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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.
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.
Goodhart's law is irrelevant. I meant that the ultimate goal was to get African-American students to do better in college. The College Board's theory is that any exposure to college-level curriculum in high school helps students do better in college. They claim, "Research consistently shows that AP students are better prepared for college than students who don’t take AP, regardless of their exam score. They’re more likely to enroll and stay in college, do well in their classes, and graduate in four years." Whether that is true or not, of course, is a different question.
I don't know what you mean by "inventing" AP bullshit, since colleges do offer AfAm Studies courses. And is it any more bullshit than AP Drawing? Or AP Art History?
That's exactly what Goodhart's Law is for. Being an AP student seems to be a good measure, in that it appears to predict college success, so we make a target of "number of AP students" under the assumption that there's a causal relationship in this correlation (AP classes cause better college outcomes), while failing to account for other explanations like selection effects (students more likely to do well in college are more likely to take AP classes).
That is not an example of Goodhart's law. Goodhart's law is about when a measure becomes an end in itself. Here, the end is college success, not AP enrollment. What you are talking about is potential reverse causation. And, FWIW, researchers are obviously aware of selection effects and other potential confounders. Whether they successfully adjust therefor is a different question, but one can't tell without looking at the actual research, which you have not done.
And the point is not that AP enrollment actually increases college success, but rather that the College Board thinks it does (or has conveniently convinced itself that it does). My point was about the College Board's motive, not the value of the course (I would think, for example, that the effect of taking an AP course on future college success would depend on the course in question. I would hypothesize, for example, that taking AP Calculus would have a greater effect than would taking AP Art. The effect would also, I would expect, vary based on the student and school in question, including the socioeconomic and English language learner status of the student).
Goodhart's Law is
That is exactly what's happening here. "Being an AP student" is a measure, and they want to increase the thing that it measures, so they set a target of "more AP students". This will probably mean that "being an AP student" will be less useful as a predictor of future success. Because people involved, who are responsible for meeting the target, will be heavily incentivized to cut corners and take the easiest path to meeting the target.
Or is willing to pretend it does, etc, etc. It's still a solid example of Goodhart, unless there is rock solid reason to think that AP classes actually increase college success. Because the most likely scenario (because it's the easiest, most reliable method) is that more AP students will come from the pool of more marginal students who will do less well in college. Just like "high school graduate" no longer reliably implies basic literacy or numeracy; the easiest, most reliable way to bump the numbers for "college graduate" is just to stop having standards.
Again, the end is not "being an AP student." It is a means to the end of "success in college." The College Board is not defining "success in college" as "taking AP courses in HS" (unlike, as you note, those who define "success in high school" as "getting a diploma", which is indeed an example of Goodhart's law. It is absolutely incorrect to say, as you do, that the College Board is using "Being an AP student" as a measure of college success.
Note that I am NOT saying that offering the class is a good idea or bad idea, nor that offering the class will or will not increase student success in college, as should be clear from what I said. Either offering the course will ultimately increase AfAm students success in college, or it won't. We obviously don't know yet, and the CB might well be basing its belief on false premises. But it is clearly not an example of Goodhart's law.
Right, I said that: "or has conveniently convinced itself that it does")
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