College Board to revise AP African American studies course again
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Conceding missteps, the College Board announced Monday that it will again revise its much-criticized plan for a new Advanced Placement course in African American studies. The statement gave no specifics on what might be changed, but it further cemented a widespread impression that the rollout of the course has been messy and scrambled by the volatile politics of race and education. The debate spilled into the spotlight when Florida officials said earlier this year they would reject the course as an example of what they called indoctrination.
“In embarking on this effort, access was our driving principle — both access to a discipline that has not been widely available to high school students, and access for as many of those students as possible,” the College Board said. “Regrettably, along the way those dual access goals have come into conflict.”
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It pledged that revisions would ensure that, “regardless of how many students take this course, each one of those students should have access to the full breadth and beauty of this discipline.”
The first AP course to focus on African American studies has drawn intense scrutiny for much of the past year as it has been undergoing revisions and soft-launch tryouts in dozens of high schools around the country.
The College Board, a nonprofit organization that oversees the SAT college admissions test and the AP program, touts the new course as a milestone effort to present high school students with a sophisticated, college-level immersion in African American history and culture. The course starts with the origins of the African diaspora and sweeps through the epochs of slavery, Jim Crow and the civil rights movement.
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But critics from the right and the left have assailed it.
In January, Florida officials rejected an initial version of the course, declaring that it “lacks educational value.” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), a potential presidential candidate, accused the course architects of promoting “a political agenda” and criticized references in early draft to Black queer studies and “intersectionality,” a concept that helps explain overlapping forms of discrimination that affect Black women and others.
Then the College Board publicly released a course plan in February that omitted or scaled back certain concepts and terms that had riled up conservative commentators. For instance, the adjective “systemic” disappeared from the plan, even though many academics and civil rights advocates say the term is essential for understanding the African American experience with racism, oppression and discrimination.
Most uses of “intersectionality” were cut. The course developers also whittled down a proposed sequence of mandatory lessons on contemporary issues to make more time for a student research paper. As a result, reparations and Black Lives Matter were listed only as optional research topics.
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Such changes angered or disappointed many people passionate about the field of African American studies, who feared the College Board had watered it down to assuage politicians. The College Board denied the charge. It insisted no concessions had been made behind the scenes to Florida even as officials within the organization acknowledged they were seeking to navigate a fraught political environment. Several professors consulted on the course development vouched for the plan that was released, but some raised concerns.
In a statement on Monday, the College Board appeared to acknowledge those tensions.
“We are committed to providing an unflinching encounter with the facts and evidence of African American history and culture,” the College Board said. “To achieve that commitment, we must listen to the diversity of voices within the field.
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“The development committee and experts within AP remain engaged in building a course and exam that best reflect this dynamic discipline. Those scholars and experts have decided they will make changes to the latest course framework during this pilot phase. They will determine the details of those changes over the next few months.”
About 60 high schools are teaching an initial version of the course this school year. That will grow to about 800 in the fall, according to the College Board, with a general nationwide launch expected in fall 2024.
“Hunger for this course has exploded around the country,” the College Board said.
Frustration has also grown in some quarters. Numerous faculty and researchers have signed on to petitions urging the College Board to take a firm stand against censorship of ideas such as intersectionality and systemic racism. They also want to ensure that the course forces students to grapple deeply with contemporary African American issues.
“If the course continues to lack rigor and completeness some faculty will advise our institutions to reject advanced placement credit for the course,” one group of African American studies faculty wrote on the online forum Medium.
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Source: The Washington Post
