{"id":2392570,"date":"2025-01-20T07:56:03","date_gmt":"2025-01-20T12:56:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/improving-ap-courses-starts-with-destroying-the-college-board\/"},"modified":"2025-01-20T08:01:18","modified_gmt":"2025-01-20T13:01:18","slug":"improving-ap-courses-starts-with-destroying-the-college-board","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/improving-ap-courses-starts-with-destroying-the-college-board\/","title":{"rendered":"Improving AP Courses Starts With Destroying The College Board"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">18<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fimproving-ap-courses-starts-with-destroying-the-college-board%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=2392570&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><p>The author, who has extensive experience as an AP exam scorer\u2062 and AP Language and Composition teacher, critiques the College Board, describing it as a &#8220;taxpayer-funded monopoly&#8221; that not only \u200bgenerates over $1 \u2064billion in revenue but also disproportionately benefits affluent students\u200b while \u2063neglecting poorer ones.\u200d despite its\u2062 mission \u200bto help <a href=\"https:\/\/amzn.to\/3YuVZYV\">low-income\u200d students earn college credits<\/a>, the author argues\u2062 that the school&#8217;s AP programs \u2064cater primarily to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/parents-fending-critical-race-theory-off-from-destroying-high-achieving-schools-need-to-keep-going\/\" title=\"Parents Fending Critical Race Theory Off From Destroying High-Achieving Schools Need To Keep Going\">upper-middle-class students<\/a>. He\u2064 points to the institution&#8217;s \u200dprogressive ideological bias in its curriculum choices, highlighting how this \u2063affects courses like U.S. History and African-American Studies by promoting left-leaning perspectives. The increasing focus on identity \u2062politics and diversity in recommended texts for AP Language and Composition has led to a devaluation of classical \u200cliterature,resulting in a curriculum\u200c that prioritizes \u200dcontemporary leftist authors over \u2062foundational \u2064American texts. The author\u200b expresses concern that \u2062this shift reflects a broader decline in \u2062the quality of rhetoric education, where students engage more with trivial contemporary issues rather than substantive philosophical ideas. The overall picture painted is of \u2063the College Board as \u200da powerful entity that, while purporting to provide equitable educational opportunities, instead perpetuates a curriculum that aligns with specific political ideologies while compromising educational standards.  <\/p>\n<p class=\"readmore\">\n    <button onclick=\"showReadMore()\" id=\"readmorebtn\">Read more&#8230;<\/button>\n<\/p>\n<hr id=\"line\">\n<span id=\"more\"><\/p>\n<div>\n<p>Despite working as an AP exam scorer for nearly 10 years and an AP Language and Composition teacher for nearly 20, I&rsquo;ve always struggled with properly classifying the entity that is formerly known as The College Board.<\/p>\n<p>Technically, College Board is a nonprofit company that designs college-level courses and exams for high schoolers who want to earn college credit. This is meant to be a resource for all schools, particularly ones in low-income areas, that could save time and money for students who might not earn a college degree otherwise. Put another way, Advanced Placement is about making the <a href=\"https:\/\/reason.com\/2002\/07\/01\/stand-and-deliver-revisited-2\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">mostly fabricated<\/a> plot of the classic &lsquo;80s film &ldquo;Stand and Deliver&rdquo; a reality for millions of American students.<\/p>\n<p>However, as the Goldwater Institute lays out in a new <a href=\"https:\/\/www.goldwaterinstitute.org\/policy-report\/advanced-partiality\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">comprehensive<\/a> report, almost all of this is wrong. In reality, College Board is &ldquo;a taxpayer-funded monopoly that dictates the curriculum for millions of American schoolchildren.&rdquo; Each year, the company rakes in &ldquo;over $1 billion in revenue and [pays] its CEO a compensation package of over $2 million a year &mdash; nearly 30 times the median high school teacher&rsquo;s salary.&rdquo;<\/p>\n<p>And in my experience, their customers are not working-class children trying to move up in the world, but affluent kids at wealthier school districts who take the AP classes and exams as a matter of course. In most cases, poorer students in run-down campuses lack both the money for the exam (which cost $100 each) and decent enough instructors to prepare them for it (the College Board training programs are largely a joke). Thus, in the end, AP mainly caters to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/500000-plus-sign-petition-calling-for-olympics-to-reinstate-shacarri-after-testing-positive-for-marijuana\/\" title=\"500,000-Plus Sign Petition Calling For Olympics To Reinstate\u00a0Sha\u2019Carri After Testing Positive For Marijuana\u00a0\">upper-middle-class white<\/a> and Asian students simply doing standard college prep.<\/p>\n<p>To make up for this, College Board&rsquo;s leadership and curriculum writers have adopted an overtly progressive stance &mdash; the very epitome of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.compactmag.com\/article\/how-the-shitlibs-won\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">sh**lib hypocrisy<\/a>. As the report notes, &ldquo;The chairman of the College Board&rsquo;s governing board has declared &lsquo;anti-racism&rsquo; as his &lsquo;driving ethos;&rsquo; he also stated as a district superintendent that all employees &lsquo;must share&rsquo; the goals of an &lsquo;equity lens,&rsquo; and oversaw the College Board issuing a letter of opposition to the Supreme Court&rsquo;s decision to end race-based discrimination in college admissions.&rdquo;<\/p>\n<p>As one might expect, this has translated to certain curricular decisions, particularly with courses like U.S. History and African-American Studies, which &ldquo;have embraced ideologically driven, politically left-leaning views of their subjects while minimizing the emphasis on more fundamental aspects of history.&rdquo; In practice, this means pushing certain texts with Marxist slants like Howard Zinn&rsquo;s <em>A People&rsquo;s History, <\/em>and prohibiting more historically accurate books like Wilfred McClay&rsquo;s&nbsp;<em>Land of Hope.