Going to a high school that provides strong academic preparation and support comes with intrinsic advantages. Rigorous coursework is one of the most important factors colleges consider in the application process. Even truer at colleges that are competitive to get into, not enough Advanced Placement or Honors courses can leave admissions officers wondering whether the applicant is a slacker or unable to keep apace with college-level work. But Black and Latino are less likely than their peers to attend a high school that offers rigorous coursework, where some high schools even lack Algebra II, a basic admission requirement of many colleges.
More so, even if the high school does provide college-level coursework, Black and Latino students are less likely than their other peers to be found on their rosters.
Are many Black and Latino students enjoying the benefits of the high schools that are perched atop the US News and World Report rankings? To find out how diverse the top 20 high schools in the country are and the extent to which Black and Latino students have access to AP courses, I combined USNWR’s list with the U.S. Department of Education’s (ED) Office of Civil Rights (OCR) data. Among other things, OCR collects data on the racial composition of AP courses for every high school (their most recent data is from 2011).
I also added the racial composition of the zip code in which the high school is located from the 2010 US Census. This was only for context, since magnet high schools can draw from much larger areas and would therefore not be very representative of the immediate area. Furthermore, Census figures show the racial composition of all people in an area, not just the high school-aged ones.
Most of the top 20 high schools in the country are not very diverse. In total, Black students are only 8 percent of all students at these 20 high schools; Latinos, 12 percent. In fact, 12 of the top 20 high schools in the country had less than 5% Black enrollment, while half had Latino enrollments below 5%. There were some notable exceptions: three high schools had Latino student enrollments that exceeded 50%.
Sources: US News and World Report Best High Schools Rankings, 2014; Civil Rights Data Collection, 2011 Survey
Many of these high schools lack racial/ethnic diversity because they are in areas that lack Black and Latino families. For example, High Technology High School in New Jersey is situated in a neighborhood that is only 0.5% Black and 3.5% Latino. The high school mirrors this dearth of diversity with just 2% Black and Latino students combined. On the other hand, there are instances where there’s a huge gap between the school population and nearby residents. Take Stanton College Preparatory School in Jacksonville, Florida. Nearly all of the residents in the surrounding area are Black, but only about a quarter of the high school’s student population mirror that. Stanton, a magnet school, no doubt draws from many surrounding communities to fill its seats.
Let’s unpack this further. Below is a graph of the average high school demographic representation by magnet school status (the first column). The second column is the racial/ethnic composition of the neighborhood in which the high school is located. Of the top 20 high schools, magnet high schools (count = 11 ) are more diverse than non-magnet high schools (count = 9), but they are also typically found in very diverse neighborhoods. What does this mean? That many Black and Latino families have amazing—but inaccessible—high schools in their backyards.
