Ilya Shapiro: Revised AP African American Studies Curriculum Delivers Course Students Deserve

If you are interested in the Revision of the framework Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis wouldn’t I object and the proposal wouldn’t have become national news. The College Board, which administers AP exams and classes, felt the need for a red flag. These include “topics” As intersectionality, queer studies, and Black Lives Matter in a class that should have ostensibly been high-concept historical classes.

Now, just three weeks after Florida education commissioner Manny Diaz said no to the proposed AP course, the College Board has pulled back on polarizing subjects and divisive authors like critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw— which will now be available as areas for “independent research” Other topics include “black conservatism.”

The course’s development was clearly a response to the “racial reckoning” that followed George Floyd’s murder, when institutional elites, already addled by the pandemic, adopted anti-racist missions. For its part, the College Board decided it needed to create a college credit class that was unlike any other. 35 It is already available – what its framework calls as “an interdisciplinary course that examines the diversity of African American experiences . . . with an emphasis on developing historical, literary, visual, and data analysis skills.” 

This course would be different from traditional AP courses like biology, calculus or Latin. It would include literature, history, and other aspects of African American culture. It would be the very first. “studies” AP is not a traditional academic discipline, but it mimics identity-based departments that have proliferated across universities ever since the 1960s. 

All this was necessary to make sure that students are familiar with black history? It’s not, in a word. If you read the appendix to the College Board’s Original proposal for African American Studies, “the top three historical developments represented on high school syllabi” Slavery, the transatlantic slave trading and the civil rights movement. The AP U.S. History course can be found here These and other related subjects are abundant in this site.. Not everyone takes AP classes, but slavery and Jim Crow are also major components of standard history and social studies curricula—regardless of the current debate over woke indoctrination.

Indeed, DeSantis’s infamous “Stop WOKE Act,” This prohibits the teaching of critical race theory concepts in K-12 Requires Classroom instruction “the history of African Americans, including the history of African peoples before the political conflicts that led to the development of slavery, the passage to America, the enslavement experience, abolition, and the history and contributions of African Americans of the African diaspora to society.”

So when Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), on the day that Florida’s rejection hit the news, That was tweeted “DeSantis wants to ban our history,” He was either ignorant or disingenuous. 

But if you’re still going to have an AP African American Studies course, what would you put in it? You’ll find it in the Revision of the framework, with units on (1) early African societies, (2) the slave trade And abolition, (3) Reconstruction And black codes, and (4) the civil rights movement and modern black culture. You don’t need an education doctorate to recognize that you shouldn’t give trendy topics like “intersectionality and activism” and “the reparations movement” as much space as weighty aspects of the American experience like “disenfranchisement and Jim Crow laws” and “HBCUs and black education”—which is what the Framework initial did.

 The original idea was surely to advance theory and ideology, not history and culture. Although some remaining topics like “gender and resistance in slave narratives” —as well as the mind-boggling absence of both Clarence Thomas and Thurgood Marshall — are still worrisome, with the ideological flourishes largely removed, opposition will likely melt away.

But even as the College Board mollifies Florida’s curriculum gatekeepers, it It claimed that the changes it made were irrelevant With criticism from politicians, pundits. CEO David Coleman claimed that teachers had complained that secondary sources more theoretical were not being used. “quite dense,” It was just poor pedagogically that the polemical stuff was used. The timing was curious, though, and yes, the polemical stuff was just as bad pedagogically. 

Of course, by reversing course—for whatever reason—the company quickly fomented left-wing backlash. J.B. Pritzker, Governor of Illinois, had Tweet that he wouldn’t stand for “watering down our nation’s history . . . . to appease extremists.” Will the Land of Lincoln now refuse to follow the course?

Ultimately, the College Board has handed DeSantis a victory while inflaming the culture wars. Which is why rather than focus on radical advocacy, it should’ve stuck to black history all along.

Ilya Shapiro is director of constitutional Studies at the Manhattan Institute. She is also the author of the Shapiro’s Gavel Substack newsletter. He’s writing a book on the illiberal takeover of legal education, to be published next year by HarperCollins.