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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.
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")
Earlier, you cite the College Board saying:
This is the measure. The correlation between being an AP student and doing well in college. So they made a target of "number of AP students", under the assumptions that "being an AP student" causes "doing well in college". But by making it a target, they change the incentive structure around "becoming an AP student" which means that the old correlation doesn't necessarily hold anymore, and given general trends in the incentives of large organizational structures, that change will probably be in an undesirable direction (probably "more AP students don't do well in college").
An alternative phrasing of Goodhart's Law might be "There are no cost-free optimizations in matured systems. The very act of attempting an optimization imposes costs elsewhere in the system." If you want to increase the number of AP students, there will be side-effects somewhere else in the system (because the system consists of people who react to the rules change) that will hamper or ruin the purpose of the increase. Check the wiki page for the alternative formulations and corollaries, I think the concept quite widely applicable.
On the more general topic of "large organization logic", this is probably driven by someone(s) in management who needs a measurable goal to point to the next time they apply for a promotion, and this is a number whose increase can be justified with facially plausible logic. Those people probably don't much care if "being an AP student" becomes less predictive of "doing well in college", because that almost certainly won't come up during the VP interview.
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