When the College Board started growing its AP African American research class amid the social justice uprisings of 2020, it got down to create a pathbreaking highschool class that might demand that college students deeply have interaction with African American historical past, tradition, actions, and debates.
But six months right into a pilot program at a couple of dozen colleges, the course is on the middle of controversy. An official framework the College Board launched final week omits ideas and students that specialists, together with many consulted by the College Board whereas growing the category, say are core to trendy Black research and important to incorporate in any college-level survey class. The omissions embody a number of the most steadily learn authors on introductory African American research syllabuses — syllabuses that the College Board studied whereas growing the category.
These ideas had been included in an earlier model of the framework, however they had been minimize from the brand new official framework, which was launched shortly after Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis attacked the pilot model of the category for protecting lots of the topics it now omits: Black queer research, intersectionality, and Black Lives Matter, and the students Kimberlé Crenshaw, Robin D.G. Kelley, bell hooks, and Angela Davis, amongst others. Florida Education Commissioner Manny Diaz introduced that the state wouldn’t permit colleges to undertake the course till the College Board eliminated the “problematic” matters it recognized. When the College Board launched the brand new framework, these matters had been gone.
The sequence of occasions has led critics to accuse the College Board of bowing to political strain from DeSantis, or shying away from a struggle in different conservative states which have handed bans on educating “divisive concepts.” The College Board has denied these accusations and stated the revisions are routine adjustments that don’t have anything to do with DeSantis or the present political local weather, however correspondence between the College Board and the Florida Department of Education, publicly launched Thursday, revealed that Florida has been involved with the College Board concerning the course since January 2022.
The revised framework, and the response it has elicited, has created a storm of controversy that dangers overshadowing what worth the course could have and underscores the fraught situations below which African American research was born.
After the omissions, the course that continues to be is generally African American historical past up till 1965, with components of tradition. But an introductory-level school class in African American research, students within the subject informed Vox, ought to assist college students join the previous with the current via principle. African American research is the research of Black resistance to structural racism — and, as such, it was probably all the time going to be on a collision course with conservative states that would like colleges not talk about the idea within the first place.
Critics argue that, although the College Board vowed to create a course that would actually embody the breadth of the African American expertise in America and past, it bowed to political forces at a time when conservative backlash is already limiting how academics can discuss race, gender, and sexual orientation, amongst different matters, within the classroom.
“You cannot have a non-political African American studies course because its whole invention, its raison d’être came out of political struggle,” stated Kelley, a professor of historical past at UCLA and one of many authors omitted from the brand new model of the framework. “You can’t professionalize something that was actually created in the midst of protests.”
What is — and isn’t — within the AP African American research framework
The AP African American research class is being taught in about 60 colleges this yr, the primary of a two-year pilot course of. Beginning in spring 2025, college students will have the ability to take the AP examination and be eligible for faculty credit score in the event that they move. When the College Board launched the official framework for the course final week, it was the primary time that the course content material turned publicly out there. Schools providing the course this yr had been working from a draft framework that had not been made public.
The framework, in accordance with the College Board, will not be a syllabus; it’s what the professors, academics, and researchers they consulted assume ought to be included in an introductory college-level course. Teachers should use the framework’s required elements, accompanied by a textbook and readings of their selection, to develop lesson plans. Students should full a three-week capstone challenge, on a subject they select, price 20 % of their AP examination grade.
The framework is detailed: It consists of particular sources, the texts or authors that college students should look at; studying goals, or what college students ought to know and have the ability to do; and “essential content knowledge” about any given matter. Under 4 broad items, it consists of week-by-week focus areas, with matters anticipated to take one to 2 class durations’ price of instruction.
The first unit covers early African societies; college students then research the trans-Atlantic slave commerce and slavery, Reconstruction, the Great Migration, and Jim Crow in items two and three; and up to date points in unit 4. Each unit is damaged down into weekly focus areas, with a listing of matters (similar to “the African continent: A varied landscape” or “Black pride, identity, and the question of naming”). For a instructor’s syllabus to move AP muster, they need to educate all of the listed matters and required texts included within the framework.
Any variations of the framework that predated the general public launch final week weren’t circulated publicly. But Vox obtained a duplicate of an earlier model, dated February 2022, and evaluating it to the brand new one reveals many variations.
