Kuttner on TAP: The African American Studies AP Debacle

“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.” —George Orwell, Animal Farm

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.

DeSantis took a victory lap, declaring that the revised curriculum still had to be reviewed by the state department of education. The College Board CEO, David Coleman, denied that political pressure from DeSantis had anything to do with its revisions, releasing documents showing that alterations were in process in December before DeSantis launched his attack. But those changes were partly in response to pressure generated by right-wing media after an early draft of the curriculum was leaked last summer. The National Review began its campaign against the curriculum last September. And this became a meme on right-wing social media.

The College Board’s cave-in will only invite more pressure from the right, as ideological censors in several states turn from picking over African American studies to the content of courses in history and the humanities. “The Board should have told the state of Florida, if you want any AP courses you have to take them all,” says Harry Feder, director of the group FairTest. “No AP course in African American studies, then no AP course in physics or calculus.”

Most Americans were only vaguely aware, if at all, that the AP courses in their local high school are a branded product of the College Board. So this debacle invites a closer look at that dubious institution.

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.

The College Board’s income comes mainly from two sources: the fees it collects from the SAT exams, and the money it makes from licensing schools to use its AP curricula and charging for AP tests.

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.

The recent history of the metastasis of Advanced Placement courses and tests illustrates the College Board’s reliance on AP as a profit center. As recently as the 1980s, there were fewer than ten AP courses, in math, the sciences, and English. Today, there are 38, including human geography, psychology, art history, and Japanese culture and language. The AP African American studies curriculum is brand-new, to be launched in the 2023-2024 school year.

AP classes have long been criticized by educators on multiple grounds. According to FairTest, most of the last month of each semester is spent mainly on test prep.

Beginning about 15 years ago, there was a movement among educators to wean high schools from the College Board’s branded AP courses in favor of homegrown advanced curricula. Most of the high schools that opt for their own curricula are private schools.

Exactly one elite public high school, Scarsdale High (my alma mater!), opted for its own advanced curriculum, called Advanced Topics, which has been available since 2007. Students who take Advanced Topics may sit for the College Board’s Advanced Placement exam if they wish.

The movement to shift from AP courses to homegrown advanced classes stalled, largely because of parental pushback. If students couldn’t show AP courses on a transcript, maybe they’d be less likely to be accepted by a prestige college.

According to the principal of Scarsdale High, that’s not the case. “Feedback from colleges indicates that they just want to know what our college-level designation and course code is, not whether we have AP or something else,” Kenneth Bonamo told me in an email interview. “In the 15+ years since we made the switch, we have not seen a diminution in college admissions.”

And Bonamo added, “Having our own ‘brand’ of advanced, college-level courses allows us the latitude to be creative in curriculum, instruction, and assessment, and to respond to student interests. We also have the space to create AT courses without AP analogs, such as AT Entrepreneurship, AT Constitutional Law, AT Linear Algebra, and AT International Politics.”

Parental worry about college acceptances in the absence of AP classes 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.

But even though few public high schools devise their own advanced curricula as Scarsdale does, the College Board’s AP program does have new competition. One is the respected International Baccalaureate (IB) program, which provides advanced studies for high school students and is far less commercialized than the College Board. For the most part, high schools that offer the International Baccalaureate don’t use AP.

Another option, used by many small and rural high schools that either can’t afford AP or don’t have enough students, is to partner with local community colleges. In Franklin County, Massachusetts, many high schools offer “dual enrollment” with Greenfield Community College, which gives them college-level courses and course credit.

So the College Board’s craven capitulation to the censors of the far right may bring unwelcome publicity and hasten its demise. It would be poetic justice if DeSantis and the College Board took each other down.