Daniel Lattier | June 12, 2015
This week, an impressive list of scholars across the nation published a letter opposing the new framework for the College Board’s Advanced Placement (AP) exam in U.S. History. You can read the full letter here.
As you may know, millions of U.S. high school students take an AP U.S. History course and exam each year in the hopes of earning college credit. The new framework of the exam is designed to shape the course curriculum.
The scholars’ problems with the new framework include the following:
It takes away teachers’ previous freedom with the curriculum and “centralizes control, deemphasizes content, and promotes a particular interpretation of American history.”
The historical view it promotes “downplays American citizenship and American world leadership in favor of a more global and transnational perspective.”
The framework is organized around the theme of “identity-group conflict… while downplaying essential subjects, such as the sources, meaning, and development of America’s ideals and political institutions, notably the Constitution.”
It shifts away from the previous framework’s emphasis on American exceptionalism and national character in favor of an emphasis on “the formation of gender, class, racial and ethnic identities.”
Those with similar concerns are often met with the straw man argument that they wish to turn a blind eye to the past sins committed by Americans. Fortunately, the scholars anticipated this argument in their letter:
“We do not seek to reduce the education of our young to the inculcation of fairy tales, or of a simple, whitewashed, heroic, even hagiographical nationalist narrative. Instead, we support a course that fosters informed and reflective civic awareness, while providing a vivid sense of the grandeur and drama of its subject.”
The concerns raised in the scholars’ letter are not new to me. I brought up similar ones in an article last year on Minnesota’s U.S. history standards, which you can read here. I have provided these standards below:
https://www.better-ed.org/blog/scholars-protest-new-ap-us-history-standards
