I have three kids. One is a grade-skipped 11th grader taking AP Calc at our local high school. The other two opted for the local dual enrollment program at the community college, where the eldest got a free AS in math when he graduated from high school.

My 11th grader is very obviously good at math, and she hates AP Calc so much, she wanted to drop it in favor of regular calc only two weeks in. Problem: too many kids had beat her to it, and the regular calc class was full.

The two classes cover the same material, so ... why would you drop the AP class? Answer: because it goes through the entire year's worth of material by February (includes extra extra work over the summer), so as to give everyone 3 months to "study" for the AP exam. So they memorize, regurgitate, and completely fail to understand. FFS. The kids in the regular calc class would probably do better on the AP test.

My eldest took AP US history and dropped it after two weeks (memorize and regurgitate; 40-minutes timed essays). This year, AP Psych consists of long MC quizzes and "open response" questions that are actually just definitions. Etc.

Meanwhile, my current 12th grader is taking actual college-level history at the community college, where he's learning to take notes, choose an essay topic, and write an actual college-level essay. Chemistry and calculus are based around calculations, and no one is worried about a bubble test in May.

Seriously, if we want to give bright low-income kids an honest chance at succeeding in college, we should be sending them to dual enrollment programs, not turning them into AP drones while pretending that AP classes even remotely resemble college classes.