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A couple of weeks ago, in the week of Jan 16 thread, there was a discussion of the kerfuffle re Florida refusing to offer the pilot of AP African American Studies. There were a couple of minor developments last week. First, the course description is available here
Second, Florida specified its objections here
Now, I am not a fan of most "studies" courses, because, in my limited experience, they tend to lack rigor and often push a political viewpoint, which is both a disservice to students and, to the extent that students are required to parrot that viewpoint, a First Amendment violation when the course is taught in public schools (and in private schools as well, in California). I have not looked closely at the course description for the AP class, so I don't know if it has those flaws. That being said, this decision by Florida seems to be more a part of the DeSantis for President campaign than a principled objection. That is because the course description is not a curriculum, and the course description, like all AP course descriptions, says:
I have attended several AP trainings in my day, and can attest that they make a big deal about individual teachers being given autonomy, as long as their syllabus addresses the content and skills set forth in the course description. So, none of the readings complained about are required, and teachers are free, as required by Florida's "Stop WOKE Act" to assign readings on all sides of the issues in question.
And, btw, the claims on the other side that Florida does not want to teach African American history is also nonsense, because teaching of African American history is mandated in FL schools
Edit: PS: There is a very odd complaint in the Florida DOE's list: It objects to a reading by one author in part because, "Kelley's first book was a study of Black communists in Alabama." Not, 'an adulatory study," but merely a "study." It is like objecting to a reading by Donald Horowitz because he wrote a study of ethnic riots.
On page 68 of the Course Framework document, we find that one of the "research takeaways" that "helped define the essential course topics" is that "Students should understand core concepts, including diaspora, Black feminism and intersectionality, the language of race and racism (e.g., structural racism, racial formation, racial capitalism) and be introduced to important approaches (e.g., Pan-Africanism, Afrofuturism)."
These "core concepts" are mostly from CRT or the cluster of ideologies to which it belongs. Presumably all variants of a course must teach its "core concepts." We can assume students will need to be familiar with these concepts to pass the AP exam and that the College Board will decline to approve syllabi that don't teach these concepts.
Why would anyone who believes this ideology to be harmful ever agree to allow this course to be taught? You might equally well argue it would be unreasonable to object to the introduction of an "AP White Studies" course in which the "core concepts" are tenets of white nationalism, on the grounds that as long as you make sure students are conversant on the Great Replacement (which will definitely be on the test), there's no rule saying you can't include other perspectives too.
As I have said several times, if Florida does not want to offer the course, that is their right. And as I also said, right up front, I tend to be skeptical of "studies" courses in general. The point is that being familiar with the concepts does not mean accepting them as true, and the College Board explicitly requires teachers to "design[] their own curriculum . . . [and] modify and adapt [it] to their local priorities and preferences."
And, your AP White Studies hypothetical is a perfect example: Yes, it absolutely would be unreasonable to object to the introduction of a course that includes the study of the tenets of white nationalism; that is an important ideology. Just as it would be unreasonable to object to the introduction of a course on Important Ideas of the 20th Century because it includes the study of the tenets of National Socialism, or Stalinism. And, just as it would be unreasonable to object to a African American Studies course because it includes discussion of ideas that were important to African Americans in 1920, such as Garveyism, it is unreasonable to object to that course because it includes discussion of ideas that are important to African Americans today. What IS objectionable is a course which advocates any of those ideas, be it white nationalism or Garveyism or Stalinism or "anti-racism." And, yes, I am sure that some teachers will teach the AP course precisely that way, but that does not mean that doing so is required, nor that the State of Florida can't teach it in, as the Stop WOKE Act says, "an objective manner without endorsement of the concepts."
This is sophistry; they will be taught from materials which assume and assert these concepts are true, and they will be required to use these concepts, as the first two bullets of "Learning Outcomes" make clear
Certainly one could remain an atheist while taking a course on Catholicism from the Bible and other Catholic theological material in which you are required to recite prayers and apply Catholic theological perspectives on the test. But such a course would still be way over the line for a public school.
Once again, Florida teachers are free to have students read materials on both sides of the issues.
In education speak, "evaluate" means "presenting and defending opinions by making judgments about information, the validity of ideas, or quality of work based on a set of criteria."
In practice how do you think this will turn out though? I have a hard time believing you are being honest with this act of “Who knows, all the teachers of AP Af Am Studies might just turn out to be David Duke, Chris Rufo and Charles Murray!”
You know damn well 99% of teachers for this course will either be true believers or willing to parrot the true believers in presenting this stuff as uncritically true
Please review my initial post, in which I said:
I have also repeatedly said that Florida is free to decide what to offer and what not to offer, and have noted that it actually requires coverage of African American history.
You seem to be trying to argue the merits of the course. But that was not my point. My point is not that the course is good or bad, or should be taught or shouldn't be taught. The point is that Florida is inaccurately claiming that the course **must **be taught that way. If the state thinks that it will be unable to ensure that its teachers follow the law when teaching this course, then they shouldn't offer it. But that is a completely different argument than the one that they made.
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Even if you had skeptical teachers, having them read materials on the other side of the issues -- that is, those which disparaged intersectionality and denigrated the various "lenses" -- would be a waste of time from the course perspective. It would not further the course's goals and it would actively harm the student's chances on the test. Basically it's saying that the course is forbidden by law but the violation can be cured by teaching the "anti-course" at the same time.
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Your hypothetical Important Ideas of the 20th Century course, and I think the way you're choosing to imagine the white nationalist course, aren't quite the same as what's happening here. You're ignoring the social and academic context in which this course is being introduced.