Topics and sources are reordered, renamed, or eliminated altogether. For instance, a subject on “enslavement in Africa,” protecting enslavement in West Africa earlier than the Atlantic slave commerce, was eliminated; a subject titled “African Americans and the US occupation of Haiti” was nixed, although the framework nonetheless calls for 2 days on the impression of the Haitian Revolution earlier within the course.
New matters and texts had been additionally added: “the concept of race and the reproduction of status,” and “the Black Panther Party” in unit 4. Others had been merged: The closing framework combines “the Black Is Beautiful movement” and “the Black arts movement” into one educational day.
What most critics of the revisions have drawn consideration to, although, are the adjustments to the ultimate unit — which covers up to date actions and ongoing debates in African American tradition and politics.
For one, what has emerged within the closing framework is a sanitized dialogue of Black girls’s management in society. A subject titled “The Black feminist movement and womanism” was eliminated, together with textual content strategies together with excerpts from author and African American research scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Alice Walker, and famend Black feminist author Audre Lorde. So was “African American Women’s History and the Metalanguage of Race,” a textual content from Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, a number one scholar of African American girls’s historical past (who endorsed the brand new framework). The Combahee River Collective, a landmark Black feminist group, nonetheless seems within the framework as important information, however the group’s assertion is now not required studying.
“Intersectionality and activism,” which might have had college students analyze connections to Chicana and Asian American feminist thought, didn’t make it to the official framework, together with texts by authorized scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, who coined the time period “intersectionality” and has boosted vital race principle; pioneering Black feminist scholar Patricia Hill Collins; and Marxist and feminist activist Angela Davis. The committee additionally eliminated the subject “Black feminist literary thought” together with texts by novelist Gloria Naylor, feminist creator bell hooks, and celebrated poet Nikki Giovanni.
While the framework nonetheless consists of matters about Black girls’s actions, it now not makes use of the phrases “feminism” or “womanism” in these contexts.
“Intersectionality describes an old concept that goes back to the 19th century, that Black women experience multiple sites of oppression. Kimberlé Crenshaw coined it within the context of legal scholarship, making it easier to discuss a historical problem identified by Black women,” stated Khalil Muhammad, a professor of historical past, race, and public coverage at Harvard Kennedy School. “The interesting thing is Higginbotham’s article, ‘The Metalanguage of Race,’ would have gotten at this core context, but that disappears.”
The College Board has additionally eliminated matters that might assist college students perceive the present conservative backlash behind legal guidelines like Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” laws or the Stop WOKE Act: The matter “Black queer studies” and texts from political scientist Cathy Cohen, gender and sexuality scholar Roderick Ferguson, and race and sexuality scholar E. Patrick Johnson had been excluded from the official framework. As had been the matters “postracial racism and colorblindness” and “incarceration and abolition.”
Other matters that might assist college students perceive up to date Black tradition, resistance, and protest didn’t make the minimize. “Black vernacular, pop culture, and cultural appropriation” and “movements for Black lives,” together with texts from African American research scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and sociologist Leslie Kay Jones, weren’t included within the closing framework.
“It seems silly to take out the Black Lives Matter movement even though it’s only been around the past half-dozen years or more. Sixteen-year-olds would be fascinated by that,” stated Yale University historian David Blight, who withdrew his endorsement of the official framework when he noticed the sooner model. “And why remove queer studies as a topic? Kids are either gay themselves, [or] all kids are entirely aware of the fight for gay rights and the fight for transgender rights.”
The College Board additionally added new matters to the later items, together with required texts by former secretaries of state Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, and President Barack Obama. The group additionally added “Black conservatism” as a brand new really helpful matter for the capstone challenge.
Many of the ideas that had been eliminated overlap with the matters DeSantis and Diaz, the Florida schooling commissioner, highlighted, and led critics of the College Board’s adjustments to argue that the group caved to political strain. The Florida Department of Education wrote in a February 7 letter that the state had repeatedly met with the College Board to debate its considerations. The College Board responded, in a letter additionally launched publicly, and continued to insist that no adjustments had been made on the behest of the state.
“It’s just not believable that the broader context of conservative backlash against the history of race and racism more generally, as well as the more forceful critiques coming out of Florida, did not influence, directly or indirectly, the final choices they made about what appears in the printed framework,” stated Muhammad.
The College Board denies that this occurred: “It is a juicy story to fabricate a cause-and-effect line between the outcome of the published framework and the topics that DeSantis underscored,” stated Teresa Reed, a professor of music on the University of Louisville and a member of the event committee.
