DeSantis balks at revised AP African-American Studies curriculum

Should such a course, in any form, be taught in high school?

Last week, the College Board announced that it has revised its AP African-American Studies course (APAAS). The revised course addresses, at least superficially, many of the concerns Gov. Ron DeSantis raised when he nixed the original version of APAAS for violating Florida law.

I thought that with these revisions in his pocket, DeSantis might declare victory and authorize Florida schools to offer the revised version of APAAS. The College Board’s decision was, after all, a political victory for the governor. He raised objections and soon thereafter this powerful institution addressed them. A bastion of leftism had blinked.

Naturally, the Board denied any causal link between DeSantis’ objections and its revisions. But the denial seemed like nothing more than an attempt to appease leftists who hate the idea that one of their institutions would give ground to conservatives in the culture war.

No one who regarded the College Board’s revisions as a favorable development could reasonably buy its claim that they were unrelated to DeSantis’ objections. (More on this below) Hence, the governor’s political victory.

But were the APAAS revisions a victory for education in Florida? Yes, but not much of one, in my view.

It’s true that the College Board removed much of the explicitly radical indoctrination material from the required sections of the course. However, those who teach the course — a cohort that surely is even more radically leftist than high school teachers as group — remain able to push their students to read these now-optional materials.

Moreover, the revised curriculum still includes consecutive units on the Black Power Movement and, worse, the Black Panther Party — a thuggish outfit that deserves only a footnote. In fact, students are required to read the Black Panther Party’s Ten-Point Program of 1966, a Marxist document. Thus, the leftists who’ll be teaching this course can peddle a far-left agenda even within the required curriculum.

Accordingly, I hoped that DeSantis would resist the easy path of declaring victory and would instead continue to object to APAAS.

Now, he has. In a letter to the College Board (which can be found here), Florida’s Department of Education (FDOE) requests further information about a possible end run by the College Board around Florida’s Stop WOKE Act, which bars the promotion of critical race theory (CRT) in Florida’s K–12 classrooms.

Concern about an “end run” stems from a recent NPR interview with College Board CEO David Coleman. Stanley Kurtz notes that in this interview, Coleman denied that some of the radical readings DeSantis objects to have been removed from APAAS at all:

According to Coleman, the College Board has gone out of its way to get special permission to reprint CRT theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw’s famous piece on intersectionality, as well as poems by the famous radical Audre Lorde. Those resources, and others like them, says Coleman, far from being cut from APAAS, will be “lifted up” and made available in a special free resource called “AP Classroom.”

It looks like “AP Classroom” is the Board’s way of smuggling CRT content into APAAS, in violation of Florida law. Accordingly, the FDOE letter asks the College Board to provide a complete list of its AP Classroom resources.

The letter also blows the whistle on the College Board’s claim, repeated in Coleman’s NPR interview, that its revisions to APAAS were not a response to DeSantis administration objections. In the interview, Coleman argued that the College Board began to develop the revised APAAS curriculum in September of 2022, and had “largely” completed its curricular changes by December. This, he notes, was “far before the governor spoke up.”

But the FDOE letter points out that it began raising concerns about APAAS in July 2022. By September, when Coleman says the College Board began to revise the APAAS curriculum, DeSantis’ FDOE was telling the Board that Florida would not accept APAAS without revisions.

Clearly, the College Board cannot be trusted to present a fair-minded APAAS course that fully complies with Florida law. This an outfit that (1) is trying to circumvent Florida law through the backdoor of “AP Classroom,” (2) is being dishonest about its reasons for revising the curriculum, and (3) engaged in deceptive course revisions in the past with its AP US History curriculum.

Let’s hope that the DeSantis FDOE’s letter leads to the flat exclusion of APAAS from Florida classrooms and, indeed, from classrooms in other Red States.

Finally, I want to address the question of whether a course in African-American Studies should be offered to high school students in any form. It’s true that colleges teach courses in African-American studies. But colleges teach courses that have no AP analog. Apparently, the College Board has no AP course in philosophy, religion, or sociology, each of which is offered by colleges as a major. Nor, has the Board developed an AP course in Latino, Asian-American, or Jewish studies.

I don’t deny the importance of black history. But schools already teach this history relentlessly. It’s emphasized in AP US History (and presumably regular US History courses as well) and taught every year of K-12 during Black History Month.

But even if we assume a need for a special course in African-American History, this would not justify a course in AP African-American Studies. Joy Pullmann makes this important distinction in an article for The Federalist. She writes:

African-American studies classes are not the same as African-American history classes. They’re about identity politics grievance-mongering, which is really about pushing cultural Marxism, the division of Americans into bitterly divided grievance groups that pave the way for undoing Americans’ constitutional individual rights. This is the antithesis of the American creed and of American happiness. That distinction is at the core of this dispute.

African-American studies is to African-American history as “diversity, equity, and inclusion” is to genuine human equality. That is to say, it presents itself as the opposite of what it really is. It preaches “history” while really providing agitation. This inherent deception — a core Marxist tactic — is yet another reason to reject its peddlers. They don’t operate in good faith, and they shouldn’t be treated as if they do.

African-American studies gurus don’t really want to teach African-American history. But they want you to think they do, while they really do something evil. The whole thing is a con.

An AP African-American History course would leave little or no room for readings — even “non-required” ones — on “intersectionality,” the merits of socialism, black queer studies, colorblindness as racism, police defunding, prison abolition, etc. Excursions into these matters would easily be spotted as departures from teaching history, and could lead to sanctions up to and including elimination of the course — at least in states like Florida.

In sum, DeSantis has multiple grounds for taking APAAS off-the-table completely.