High school physics and socioeconomics Available to Purchase

In our September column, we noted that Hispanic and African-American seniors were less likely to have taken a high school physics course than their peers, and we suggested that socioeconomic status (SES) played a role in the lower participation. In the figure, we display the proportion of seniors, of physics teachers, and of physics enrollments at schools by SES. While the number of seniors is roughly one-third in each group, physics enrollments differ dramatically by SES. Furthermore, the disparity in enrollments is greater than the disparity in physics teachers; this means that the teachers teaching physics at “better off” schools teach more physics than the physics teachers at “worse off” schools. Thus, a physics teacher at a “better off” school is more likely to teach a majority of their classes in physics.