“But as someone who’s attended the development committee meetings, been involved in the work, and has been tasked with looking at the units and making recommendations, I can say that not one time, in any of those meetings, did the name DeSantis come up. Nor did the name of any political issue, or anything outside of the expertise around the table — none of that at any point ever, ever came up,” Reed stated.
The AP says its adjustments had been routine — however specialists and students are skeptical
According to the committee that designed the course, the discharge of the official framework was a part of the College Board’s routine: The College Board says it principally accomplished the official framework by December 22 and deliberately launched it on February 1 to coincide with the primary day of Black History Month.
The course of to supply the framework started in spring of 2021 (the College Board first mentioned the opportunity of the course a decade in the past) when the board carried out intensive analysis to find out what to incorporate within the course. Staff collected and analyzed syllabuses from 107 schools and universities, carried out on-line surveys and advisory periods with school school, and held digital focus teams with 28 highschool and school college students. By the autumn, they requested school school to rank and consolidate content material to deliver the course all the way down to the core info that might match into 140 class durations.
“Our very first problem was that there was just too much,” Reed stated. ”As a music historian, I can simply consider 25 sources that I believe are nonnegotiable. … Multiply that occasions the variety of different disciplinary specializations across the desk and you find yourself with one thing that won’t take one yr to show however it may take 5 years to show.”
But even given the necessity for a broad survey course, a number of the cuts fly within the face of the College Board’s personal analysis. In its conversations with school school, the group discovered that “intersectionality” was the second most steadily talked about matter; “diaspora” was the primary.
One participant informed them: “Please think about Black women and LGBTQ people as central to the history and future of the African diaspora.” Another added, “Scope is key; [this is] not just Black male studies.”
When the board requested school school to rank content material matters and themes, “intersectionality, cultural production and appropriation, and structural racism” had been chosen as probably the most important ones, in accordance with information included within the draft framework. Yet none of those matters made it to the official framework.
When I requested the College Board why the idea of “intersectionality” didn’t make it to the ultimate draft, Steve Bumbaugh, the group’s senior vp of faculty, profession, and digital entry, informed me that intersectionality was nonetheless within the framework on web page 219 — as a steered matter that college students may discover for his or her closing challenge.
“If the College Board were trying to appease Gov. DeSantis, it did so miserably by flinging open the doors for students to take this high-stakes project and investigate literally any topic they want, including how right-wing political extremism may be used to block educational opportunities for African American students. That’s a project I’d love to read. And I believe we have sufficient evidence for it,” stated Reed.
Kerry Haynie, a professor of political science at Duke University and a member of the event committee, informed me that whereas intersectionality is now not a subject within the framework, it’s represented all through the course. “My latest book is on intersectionality. I think it is important, but that doesn’t mean that my colleague teaching the course would include it,” Haynie stated. “We looked at 100 syllabi, and intersectionality doesn’t appear on the syllabi of every introductory college course.”
Still, the selection to make the subject of intersectionality non-obligatory, with no assure that college students will discover it for his or her initiatives, says so much, in accordance with critics. “If you leave intersectionality as a possible option, you have made a statement,” Blight informed Vox.
Aside from the necessity to scale back the breadth of the course, the College Board stated it was necessary to floor the course on main sources, therefore the elimination of any required secondary sources, and to keep away from copyright entry points that might come up with some authors, together with James Baldwin.
“It’s kind of a false distinction, what’s primary and what’s secondary,” stated Blight, citing items like Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “The Case for Reparations” as a sort of main supply. According to Kelley, the insistence on the usage of main sources for what’s purported to be a college-level course is one other approach the College Board has tried to keep away from political scandal.
“Part of the capitulation is this idea that we have to have a non-political curriculum in order to satisfy the expectations of state governments and school boards,” stated Kelley. “The more you focus on primary sources, the less controversial the course seems to be.”
Some of the eliminated texts are extensively learn in school lessons. The College Board’s syllabus evaluation discovered that scholar Michelle Alexander’s 2010 e book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration within the Age of Colorblindness was the second most typical textual content on the faculty syllabuses, after W.E.B. Du Bois’s essay “The Souls of Black Folk.” (Du Bois’s essay appeared on 24 syllabuses, whereas Alexander’s nonfiction e book appeared on 18. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter From a Birmingham Jail” ranked third with 12 options.)