This isn't just the equivalent of a course having high school students learn the tenets of white nationalism — which most people would already find wildly objectionable, even if you don't — it's the equivalent of white nationalists themselves introducing such a course, in which students are not only taught about white nationalist beliefs but are presented with history interpreted through a white nationalist lens and taught how to perform such interpretation themselves. Also white nationalists get to write and grade the exam, can veto syllabi that deviate from their understanding of what the course should be, and know they can rely on most teachers interested in teaching the course either being white nationalists themselves or at least naively willing to accept white nationalist framing.
So, sure, in some extremely hypothetical sense a state where the consensus was against CRT could adapt this African American Studies course to "local priorities and preferences" by having students learn its CRT-derived "core concepts" via James Lindsey. Those students might even have a clearer picture of those concepts than they'd get from reading the often obfuscatory writings of their proponents! But in practice, no, you couldn't remotely do this. The College Board wouldn't approve your syllabus, on the contextually reasonable basis that it didn't represent African American Studies as taught in colleges. Your students wouldn't be able demonstrate "correct" (that is, politically correct) understanding on open-ended exam questions.
Almost certainly, the "local priorities and preferences" language just cashes out as "you can add some modules about local history," not "you can refocus the course on questioning the validity of the analytical framework that underpins the entire academic field it's situated within."
As mentioned previously, I have taken several AP trainings, and that is absolutely NOT what what that language means. They make a rather big deal about teacher autonomy.
Yes, they probably would, as I argued in another response.
That is conflating the TOPICS that are taught with HOW they are taught. The AP course audit looks at coverage, and at whether students are asked to use analytical skills, etc. It is of course possible that this course will be an exception, but a claim that it will be is based purely on the assumption that the course is intended to be indoctrination. As I said in my initial post, "studies" courses often are, in my very limited experience solely at the HS level. But that does not mean that they must be.
The bigger problem with a James Lindsey-based course is that it would fall afoul of Florida's Stop WOKE Act, because it would be teaching the subject in a non-objective manner. You have inadvertently set up a strawman, since my point all along has been simply that a course which assigned students both Kimberle Crenshaw and her critics would meet the criteria of both the College Board and FL law.
I feel like I've addressed this already. Reading Crenshaw and her critics might be a reasonable basis for a class, but not if Crenshaw supporters get to define the "core concepts" of the class, the syllabus has to be approved by Crenshaw supporters, and the exam will be written and graded by Crenshaw supporters. It is entirely unreasonable to ask people who disagree with Crenshaw to accept this.
Again, I think you are addressing an argument that I did not make. As I have said, if Florida doesn't want to offer the class, or any class, that discusses topic X, that is fine. So, I agree that there is nothing unreasonable about that. What is unreasonable is claiming that the College Board requires that the course be taught in a one-sided manner, which is what FL seems to be claiming.
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This is an overly charitable take. The key to judging AP courses of this sort is to just skip to the recommended readings section. In this outline it starts on 70 with recommended textbooks. The first one listed, by Maulana Karenga clearly would be in violation of the FL statute if used. It is an openly race critical text that contains all forms of intersectional conspiracy theories. Its hard to imagine the majority of those textbooks (which are not mandatory, but in practice are more or less mandatory) are all that different. The other literature section contains a hodgepodge of works, I am not familiar with all of them, but at least 5 on the first page contain conspiratorial rants about whiteness, white supremacy, or some similar concept.
Where does it say that the course requires a textbook at all? After all, it says that only 61% of college courses surveyed use a textbook.
It is impossible for a textbook to violate the FL statute, because the FL law does not reference textbooks. It references courses, and permits the study of the concepts listed therein as long as it is done so objectively. It does not require that every resource be objective. Many teachers ask students to critique textbooks, and there is nothing to stop Florida teachers from doing so, if for some reason the State adopts one of the textbooks you find problematic.
Speaking of textbook adoption, state funds can not generally be used to purchase textbooks that have not been adopted by the State or by the district, including AP textbooks. See, eg, this district's list of adopted books, including those for AP classes. hence, if those books are as problematic as you say, Florida will not permit districts to use state money to buy them, just as they did not permit districts to use state money to buy math textbooks which they found problematic.
Edit: Also, 4) The fact that the FL DOE did not take issue with the textbook list indicates that it is not as problematic as you suppose.
HS teachers rarely do this. I had very few HS courses without a textbook, and those were all ones with reading lists of books. Its a question of basic competency and effort.
Obviously the text of the law is written to evade facial challenges and forum shopping to find a particularly left wing federal judge from striking it down on whatever spurious grounds she thinks up. In practicality, the DOE must holistically review a proposed course to see whether, in a large number of instances it will violate the law.
There are likely ways for teachers to obtain them for free. They also can use the alternative readings list as a basis, which also would result in a course that is in violation of the law in nearly every iteration.
DOE official statements need to be as measured as possible so as to survive hostile lawsuits.
You basically seem to be making this up. There is no way to make a facial challenge to the law regardless of that provision. The Court's govt speech cases in general, and their education cases in particular, make it very clear that govt can use schools to inculcate any values they want. And, the law says what it says, and in fact the very fact that it explicitly permits objective discussion renders the criticism of the law invalid.
Nope.
You obviously haven't read the statements that have been made.
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"The courses are not rigorous." Maybe true, but many courses in school are not indented to be rigorous in an academic sense per say, like art, music, PE, etc. If rigor is the sole criterion, then this would mean many other courses would have to be removed. This would imply that 'European History', which is also an AP course, may also be lacking in rigour.
"The courses are biased." But what if they were made more objective/impartial?
