News in Brief: A National Roundup

The College Board has announced a plan to make at least 10 Advanced Placement courses available in every high school in the country over the next decade. The initiative is intended to improve access for minority students, who are more likely to attend high schools that offer few, if any, advanced courses.

Those courses, sponsored by the New York City-based College Board, allow high school students to earn college credit in certain subjects. A lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union against the state of California and state education officials last year contended that minority students were being denied adequate access to the courses.

The new initiative will attempt to raise the number of teachers trained to teach ap courses by 80 percent, to 180,000, by 2010, and increase the number of students participating in the program each year to more than 2 million. Some 1.2 million students at 13,000...