The Advanced Placement program stands as the foremost source of college-level academics for millions of high school students in the United States and beyond. More than 22,000 schools now participate in it, across nearly forty subjects, from Latin and art to calculus and computer science. Yet remarkably little has been known about how this…

For a long time, Advanced Placement and other advanced-level U.S. history courses at the high school level were modeled after the collegiate survey course. However, the last two decades or more have seen some significant changes in the teaching of U.S. history at undergraduate and high school levels. Many of these changes at the high school level…

As every good secondary administrator knows, rigorous curricula matter. Challenging curricula is the factor in lifting each student to reach their potential: "the academic intensity of the student's high school curriculum still counts more than anything else...in providing momentum toward completing a bachelor's degree" (Adelman, 2006,…