These objections seem to be be an attempt to divert from the actual motive /reason, being that people do not want courses which single out African Americans, although European History already exists. Maybe rebrand it as "African History", which does not exist as an AP subject? There are no good answers it seems. My own opinion is just lump all ethnicities/races into a single course(s), without any obvious preference/favoritism. I don't think it's that big if a deal.
Do you think that there would be similar objections to an African history course?
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To be more clear, I meant that in a relative sense. Several years ago, I was talking to a former student of mine who was attending UC Berkeley. He mentioned he was taking a Women's Studies class. I said to him, "Let me guess -- it was by far the easiest class you have taken at Cal." He confirmed that my suspicion was very much correct.
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Banish from your mind the notion that this course teaches history. I linked below to an African American Studies scholar who freely admits as much. The course is not about history. It's about "learning how to think" and "viewing things through a critical lens".
I'm really struggling to come up with anything that would be an apple to apples comparison to a course we'd be broadly familiar with. But these "XYZ Studies" degrees really are their own special thing. I can't think of a single other curriculum that isn't about teaching subject matter per say, and is instead about deconstructing, recontextualizing, or specifically countering other course work or cultural forces. Like a "math" class that attempts undermine your belief in validity mathematics.
Those are not mutually exclusive. The CA history standards, for example, include both content standards and historical thinking and analysis standards. I assume other states do as well. And AP World, AP European and AP US History all include historical analysis and thinking as purposes of the course.
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I have come to the opinion that critical is a terrible word choice (but possibly deliberately so). The different meanings of "heralded to critical acclaim", "critical decision to save the world", "in critical condition", and "overly critical diatribe" are so disparate that despite years of supposed education, I'm not sure which "critical thinking" refers to.
Naively, we should be teaching students to fairly evaluate ideas, and to make important decisions. But sometimes it seems like people lean into the criticism aspect to justify nihilism and tearing down everything without any thought to improving the human condition.
Political as well as social revolutionaries often seek to destroy and delegitimize the dominant framework because chaos and confusion are fertile soil for planting the seeds of a new framework. That's the implicit goal of efforts to "attack structural whiteness" or whatever. Once "whiteness" has been made radioactive and repellent enough, activists can offer their CRT framework as a path to redemption for those benighted souls who had been ignorant enough to use the old framework to understand the world.
You can see this strategy play out in every leftist movement since the French Revolution. It's a good one, the right seems to have no defense against it.
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It's not hard to look up.
It's not terrible as a book, as much as I'd take a lot of its summaries with mountain-sized pieces of salt (in particular, I remember being impressed by how poorly the book glosses around Soviet funding of the organizations while describing Soviet influence or organization as propaganda). But for however the reviewers call it a 'descriptive' study, it's very much a descriptive study from the perspective of someone that really fucking likes communists and communism. There's occasional recognition of faults and failures, but they're things like :
or
or
That is, Hammer and Hoe details a lot of ways communist groups were sometimes incompetent, occasionally became unintentional strawmen, and were often insufficiently communist; it has few places where it considers or even describes potential solutions to a given economic or social problem other than more
Stalinscommunism except to consider these things conservative interlopers. The 25th Anniversary edition opens with a preface explicitly spelling out that "I'd be lying if I said Hammer and Hoe was conceived as a purely academic contribution, unburdened by presentist concerns", before highlighting perceived overlap with the 1990s South African revolution.There's a fair criticism that the Stop WOKE Act doesn't actually have any rules about communism, and in that sense, yes: I don't think you could honestly say Kelley blamed people for the racism of their ancestors at any point, both because it's not the focus and also because he was too busy blaming them for the insufficient communism. In that sense, the inclusion on the list is pretty obviously and overtly a political moment (ed: and not even an especially competent one: the recommended authors for 4.1 and 4.2 are far more controversial in Stop WOKE-specific ways).
But even if I hadn't previously read the book, I don't think I'd have had to make really difficult calculations on its political position, or the political position of its inclusion on the Florida DOE's list.
Yes, I am sure the book is terrible, and horribly biased, etc. But the point is that the document doesn't claim that. It complains merely that he wrote a book on the topic.
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It's been a while since I took AP courses, but the history exams I took definitely had a mix of more open-ended questions where students had to be able to evaluate evidence and make arguments, and also a section of multiple-choice fact questions. In addition, some of the writing questions required you to know all of the relevant information already (FRQ). Even for the part that gave you primary sources and required you to evaluate them (DBQ), you would have to have at least some context and outside information in order to be able to do that evaluating. So although you could emphasize different themes, there was still quite a lot of factual information you had to have in order to get a decent grade on the AP exam.
The material need not be skipped*. It can be covered from opposing views.
*That being said, there are 90+ topics in the course description. Every teacher is going to skip some, as is common in AP History courses, which the College Board well knows (source: UC Berkeley prof who was a long-time member of the AP World History test committee).
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Let me attempt some kind of steelman here. First, like you, I am extremely skeptical of grievance study courses, and particularly CRT. Second, while I think it’s fine to study these phenomena at arm’s length, often high school students assume they are being taught the truth, not merely one perverse angle on it. In 99% of my high school classes, it was obvious I was meant to internalize and adopt the teachings presented. Only the most careful of teachers could approach truly controversial topics. I have little confidence this can be maintained across our public high school education system.
Nonetheless. The course description describes what to expect at college. This is an AP class after all. I can’t argue with the course description, which certainly covers a great deal of CRT, even if seemingly out of proportion with its influence and impact on ordinary African Americans.
