I’ll begin today’s post with a link to this report from The Week, but I’m reasonably certain that everyone reading this blog has already encountered reports about Ron. DeSantis’ most recent assault on the Constitution.
On the remote chance that you were vacationing in Bora Bora or blissfully hidden in an Amazon forest, I’ll explain: DeSantis refused to allow Florida schools to use a new Advanced Placement course in African-American studies, accusing it of being “woke.”
DeSantis has engaged in an unremitting war against “woke-ness”–otherwise described as any recognition that Black, Brown and LGBTQ people are citizens who are entitled to be treated as civic equals. My initial reaction to this latest eruption of racism in an effort to appeal to the increasingly racist GOP base was just to shake my head at this latest effort to protect Florida school kids from the evils of education.
Then came the reports prompting today’s headline–the utter capitulation of the College Board.
The alarming part of this story is that the College Board “completely bowed to his demands — and extremely quickly at that!” The nonprofit’s insistence that politics played no part in the decision is bunk. According to The New York Times, the writers and academics barred from the curriculum include Kimberlé W. Crenshaw, a Columbia professor whose work has been “foundational in critical race theory,” and author Ta-Nehisi Coates, “who has made a strong case for reparations.” More than 200 African American studies teachers said in a Medium post this gutting of the course amounts to “censorship and a frontal attack on academic freedom… Happy Black History Month.”
As Robert Kuttner put it in Kuttner on Tap in The American Prospect, DeSantis and the College Board were “enabling each others corruption.”
On Wednesday, after a threat from Gov. Ron DeSantis to ban the new Advanced Placement curriculum on African American studies in the state of Florida, the College Board released a watered-down version. The new curriculum is mainly historical. It deletes critical race theory and expunges or minimizes references to Black Lives Matter and the issues of reparations and Black incarceration. Some issues are removed from the AP curriculum entirely; others are left as optional topics for papers. The course still covers the slave trade and the civil rights movement but excises the work of several Black radical scholars.
Talk about following the money!
Like most Americans, I had previously been unaware that the AP courses offered to high school students capable of engaging with a more challenging curriculum are a branded product of the College Board.
As Kuttner explained,
The College Board is a classic case of a large nonprofit that behaves exactly like a profit-maximizing business. Its annual budget is about a billion dollars a year, and according to its most recent tax filings, Coleman, its CEO, was paid $2.849 million in total compensation in 2020, which included $1.6 million in bonus and incentive compensation.
It turns out that the College Board’s income comes almost entirely from two sources: the fees it collects from SAT exams, and the money it makes from AP classes–licensing fees for use of the curricula and charges for the AP tests that allow students to earn early college credits.
But the SATs are on the ropes. Thanks to a long-standing campaign against the overuse of standardized testing by FairTest and other critics, at least 1,835 colleges and universities, a majority of all higher-education institutions, now either don’t use the SAT or make it optional. Its total revenue dropped from $1.1 billion in 2019 to $779 million in 2020, the year of its most recent tax filing. So the College Board is now even more reliant on AP curricula and tests.
That reliance explains a lot. According to Kuttner, there are currently 38 AP courses, including human geography, psychology, art history, and Japanese culture and language. The AP African American studies curriculum was new, poised to be launched in the 2023-2024 school year.
I had also been unaware of a growing movement to replace the College Board’s AP classes with “home-grown” curricula; the article quoted one principal explaining that having his own advanced courses allows his school to be creative in curriculum, instruction, and assessment, and to respond to student interests.
Parents opposed to substituting local curricula worry about college acceptances in the absence of the familiar College Board classes. Kuttner notes that their worry “is fomented by that other famously corrupted institution, the U.S. News rankings. In ranking high schools, one major U.S. News weighting factor is how many kids take AP courses—”a perfect symbiosis between two unsavory education players.”
This “backstory” goes a long way to explain the College Board’s craven capitulation to the censors of the far right. It also strips away any belief that the Board’s mission is education.
It’s profit.
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