GTP Adds AP Statistics to Expanded Curriculum

This academic year, the Global Teaching Project has added a new, fourth course to its AP STEM offerings: AP Statistics.

The addition of AP Statistics provides our students the opportunity to learn, at an advanced level, subject matter that is increasingly relevant to nearly all facets of our lives, as well as many academic and career paths.  The daily deluge of data has created great demand for persons who can find the answers hidden in numbers.

College Board, which administers the AP Program, identifies 32 college majors and 106 career areas that require at least one course in Statistics.  Moreover, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that Data Scientists’ median pay was over $100,000 in 2022, and projects that the field will be among the fastest growing professions in the next decade, followed closely by Statisticians.

The Global Teaching Project’s Advanced STEM Access Program, now in its seventh year, provides promising high school students in rural, high-poverty Mississippi communities access to advanced courses they need to achieve their full potential, but which their schools otherwise may not be able to offer, due to a chronic, and worsening, shortage of qualified teachers:

The Advanced STEM Access Program began with a single course, AP Physics 1, and has since added a new subject every other year, while also dramatically expanding the number of schools and students served.  This year, the Program offers over 80 classes at 38 rural Mississippi high schools in four subjects—AP Physics 1, AP Biology, AP Computer Science Principles, and AP Statistics.

As College Board recently wrote to the U.S. Secretary of Education, GTP’s Advanced STEM Access Program “has proven uniquely successful in addressing disparate access to AP STEM courses.”   

Among schools that serve the 50 highest poverty rural school districts in the entire country , the only ones that offer AP Physics do so through GTP’s Advanced STEM Access Program, and the majority of those schools that offer AP Biology, AP Statistics, or AP Computer Science also do so by working with the Program, according to recent Census and College Board data.

The AP Statistics course consists of nine units covering four broad themes: data analysis, probability and simulation, selecting statistical methods, and statistical augmentation.  Students who earn a qualifying score on the AP exam earn credit at most U.S. universities.  Mr. Dane Peagler, an AP certified teacher and experienced AP Statistics instructor who has worked with the Advanced STEM Access Program since inception, will serve as the Supervisory Instructor for AP Statistics.