Now, Florida DOE is faced with a course description that it has significant disagreement with. They could design a curriculum that sideskirts all the CRT stuff, but then its students will fare poorly on the AP test. Which failure is a greater disservice to its students? Failing to prepare them for a very important test, or breaking the ban on CRT?
It would be nice if the College Board could separate the most controversial, politically charged aspects of their African American History into a seperate module, perhaps Advanced African American History. It seems we are forced to throw the baby out for the bathwater.
My entire point is that they don't have to do that. They need only include opposing views. And that would probably give their students a leg up on understanding the material.
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"African-American Studies" (hereinafter "AAS" because I'm lazy) is not "African-American History." In fact, properly understood, a student isn't really able to engage fruitfully with AAS until they already have a reasonable familiarity with the relevant history, sociology, anthropology, music/cultural studies, etc. The whole point of the various "X Studies" programs is to be interdisciplinary - to take extant bodies of information, place them in dialogue with each other, and attempt to figure out what insights they may have to offer each other, and identify blind spots in prior, monodisciplinary analysis.
Were that true, then college intro to Af Am Studies courses would have lengthy prerequisites. They don't. Nor does the major normally require basic intro coursework from any of those fields. See, eg, the UCLA major requirements here.
The major is certainly interdisciplinary, but the basic concepts of sociology, history, etc, are acquired through an African American lense.
Most college education still presumes a basic level of competency; after all, the aspirant already graduated high school with at least decent grades, and did decently well on the relevant college entrance exam.
Yes, of course. But that is an entirely different claim.
No it's not. Presumably someone taking a college-level interdisciplinary class at least has high-school level knowledge of the basics of the underlying history, civics, and literature. The college level course can draw on that background knowledge while presenting the information in a new context, or through a new frame.
The coursework under discussion in FL, by contrast, is a high-school level interdisciplinary course, which is putting the cart before the horse.
You were clearly referring to college-level programs in your comment, since you referred to "the various "X Studies" programs"
Regardless, why do you assume that the AP class will be taken by students who have not already completed HS history, etc? Most HS seniors have done so, for example.
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Oh gosh, good point. So maybe the distinction I propose is already there? It would make sense, to me, for Florida to offer AAH but maybe not AAS. I feel like much of “liberal” uproar assumed Florida was cutting out AAH. Is AAH generally a prereq for AAS?
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I'm having intense flashbacks to culture wars of years past, with the polarities reversed. I'm of course talking about "creation science".
It's all the same arguments. The "both sides" arguments, the "this belongs in a social studies class, not science" arguments, the "you can't have an authority figure like a teacher showing preference for these ideas in an education setting" arguments. And we more or less saw how that culture war shook out. I see no reason this one shouldn't follow through to the same conclusion. AP African American Studies is not education. It's dogma masquerading as such. It's no different in substance, rigor or evidence as "creation science".
I have zero reason to ever give the people teaching this curriculum the benefit of the doubt. Every interview with African American Studies scholars I've seen lambasting the decision is full of all the mealy mouthed buzzwords and turns of phrase I've learned to interpret as massive red flags.
The insistence that they don't "teach kids what to think, but how to think". Which I've learned is actually far more pernicious when you teach people how to think incorrectly. To turn a phrase, throw someone's fish in the river, they'll go hungry for a day. Teach them the wrong way to fish, and they'll go hungry the rest of their life.
There is always the old classic that they teach kids to study history "through a critical lens", which rather gives the game away. The "critical lens" only ever points one direction.
And of course in the interview I saw on The Hill, the scholar further emphasized that MLK Jr's legacy needs to be placed in the proper context of MLK Jr's "Democratic Socialism and radical" beliefs, if you believed any of the red flags I listed above had a more benign interpretation.
Furthermore, DeSantis was elected almost specifically to do this. If he actually has the authority to do so, I'm all for it. I'm over arguing principle. This is naked power politics, that I've been on the receiving end of. Turn about is fair play.
Because in my local school district that has tripled down on far left policies, they just lie. They lie when they are caught. They lie when those lies are exposed. When a grand jury is empaneled to investigate them, they lie more. When the grand jury report is released, they tell even more lies. It's lies the whole way down. The process has taken 3 years and counting, and in the meantime, nothing has changed and they still have our children as a captive audience. These are institutions that have learned to obscure, confuse and obfuscate through extreme bureaucratic defense in depth, and they've repeatedly proven themselves to be utterly untrustworthy.
Note that the syllabus never uses the term "critical lens". But it does use "lens" in that manner. It's like they were trying to avoid the trigger word while still getting the meaning across.
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This seems a little bit of a change in approach from the normal strict literalism you've been bringing recently. Stop WOKE does not require teachers to "assign readings on all sides of the issues", under the increasingly-reasonably-looking theory that progressives would consider their own racially-discriminatory texts as a legitimate side and conservative-leaning views (or classically anti-discriminatory ones!) as not. The relevant prong of the law is:
((From a philosophical position I think this raises some serious free speech questions given that it is neither content- nor viewpoint-neutral, but from a legal one it'd just get smothered in the crib as government speech were it a progressive political program.))
