New AP Results Highlight the Power of Opportunity

We have begun to receive results from the May 2026 AP exams.  Though we await considerable data, even the partial data we have is sufficient to affirm the premise of the Global Teaching Project’s Advanced STEM Access Program—that is, there are promising students in every community who, if provided quality instruction and extensive supports, are capable of excelling academically, even in rigorous courses.

By design, our program seeks to serve students and schools with the greatest needs.  Mississippi has the nation’s highest school age (5-17) poverty rate, and the many school districts we serve include a substantial majority of the state’s most impoverished districts.  Those districts also tend to have the most severe teacher shortages and, as a consequence, the most limited curricula, with few, if any, advanced STEM offerings prior to working with GTP.

Students in those high-poverty districts face many challenges, but the recent AP results once again demonstrate what they are capable of achieving if given the opportunity.

• AP Statistics students at one small Delta high school, in a district with a poverty rate nearly double the statewide rate and triple the national rate, had some of the top scores in the state.  That school, which enrolls just 0.3 percent of Mississippi high school students, accounted for over 2 percent of statewide qualifying scores—that is, the AP score required to earn college credit at most universities across the nation.

• At another, extremely small, Delta high school with a senior class of just 18 students, both students who took the AP Biology exam earned qualifying scores, a feat achieved by fewer than 0.5 percent of high school students statewide.

• AP Computer Science students at yet another small school, located in a central Mississippi district that has a poverty rate significantly above the statewide rate and almost exactly double the national rate, had much higher average scores and a greater percentage of students earning qualifying scores than corresponding statewide or global figures.  That school enrolls just 0.2 percent of Mississippi high school students, yet accounted for 4.7 percent of statewide qualifying scores, and a remarkable 13.7 percent (4 of 29) of students statewide who earned the highest possible score.

• In a north Mississippi school district with just 0.7 percent of statewide enrollment, six of our AP Physics 1 students earned qualifying scores; statewide, only 161 students did so.

We do not claim that all our students have such remarkable results.  Many of our students struggle as they grapple with, often for the first time, advanced subject matter, but that struggle typically is a necessary first step in altering the students’ academic and career trajectories.

Nor do we view AP scores as the most meaningful metric of student success.  Those scores are simply a snapshot that provides some information about how students have progressed in the first few months of engaging with academic rigor.

Our focus is helping our students learn, and learn how to learn.  Our experience over the past decade has convinced us that every student who puts in the effort makes progress towards those objectives, though the extent of that progress may not be fully evident for years, particularly when they advance, as almost all our students do, to the post-secondary level.