Chapter 5: Rural and College Prep: Differences in Schooling for Indigenous American Students

Since the turn of the century, college prep has become common in high schools across the United States. Advanced Placement (AP) courses increased steeply in the past 20 years (Geiser & Santelices, 2006; Judson & Hobson, 2015; Wildhagen, 2014) and International Baccalaureate (IB) also began to become more widely available across the nation (Donaldson, 2017). However, students can only take AP or IB if their district teaches it. That is, students' need to be enrolled in districts that actually offer college prep curriculum in order to even have a chance at taking these courses.

Most studies on course-taking look at the disparities in participation between groups of students within the same school, such as which students participate in AP classes and which ones do not. This line of research jumps past the first part of the equation: students needing to be in schools that offer the AP or IB courses. Moreover, these students need to be enrolled in a district that offers these courses so they can even attend the school with the classes. This chapter looks at which students in rural districts even have AP or IB as a viable course option. This analysis revives a discussion about the old form of first-generation tracking (Mickelson, 2001, 2005). Inordinately, students attending rural schools in the United States lack access to the college prep curricula.