Some of the commonest authors didn’t make it to the official framework. Coates and Alexander had been eliminated, although they ranked within the prime 5 amongst authors showing on 10 or extra establishments’ syllabuses. They each appeared on 16 syllabuses, whereas Du Bois ranked first, showing on 54; Frederick Douglass appeared on 21, and MLK on 17.
Bumbaugh argued that the category was developed with fairness in thoughts to learn first-generation school college students, Black college students, Latino college students, and others who’re underrepresented on school campuses.
“Research has shown that these students do better academically when they see representatives of themselves in their teachers and in the curriculum, and when they take an AP course, they are much more likely to attend college, to perform better, and to graduate,” Bumbaugh informed Vox. “It’s why we’ve been trying to build this course for years and have been pushing to develop it through an equity lens. So I have to say, it is utterly baffling now to hear from people I’ve known for decades, people I respect and trust, that somehow we are approaching this with a political lens.”
He concluded: “No politician has ever added or subtracted a single semicolon from the AP African American studies curriculum. That’s just a fact.”
There are nonetheless numerous questions concerning the College Board’s choices
While the College Board has stated it made the revisions earlier than DeSantis’s criticism, critics say it stretches credulity to argue that the present local weather, during which conservative states are pushing again on the educating of historical past, didn’t play a job in streamlining the course, eliminating hot-button present matters, and weakening its protection of principle.
“This isn’t so much about the specific work that was removed but about the overall shift in the framework,” stated Kelley. “This is a response to political pressure no matter what the College Board says.”
Others say the discourse shouldn’t ignore the College Board’s energy as a company. The board’s final aim is to get as many establishments as attainable to decide to the course. So far, greater than 200 establishments have dedicated to accepting the course for faculty credit score. But a number of states have banned the educating of “divisive content” or vital race principle, which may restrict the brand new course’s attain and even result in broader backlash in opposition to the College Board.
“The context is not just DeSantis. Dozens of states have passed or are considering these divisive concept laws,” Blight informed Vox. “The broader issue is fighting these laws. Whatever the content of this particular course is, this course has become a lightning rod for a much bigger problem — and that’s how do we enhance public schools and teachers?”
And, till not too long ago, when colleges started ending the requirement that candidates take the SAT, which the College Board administers, “no one got to college without some kind of economic relationship to the College Board. I think it is impossible not to recognize that an organization of this size and wealth has tremendous incentives to protect its brand,” stated Muhammad.
Last yr, when the College Board broke the information of the course, spokespeople, together with Henry Louis Gates Jr., the director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University, distanced the course from vital race principle and emphasised that it was not linked to the 1619 Project, which has confronted its personal pushback.
“We missed an opportunity to say, ‘You know what, critical race theory is not taught in elementary, junior high school, and most high schools — but it should be,” stated Kelley. Critical race principle may clarify why Tyre Nichols was killed by 5 Black cops or how a whole committee of Black students may create a course that’s so clearly watered down as a result of political strain, Kelley stated.
College Board members say there is no such thing as a plan to launch one other revised framework for now, however stated it’s customary to revise AP programs each few years to raised replicate the occasions. The committee has additionally stated that the framework will not be the totality of the course, and that a web based portal will give college students and academics entry to further materials.
But some say it’s too late and that the College Board’s course, whereas nonetheless helpful, loses a lot of what makes African American research distinctive — and its refusal to acknowledge the position of backlash has worsened the scenario.
“If the College Board were to say, ‘We recognize that in a climate of fear stoked by an attack on academic freedom, and particularly the history of race and racism in this country, we cannot even discern fully how the pilot itself might have been impacted by these choices,’ that would make a difference,” Muhammad stated. “Instead, they are managing a very sophisticated communications strategy.”
The adjustments, some students argue, undermine the course solely: “In my view, it is not worthy of advanced placement. In other words, it’s supposed to be a college-level course. It is not a college-level course,” stated Kelley. “It’s a mistake to put all of our eggs in the basket of advanced placement, when what we should be fighting for is the introduction of African American studies for all students, not just the ones who can take AP courses.”
And the controversy has broader implications for the way forward for public colleges, too. “Whatever the content of this particular course is, it has become a lightning rod for a much bigger problem,” stated Blight. “And that is, how do we support, buttress, and save public school, and who gets to control knowledge and education?”
Update, February 9, 2023, 3:15 pm: This story was initially revealed on February 8, 2023, and has been up to date to incorporate new details about correspondence between the College Board and the Florida Department of Education.