Now, this statute does have one exception, but rather than a "all sides" one, it's :
Emphasis added. That is, it is neither sufficient nor necessary to cover "all sides", but instead a teacher must specifically avoid endorsement. There could be a fair argument that this syllabi could be customized in a way that matches this exception. Except, of course, you specifically admit:
Now, I'm not particularly interested in the question of whether this is
political propagandalacking rigor and requiring students to parrot a political viewpoint, because it'sa school project on a politically valiant topic what do you expectthe sort of question that immediately demands argument-by-definition whether this is happening and then, having admitted it, whether it's good. And there's a fair argument that this is not sufficiently precise enough to be a law, in that fun void-for-vagueness way (although, again, compare how government speech regs fair when used to further progressive political goals).But it's a little hard to see that for this specific situation. A recommended text for "The Reparations Movement" is Coates' "The Case For Reparations". Even assuming that teachers could add a Sowellian counterargument, this remains an endorsement of racially discriminatory practices for the purpose of repairing the harms from actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or national origin (literally: "It is as though we have run up a credit-card bill and, having pledged to charge no more, remain befuddled that the balance does not disappear" and "Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole", in case you thought fiscal conservatives had a monopoly on bad debt metaphors), and one that's very likely to be on the not-adjustable test.
((And in practice, there's a complex auditing system that goes on, here; I think you're vastly overstating the degrees of freedom a state has to modify the syllabi.))
It's physically possible to discuss the material without endorsing it (although whether such discussion would prepare students for an AP exam...), but do you really expect the average classroom to manage it? We can barely manage to teach Brave New World without people missing the blatant racism and classism for the feelies and drugs and free love. And it's not exactly alone, here.
Yes, I suppose I misspoke slightly; Stop WOKE does not not technically require teachers to assign readings from both sides. Nevertheless, under the course description, teachers are free to do so, and are certainly free to teach the course in an objective manner. That is the main point: Florida seems to be claiming otherwise, which is incorrect.
The point is that it is a recommended text, not a required text, as Florida implies.
Yes, I have gone through the AP course audit. But, like many people here (as well as the Florida DOE), you are conflating the course description with the curriculum or the syllabus. Teachers are not free to modify** the course description** -- for example, they generally cannot teach units that are not included in the official description. But, they are free to develop their own syllabus: There is no official syllabus, and the course audit to which you refer is a review of each teacher's syllabus.
Yes! By assigning readings on both sides.
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EDIT: disregard the below. I missed the course description link
You’ve got a slight problem in your post: a circular reference.
From this, it looks like anything could be taught and match the course description. We should really look at the actual course description, and much more importantly What’s on the test??
No, no, no. The course description sets out the topics and skills to be covered. (As I noted in my post). HOW those topics are covered -- the curriculum -- is up to the individual teacher. It is simply not true that "anything" can be taught, and in fact the College Board requires AP teachers to submit their syllabi to the AP Course Audit to ensure that they are actually covering those topics and skills.
Sorry, I missed your links. Let me review. I was responding to your text, trying to follow the argument, but I was premature in responding.
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So... it's not actually up to the individual teacher then? You seem to be proposing some sort of magic, inviolable barrier between "how" and "what" that I don't think exists here. In the realm of teaching, the how and the what influence each other heavily and are frequently just the same thing in different garb.
???? The TOPICS are required (to the extent, of course, that anyone can cover all of the topics, which they can't. But the point is that a course needs to cover those topics, not other topics. Eg: The AP Modern World History covers "the cultural, economic, political, and social developments that have shaped the world from c. 1200 CE to the present." So, a syllabus that spent weeks comparing the Roman and Han empires would be dinged).
But, there is no mandate re HOW the topics are covered. So, in a unit in AP Modern World on Mass Atrocities After 1900, I can focus on Rwanda and Cambodia, or on Germany and the Holodomor, or whatever. Similarly, in that unit I can assign readings by Scott Straus, or by Omar McDoom (yes, the real name of a guy who studies the topic), or Lee Ann Fujii, or people who claim all of those people are misguided.
So you realistically think some teacher is going to be able to get away with assigning Steve Sailer or Charles Murray to add the HBD context to such a course? (If I were the teacher of such a course and strictly striving to be objective, I would feel deficient in that regard to not do so, irrespective of my personal political leanings.) You think that's actually possible?
You're also ignoring that the whole point of AP courses is the test, meaning that the test inevitably dictates quite a bit by gravity even if not necessarily by fiat. You're, as I stated in my other response to you, appealing to possibility while ignoring probability. The fate of those who naively accept that reasoning from their opponents is the same fate of any other gambler who bets on bad odds: the house wins.
Why should those who oppose ideology X be willing to or care to bet on the small probability that a course with every reason to be biased in favor of ideology X might, with great effort on their part that they could expend elsewhere, not be? Why go to pains to try to stop your opponent from shooting you with a gun when you can just stop them from possessing it at all in the first place? Who benefits from this other than the bad actors who caused the issue in the first place? It's the equivalent of peeing on the floor (causing concerns over education being institutionally biased towards the left by, well, institutionally capturing education in a biased left-wing fashion) and demanding someone else clean it up (expend massive resources to try to allow you to still be able to teach your favorite pet subjects without taking advantage of that capture). Why should they?
What teachers can "get away with" is a rather different issue, but the question is not whether they would get away with adding a new topic to the course, but whether they can get away with including a variety of views on the existing topics in the course.
As I discuss elsewhere, that is not the whole point of AP courses. The point of AP courses is to enhance student learning.
Is this a joke? Were you ever in AP courses? The point is to skip college classes and hopefully save money.
It's also to get higher weighted GPAs in schools that do that. Anyone in the top 10% or so of my highschool class had a GPA higher than could be achieved without taking APs, any non-AP class that took, even with a perfect score, would lower their weighted GPA.
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Once upon a time, but more importantly I taught an AP class for years.
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How many AP students have you polled about this?
Quite a few, actually. In the form of revealed preferences. And I have certainly had lengthy discussions with school policy makers and accreditors, and that is precisely why policy makers pushed to enhance AP offerings, and why accreditors pushed them to do so.
