-assessment, please consider the following:

1

Time

The self-assessment carefully examines five structural conditions with a total of 28 best practices. In order to ensure adequate thought is given to each condition and best practice, we estimate that you will need 90-120 minutes to complete the self-assessment depending on your school/district.  You may need multiple sittings to complete the self-assessment.

2

Team

To ensure all voices are reflected in this process, we recommend a diverse team of stakeholders complete this self-assessment collaboratively; at a minimum, this should include a school administrator familiar with the school’s budget, AP coordinator, AP teacher(s), and counselor.

3

Data

While it is not required, we recommend having several data sources readily accessible to provide the most accurate and thoughtful responses to each item; each new section intro in the self-assessment will also suggest these data sources. These may include, but are not limited to: schoolwide and AP demographic data, staff, student, and family feedback surveys, annual district and school budgets, AP coursework scope and sequence, district hiring, and certification policies, counseling policies and school master schedules.

4

Next Steps

When you begin the assessment, you will be asked to fill out a short contact form which will generate a unique link to access the assessment. Prior to assembling your team, we recommend you complete the contact form to save time. This link will be sent to your email and may take up to 15 minutes to arrive in your inbox; the link will allow you to save and return as many times as you need to complete the assessment.

Once you have completed your assessment, you will have the option to download the report directly from the site or access the report from your inbox. We recommend convening the same team to review the report in-depth and plan for next steps. If your team is interested in a facilitated action planning process, please contact Mass Insight to learn more.

If you have any questions regarding the completion of this self-assessment, please contact: info@equitytools.massinsight.org.

Are you ready to start the AP Equity Self-Assessment?