When I learned there were Junior AP courses at the middle schools here - purporting to cover high school level subject matter - I decided it was about money and gaming performance evaluations.
One middle school principal was moving students around - including removing them from any course they weren’t passing - to goose the “success rate”. A friend who taught gym there had kids with 2 or 3 gym classes each day after they were pushed out of classes they were failing. The school didn’t have regular art classes because students were pushed into Junior AP Art History; the teaching staff had multiple sections of that course. Too bad if you wanted to learn to draw.