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Hahaha. That might be what is written down about AP courses, but in practice, the point is to give smart kids some college credit through the public school system. And ‘no, we’re not going to spend state money getting kids college credit in some field invented by literal communists and ending in -studies’ is a perfectly reasonable view to take.
It's right there in the name, "Advanced Placement". The College Board's own blurb about it:
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And I never said otherwise. As I said, initially, I am generally skeptical of "studies" courses, and as I have said above, Florida is free to decide what courses to offer and not offer. And had they said, "we think "studies" courses are usually bullshit, so we don't want to offer them," that would be fine. But, that is not what they said.
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I find the autonomy listed a bit misleading for a couple reasons. First, they know exactly what kind of teacher is going to sign up for teaching this course. But more importantly they control the fundamental curriculum with the test design. AP teachers teach to the test, they'd be failing their students their valuable college credit if they didn't. We can pretend like the teachers get to pick the curriculum all we want but if critical theory is on the test critical theory will be taught, simple as that.
But you are confusing content and curriculum. Yes, it will be taught, but as I noted, Florida law explicitly allows it to be taught, as long as it is done objectively. In fact, perhaps the best way to learn about a topic is to criticize it.
I'm struggling to think of examples of this being true. If you don't know a discipline, how can you accurately criticize it? If you don't know a topic, wouldn't you just be satisfied with counterarguments which someone conversant in the topic would know to be inaccurate? It's like people in favor of gun control, but who have never shot a gun in their lives or deigned to learn anything about how they work or how they're used. We know how that ends up - bans on purely cosmetic features which do nothing to actually limit gun proliferation or shootings.
I said the best way, not the perfect way. My point is simply that if student A were asked to read article X and summarize it, whereas student B is asked to read article X and criticize it, student B will probably* walk away with a better understanding of article X than will student A.
*note that I said, probably. Not every student, every time.
Edit: And, btw, I said the best way to learn about a topic. Not the best way to, as you said, 'accurately criticize it."
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So you fully support and expect such a course to include (given it is a matter that, though not fully settled, still has much objective evidence in its favor) the influence of the quite possibly genetically limited black average IQ on their history and current state of affairs? Since after all if you're studying blacks and black history, surely any genetic specifics of their race are objectively relevant, right?
Your reasoning reminds me of the classic "Just make your own Reddit if you don't like its moderation!" line, in that it retreats into the technicalities of what is formally not impossible to pretend that it is not so blatantly improbable, unwieldy, and unreasonably/unduly burdensome for their interlocutors to be worth seriously advancing as any sort of solution to them (a fallacy I am not quite sure of the name of, but perhaps you could call it "appeal to possibility" or the "akshually fallacy").
Sure, technically based on the written word of Floridan law if this course were to be taught in Florida then it should/could/would be fully objective, merely presenting the facts and allowing students to come to their own conclusions. In practice though, anyone with an ability to make predictions about the future based on empirical observations about the past greater than that of someone with Alzheimer's knows that the context and unavoidable partisanship (given that it's already happened) of the course's formulation and dissemination will inevitably influence its content and presentation in a non-objective direction.
The amount of resources it would take to actually realize a truly objective version of such a course (such as, for example, finding the hundreds of teachers required who would be interested in teaching "African-American Studies" and are also capable of being charitable enough to a right-wing view on the matter to be objective, while also rigorously excluding/avoiding the thousands who would almost certainly engage in any deception to become among those hundreds so as to have a bully pulpit for left-wing propaganda) is not even worth the intellectual/educational value even a truly fully objective version of such a course would provide, especially given how much blacks have tended to be the objects rather than subjects of history.
We are quite literally having this discussion on a “your own Reddit”! As Scott pointed out a while ago, any argument is made better with made up numbers, so let’s make some up!
I’ll claim that at least 10% of teachers would actually meet the criteria, which I believe to be an underestimate as some students will take those classes looking for trouble. Teachers would be aware of that; a few would probably aim for martyrdom… which brings us to avoiding a discussion in the concrete as shrewd politics. Allowing for an argument over the merits of “favorite teacher”, students rallied around, after the fact would be a strong and effective nucleation site for dissent. Canceling the class is comparatively easy - the courts could reinstate it, but they can’t turn back time to before the semester.
Um, no. This is a forum formatted like Reddit. But it is still a fraction of the size and influence of Reddit. If I want to discuss 90% of the things I can discuss (albeit in an infuriatingly censored/muted fashion) on Reddit (hobby interests, etc.), this place is no alternative whatsoever. It's still better than having no alternatives at all certainly, but saying it is "your own Reddit" is like giving a 16 year old a Hot Wheels and telling them they don't need to be jealous of adults anymore because now they have their own car too.
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Yes, I support the right of a teacher to include that topic in a course on African American Studies, if it is done so in an objective and intellectually rigorous manner.
Okay but that's never going to happen. So even seriously advancing it as a possibility is naive.
LOL, why did you ask the question, if any answer is going to be wrong somehow?
You haven't heard of a rhetorical question? The point is phrased as a question to highlight the obvious absurdity of its own premises.
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Are there any course designs you would consider objectionable by this standard? AP race an IQ? AP Based altrightism? Especially if by teaching demographics data you know that nineteen out of twenty classrooms will be run by a rabid partisan of whichever side you oppose and the test at the end is designed by people you oppose.
I wouldn't be here if I didn't agree with the basic premise of your objection, that exposure to repugnant ideas is good and I'm even sympathetic to high school students getting a dose of this, but I think this is a maximally bad environment for it.
Well, as I think I made clear, any course that is taught with the purpose of pushing a political viewpoint is objectionable.
