As Atlanta expands AP classes, more students earn college credit

Krista Sanders’ Advanced Placement Calculus students at Atlanta’s Mays High School have their eyes set on a big graph displayed at the front of the classroom. Sanders has drawn a line on the graph that has two slopes. She asks her class to identify the “point of inflection.”

“The point where the slope changes,” replies Ralph Long IV.

“Can you go a little deeper?” she prods him.

He explains that the inflection point is where the slope changes direction, going from negative to positive. He gets it right.

The moment is symbolic.

Atlanta Public Schools has also reached an inflection point. The district has strategically expanded the number of Advanced Placement classes it offers, hoping students who haven’t considered taking the college prep classes would enroll. Those students tend to be economically disadvantaged and students of color. At Mays, 92% of the student body is African American; 81.4% are economically disadvantaged, according to state data.

Typically, when the number of students taking a standardized test increases, average scores dip. But APS has seen steady improvement in AP performance.

In 2019, 3,232 APS students took AP exams and 41% of them scored well enough to earn college credit. In 2025, 4,470 students took AP tests and 61% of them earned credit. Some schools offer extra help sessions after school and on weekends, which they believe are helping improve students’ performance.

The College Board, which provides the curriculum for AP courses, has tried to increase the participation of underrepresented students nationwide in classes such as AP African American Studies and AP Precalculus, Education Week has reported. Recent data show both saw Black and Hispanic students register for exams in those courses at high levels, the publication reported.

‘You have to do something’

Dwionne Freeman​ is the district’s director of career, technical and agricultural education, which includes college preparation. She said there were several reasons why district officials decided to expand AP course offerings. For one, Georgia colleges have become more competitive. This fall’s first-year students at the University of Georgia, for example, took an average of 11 AP courses.

To increase interest among students, Freeman said, schools needed to do what worked for their student bodies. So, there are no mandates, such as a minimum number of courses schools need to have or particular kinds of courses.

“You don’t have to do the same things, but you have to do something,” Freeman said.

At Mays, that means offering classes students want to take. Ramon Garner has been the school’s principal since 2023. During the 2024-25 school year, a senior wanted to apply to Dartmouth College, a member of the prestigious Ivy League in Hanover, New Hampshire. There was just one problem. The student needed to take AP Calculus, but Mays didn’t offer it. Garner was shocked.

“We’re a high school,” he said. “I couldn’t understand why we didn’t offer this course.”

Garner helped the student enroll in the course through Atlanta Virtual Academy, an online learning program offered through the district. He’s now a freshman at Dartmouth. Sanders now teaches that AP Calculus class he needed.

Since becoming principal, Garner has added five AP classes at Mays. He says educators are strategic about placing students in them.

“We look at our kids who we’re receiving from middle schools, how they have performed as it relates to (whether they’ve taken) algebra or not, and then creating a pipeline for students who want this level of rigor to be able to get there.”

Across town at Midtown High School, students can choose from 23 AP classes. The student population at Midtown differs from Mays. Just 30% of them come from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. State data show 40% of Midtown students are Black, 44% are white and 8.6% are Hispanic.

Despite those differences, Midtown Principal Betsy Bockman said her goals are similar to Garner’s. She points to data that shows in 2023, 36 Black students at Midtown earned AP credit. That number jumped to 92 students the next year, thanks in part to extra tutoring sessions and Saturday school.

Bockman reviews all of the students’ grades every four and a half weeks. If she thinks a student can handle an advanced class, she calls the parents to persuade them.

“Say they’re in 11th grade lit (literature) and … they’re doing really well,” she said. “I’ll call the parent and say, ‘Look, I think that we need to move your child, to AP Lang (Language) instead of just the 11th grade lit. He’s doing well. We’ll give him the support.’ That kind of thing.”

Another tactic Midtown has used to get students from different backgrounds interested in AP classes has been to let 10th graders take AP African American Studies.

“Getting more kids of color in earlier is very important, and that class is not intimidating, like some other classes,” Bockman said. “It’s a strategy. We’re trying to get them to see that they can do it.”

‘The power of the 2’

On a recent afternoon, Midtown students in Brent Eickhoff’s AP African American Studies class were learning about the role African explorers played in the colonization of the Americas in the 16th century. Eickhoff assigned them a project: Develop collectibles for children’s fast-food meals featuring different explorers.

Upstairs, Susan Salvesen’s AP Government class was preparing for a debate over the part of the Federalist Papers where Alexander Hamilton argues the U.S. should have a unitary executive. Some students planned to argue in favor of Hamilton’s ideas; others planned to argue against them. Salvesen urged them to find the strengths and weaknesses of Hamilton’s arguments.

In both classes, about 28 students are crammed into rooms that seem designed to hold a maximum of 20.

It’s a stark contrast to Mays, where the AP Calculus class has 12 students. But AP Calculus is rigorous, and Sanders had a few students who dropped the class this year. She offers after-school sessions to help them stay on top of the material.

“I will be honest, there are times where it can be really, really, really stressful,” Mays senior Savion Sneed said. “But I say college isn’t going to be easy on us.”

Fellow senior Bethany Momon is taking another math class but signed up for Sanders’ class because she wants to attend Georgia Tech or Caltech next year.

“I took AP Calc so they could see that I was dedicated about math,” she said.

The hard work has paid off so far. Bethany, Ralph and Justin Allen — all in Sanders’ class — were accepted Early Decision early into Georgia Tech.