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>This leftist sensibility filters into other humanities courses as well. In AP Language and Composition (the <a href=\"https:\/\/collegeprep.uworld.com\/blog\/the-top-ten-most-popular-ap-exams\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">most popular AP class<\/a> by far), I&rsquo;ve noticed that the recommended texts are always composed of an obviously diverse set of authors who write on leftist topics like identity, race, gender, misinformation in media, and the immigrant experience. The exam has also incorporated more of this subject matter in both the passages for multiple choice section of the exam as well as passages for the rhetorical analysis essay &mdash; for reference, the writers featured in recent exams were Sonia Sotomayor, Michelle Obama, Barack Obama (twice), <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Reshma_Saujani\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Reshma Suajani<\/a> (a leftist Indian-American activist), Rita Dove, and <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Simu_Liu\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Simu Liu<\/a> (the leftist actor who played Shang-Chi), all of whom spoke about identity.<\/p>\n<p>It should be remembered that assigning and reading one thing usually means not assigning and reading another. So instead of reading classics from the Founding Fathers or great American orators, American students in AP Language and Composition are reading and analyzing irrelevant drivel from leftist New York Times columnists along with Sonya Sotomayor&rsquo;s dull reminiscences on eating Puerto Rican food. On one hand, this is much easier for students to do, but on the other hand, it&rsquo;s a sad reflection of how mastery in advanced rhetoric has now degenerated into reading (and sometimes regurgitating) banal leftist pablum and spinning it into something profound.<\/p>\n<p>Even worse than enabling a leftist agenda in its material, The College Board&rsquo;s monopoly has allowed it to cheap out on its actual product: the AP Exam. As most AP teachers of any subject can attest, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.edweek.org\/teaching-learning\/heres-why-more-students-have-passed-ap-exams-in-recent-years\/2024\/08\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">nearly all <\/a>the exams have become easier with fewer questions, fewer answer choices, more time, a simplification of standards overall, and dumbed-down rubrics for essay responses.<\/p>\n<p>In my class, the combination of leftist partisanship and easier exams has the effect of encouraging bad reading and writing. No longer are students required to be concise, clear, organized, and logical in their writing, nor do they need to expand their vocabulary or imagination when reading. Instead, successful students are the ones who can whip up pretentious word clouds filled with the right buzzwords and can consistently read and think at a middle-school level.<\/p>\n<p>Naturally, College Board&rsquo;s monopoly needs to be broken up for reform to happen. In addition to recommending that states &ldquo;end their favoritism toward the College Board and the AP program and adopt a policy of neutrality,&rdquo; the Goldwater Institute also calls for more &ldquo;transparency of public school syllabi&rdquo; in regards to AP courses as well as the creation of alternative assessments and college preparation programs (something which I wrote about <a href=\"https:\/\/americanmind.org\/salvo\/a-conservative-classical-college-board\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">here<\/a>). As it stands, the only other advanced curriculum for high school is the International Baccalaureate (IB) program, which is far more expensive than AP and has its own set of challenges since it&rsquo;s not intended to be implemented at a mass scale.<\/p>\n<p>That said, even if these changes don&rsquo;t happen, it&rsquo;s fair to declare that College Board&rsquo;s supremacy is coming to an end. More campuses across the country now offer dual-credit programs, many of which are tied to vocational tracks, and this continues to siphon students who normally would take AP in high school. As sad as this makes me (dual credit usually amounts to a lower-level education better suited to students who won&rsquo;t go to a four-year college), the logic is sound: the classes are easier, there&rsquo;s no exam, the credit is assured, and students can move on with their lives. I&rsquo;d probably do the same if I were them.<\/p>\n<p>Unfortunately for College Board, no amount of leftist virtue signaling and watering down of content will solve this problem. The supposed nonprofit testing company has grown too big and unwieldy, straying from its original mission of offering college-level instruction to talented students willing to work hard and challenge themselves.<\/p>\n<p>Ultimately, an effective school choice program &mdash; which is what the Goldwater Institute and us conservative educators are essentially seeking &mdash; is about meeting the educational needs of all students by opening up different pathways to starting a career or going to college. Aside from having money follow students and not mediocre school systems, this means incentivizing schools and curricula that provide a rigorous education for students who can handle it.<\/p>\n<p>Just like the one-size-fits approach doesn&rsquo;t work for public schools, neither does it work for advanced curricula and exams. The public school and College Board leviathans must both be slain before genuine reform can happen.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p>      Auguste Meyrat is an English teacher in the Dallas area. He is the founding editor of <a href=\"https:\/\/everymancommentary.substack.com\/\">The Everyman<\/a>, a senior contributor to The Federalist, and has written essays for Newsweek, The American Mind, The American Conservative, Religion and Liberty, Crisis Magazine, and elsewhere. Follow him on <a href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/EverymanComm\">X<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/substack.com\/@meyrat\">Substack<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<p><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>College Board is a nonprofit creating college courses for high schoolers<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":551,"featured_media":2392571,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/tests.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[40451,48844,37300,37383,32189],"class_list":["post-2392570","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-academic-standards","tag-ap-courses","tag-college-board","tag-education-reform","tag-higher-education"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/tests.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2392570","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/551"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2392570"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2392570\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2392574,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2392570\/revisions\/2392574"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2392571"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2392570"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2392570"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2392570"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}