You are making a lot of assumptions there, I must say. Did you even look at the course description? The material that Florida has identified as objectionable are about four of 92 topics.
More importantly, your claim is not Florida's claim. Florida's claim was NOT that "the course seems OK as written, but will be implemented in a biased way." Rather, it was that the course** as written** is biased, which is a claim based on a misunderstanding (perhaps intentional, but perhaps not) on how AP classes work.
"It's ok officer, for 90% of my drive I wasn't doing 30 over the speed limit"
You must be a big fan of banning gas stoves.
You must be a big fan of devoting 5% of biology class to Intelligent Design.
Nice try, but as it happens I have long advocated for including a unit in intro to biology that presents students with intelligent design and asks them to assess the evidence for and against it. As well as evidence for and against evolution by natural selection, and everything in between.
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I know at least one AP biology teacher who gets away with teaching YEC, but overall you’re probably right that the vast majority teach to the test.
We need to distinguish teaching what is on the test from teaching with the purpose of passing the test. Eg: When I taught AP World History, every topic that I taught was one that was in the course description and might be on the test. However, instead of covering every topic that might be on the test -- as one would do if the purpose of the class was to pass the test -- I chose to cover fewer topics in greater depth, and particularly emphasized teaching skills (such as analytical writing) over content.
Similarly, at the end of the class, and before the test date, I had students write a research paper, instead of doing weeks of test review, as would someone whose goal was to have the students pass the test.
I guess this is part of why I hated teaching. My viewpoint would have been that (ethically) maximizing the students' chances of passing the test should be heavily prioritized. Even if the fun stuff is better for their psyches, they're paying for a leg up on the competition.
So the worry is that -- if one prioritizes passing the test at all -- the bare facts being tested militate strongly towards certain ideas, and that ethical use of class time does not allow room to introduce complementary material. This is compounded by the fact that so much of the test seems to be free response, and teachers need to be convinced that these would be rubric-ed tightly enough so as to not be graded on ideological parroting. Professionally, I've only seen how the AP grades calculus, so maybe you can tell if such a thing is even possible? My own high school experience was that one wants to approximate ChatGPT's response as well as possible, which is what we'd like to avoid here.
Finally, I found the sample questions to be interesting and challenging (IANA historian). Students would presumably find the course valuable, but (IMO) Florida would be right to claim that the Black experience is better understood with every bell hooks reading replaced by Tupac Shakur.
Well, that is an unavoidable dilemma, as is the content v. skills dilemma, and breadth v depth dilemma. But, btw, I don't know that most of my students would call writing essays "fun stuff," though it is probably more fun than lots of rote memorization.
There are obviously no scored tests yet for the new course, but scoring guidelines, sample responses, rubrics, etc for old AP World tests are here, and for old AP US History classes are here
Yes, Florida is free to offer or not offer whatever course it wants (and, as noted, it does in fact offer African American studies classes). But the "culture war" aspect is why Florida rejected this particular course.
Did they explicitly say that?
Yes.
Did they? Iirc, the stated motive was an apparent lack of academic rigor.
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Yes. It's also the reason this particular course exists.
Except that Florida high schools offer non-AP versions of the course already.
And, the course exists for one reason: to get more African American students to take AP courses.
That sounds both very counter-productive (see Goodhart's law) and extremely condescending. Like, since they can't take AP math, so we invent AP bullshit and pretend it's the same thing. Nobody would think it's the same thing.
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Is this because it is intended to be extremely non-rigorous so anyone with a pulse can get a 4 or 5?
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Or, in other words, the complaints against DeSantis seem to be more a part of the long-running "Defeat DeSantis" campaign than a principled objection? I don't think there's any question that DeSantis is angling for the White House, such that everything he does can be plausibly cast in that way. But asking politicians for principled objections seems to always and everywhere end up as an isolated demand for rigor.
The complaints from Florida seem perfectly reasonable to me; I regard so-called "intersectionality" as much more like a religion than a legitimate form of academic inquiry, and I don't see any value in teaching it in schools (beyond, perhaps, including it in a religious studies course as an example of a secular dogmatism that has emerged in response to the broad exclusion of deity-oriented faith from public debate). Of course, reasonable minds may differ on this point, and I'm comfortable with each state education system in the U.S. reaching its own conclusion through standard legislative processes, which Florida has done here.
But I am also broadly disinterested in having "standardized" education across the country, and would rather see states actively competing in that arena rather than outsourcing everything to monocultures like the College Board. Very few people seem to actually care about AP Black-Queer-Feminist-Communism, and most of the complaining I see is false claims (as you noted) about black history being removed from Florida schools. Given that no actual history is being excluded from Florida schools, only certain forms of political indoctrination, what complaint remains? The complaint that DeSantis is doing this for the votes?
I have a lot of problems with democracy, but ultimately "politician doing the things his voters want him to do" just isn't very high on my list of things to worry about.
ETA:
This seems like a great way to get poor scores on the exam, though. "You are free to teach what you like" does not translate into "and your students will still do well on the exam." Students who are not closely able to at list imitate the dogmatic thinking from the objectionable readings seem unlikely to do well on the exam that is the ultimate point of any AP class. My own experience with AP exams is that failure to hew closely to the "suggested" readings will often leave your students swinging in the wind.
That seems an odd response to a post in which I explicitly criticized both sides.
I agree; Florida is free to teach what it wants. But note that the standard legislative process in Florida has yielded a law, the Stop WOKE Act, which explicitly permits the teaching of "CRT"-related topics.
The quoted material does not say "you are free to teach what you like." It in fact says the exact opposite, as I noted: That teachers are required to "address[] the content and skills set forth in the course description." What it says is that teachers are free to teach the material how they like.
