Introducing the AdvancED Equity Interactive Dashboard: A Decade of AP Access, Mapped
Nearly a decade ago, ProPublica’s landmark Miseducation project put a number to something educators had long known: nationally, white students are 1.8 times as likely as Black students — and 1.3 times as likely as Hispanic students — to be enrolled in an Advanced Placement class. It was a striking snapshot, drawn from a single year of federal civil rights data, 2015-16.
Today, as students head back to school, we’re releasing a tool that turns that snapshot into a decade-long picture. The AdvancED Equity Interactive Dashboard makes racial/ethnic disparities in AP course access and enrollment visible and comparable across school districts in the country, from 2011 to 2021.
We’ve harmonized ten years of the federal Civil Rights Data Collection that undergirded ProPublica’s project. What’s new today is accessibility: the dashboard turns a decade of complex federal data on AP enrollment disparity at the nation’s public high schools into an interactive map anyone can explore — no downloads, no data wrangling, no technical expertise required. You can move from the national picture to your state, to an individual district, tracing how AP enrollment disparities have widened or narrowed over time, and how any district compares to its peers.
This is a proof of concept. It currently focuses on enrollment comparisons for Black and Hispanic students relative to their white peers. In the near future, we hope to expand it — adding more opportunity indicators and more student subgroups, so communities can see more clearly different aspects of schools that structure students’ experiences and outcomes.
The dashboard arrives amid real policy momentum: in July 2026, Senator Cory Booker introduced the Advanced Coursework Equity Act, which would create a federal grant program to expand enrollment of underrepresented students in advanced coursework. Tools like this dashboard exist to make that work legible — to show where the gaps are, so the people working to close them have the evidence they need.
Watch the walkthrough below, then explore the dashboard yourself at advancedequity.org.
The AdvancED Equity Interactive Dashboard is a project of AdvancED Equity, led by Maithreyi Gopalan and Erica Frankenberg. Data source: U.S. Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights, Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC), 2011–2021.