IF the test requires students to "imitate the dogmatic thinking," then I will be the first to agree with you. But note that that would only happen in free response questions, and one cannot assume that there will be any free response questions on the topics at issue.
I take issue with your statement that doing well on the exam is the ultimate point of any AP class. It wasn't when I taught an AP class, and any teacher who thinks it is the point should be reassigned, if not fired.
Well, you (I think at least partly correctly!) identified the DeSantis administration's arguably unprincipled motivations, but you did not actually call out his opponents' straightforwardly equal-but-opposite arguably unprincipled motivations. Even the Twitter link you provided to Florida's specified objections is a Tweet deriding those objections as obvious wrongthink. All I did was make the hypocrisy explicit.
To the best of my understanding, this is only if CRT topics are taught about, not if they are presented as correct. As far as I have seen, nothing in the AP readings seems to accommodate the possibility that any of these claims are wrong. There are not even readings from, say, black scholars like Clarence Thomas or Thomas Sowell. Not even a pretense of ideological neutrality is evident in the selection of materials.
Presumably one cannot assume that there will not be any free response questions on the topics at issue, either, so this seems to be an obvious case of "the College Board should have been clearer, then, so the fault continues to lie with them."
Look, I love to tell my own students how intrinsically valuable learning is, too, but I am not stupid. The vast majority of them take my classes because I am an obstacle imposed between them and where they want to be. Students who take AP classes out of nothing but inquiring interest are lovely and wonderful, but if you're not doing your best to help your students score well on their AP exams, then you are doing at least many, and probably most of them a grave disservice. They would not be doing the work that AP courses demand, if they did not anticipate a reward in the form of legible credit towards their upcoming university matriculation and education.
As it happens, I did not read the Twitter thread. I posted that link because that is where I found the letter. It is not on the FL DOE's news page, nor does it come up when I search for "African American Studies" in their webpage.
As I have pointed out repeatedly, the AP course description accommodates the possibility that they are wrong by leaving it up to the teacher to decide how to cover the material.
Obviously. The point is that your assumption that the test requires parroting of ideas re the topics is based on a mistaken premise.
Who said anything about "nothing but inquiring interest"? A course that improves the skills students will need to succeed in college is a course which provides rewards to students, even if it does not provide the more tangible, yet far less valuable, reward of college credit.
"I didn't read the stuff I linked everyone to" is certainly some kind of response, sure.
I didn't assume anything--I only identified an uneliminated possibility. The possibility itself was objectionable. The College Board's failure to eliminate the possibility is where the objection is grounded. Thus "it's merely possible, not certain" is no answer at all.
Sorry, I charitably assumed there was an interesting point underneath what I took to be kind of a silly one (firing AP teachers for teaching toward success on the AP test). The putative intrinsic value of learning seems like at least a potentially interesting topic.
The idea that incrementally improving general study skills is somehow a more valuable reward than college credit seems odd to me, given that the point of success in college is, for most students, more college credit! In particular, AP courses are a chance to cut down on the number of years students need to spend paying university tuition. If our time is the most valuable thing we humans have, then helping your students secure credit in advance is surely at least as valuable as incrementally improving their study skills--which many will never use again after college, alas. (And if you do think that is tragic, then of course--see my point about the intrinsic value of learning.)
The link was to the FL DOE document posted there. Why would I read the idiot comments re the document on some Twitter feed, if the point was to provide the document itself? The real mystery is why you think it was some sort of "gotcha" to note the existence of said idiot comments. How are they relevant to the issue?
Except that my entire point is that the FL DOE claims that it is certain, and that they are wrong.
I didn't say that it is more valuable.* I simply noted that even a student has no intellectual interest in anything at all, but rather whose only goal is getting a college degree as easily as possible might well enroll in a class which improves academic skills even if it did not offer a chance to acquire college credit.
*In the eyes of the student, that is.
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Was the end of this just a silly throwaway joke, or did I miss something in the syllabus? "Black-Queer-Feminist" seems to be thoroughly covered, but the closest thing I see to socialist or communist thought is the inclusion of "racial capitalism" in a list of forms of racism, and without looking deeper at the texts I can't tell whether this is a case of an adjective being used for association or just for categorization.
Reportedly, one of the concerns Florida expressed is that Robin D.G. Kelley, specifically, advocates for communism. But more broadly, "critical theory" is largely the new phrase people use to refer to theories that used to be called "cultural Marxism" before people decided that phrase referred to anti-Semitic conspiracy theories instead of, you know, the huge body of academic work by people who literally called themselves cultural Marxists.
Somewhat ironically, it is the critical notion of "intersectionality" that gave rise to the sense that people can't talk about e.g. feminism or racism without also being "allies" for every other "progressive" cause (or at least every other progressive cause with a stripe on the flag). But the moment Florida says "we really don't like communism" suddenly everyone is supposed to accept that Kelley's work on communism is just cleanly separable from the other stuff Kelley wrote. It's a classic motte-and-bailey--which makes sense, given that it is ultimately a postmodernist critique, and the motte-and-bailey doctrine was specifically identified to critique postmodernism.
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I think this is double standard, as many actions are criminalized separately several times by different laws. For example, consider the anti-lynching bills: nothing they make illegal was legal before, but they are still passed with only conservative objecting.
I don't understand what you are referring to. I was referring to the "Stop WOKE Act," which, contrary to what people on both sides have claimed, does not forbid the teaching of CRT-adjacent concepts "as part of a larger course of training or instruction, provided such training or instruction is given in an objective manner without endorsement of the concepts."
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