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The Washington Post reports: Florida schools drop AP Psychology after state says it violates the law, a good example of the media getting as close to lying as you can get while still remaining in not-quite-lying territory.
As far as I know, this all started last Thursday, when the College Board issued a statement regarding its AP Psychology course and Florida law. In this statement, the College Board wrote: "The state has said districts are free to teach AP Psychology only if it excludes any mention of [content on sexual orientation and gender identity]."
Citation (desperately) needed! Contrary to what the College Board says, I have been unable to find any source on the internet prior to the College Board's statement corroborating their claim about what the Florida department of education requires. The Washington Post claims that the statement was based on a "conference call" between the board of education and school superintendents, but again, I have found no stories where the reporter interviews someone involved in the call in order to confirm the College Board's characterization of what was said.
On the contrary, on Friday, the day after the College Board published its statement, the director of the Florida Department of Education wrote a letter to the school superintendants, clarifying that
As far as I know, this letter is the only official statement from the Florida Department of Education regarding the application of the Parental Rights in Education ("Don't Say Gay") law to the teaching of AP Psychology. And yet a google search of "ap psychology Florida" returns headline after headline of major news outlets reporting the College Board's interpretation of this law as if Florida had gone out and "banned" the teaching of AP Psychology in its schools.
Without knowing anything about the conference call (because no reporter bothered to check), I have to caveat that maybe Florida did suggest that some parts of AP Psychology could not be taught, only to backtrack after being called out by the College Board. But for me, it seems like a dishonest characterization of the law intended to make Florida and DeSantis look bad.
EDIT:
Okay, having done a bit more research by going back to read the College Board's previous statements on this matter, I have to admit that my characterization was mistaken. In particular, in their June statement on the AP Psychology course, they reference correspondence from the Florida Department of Education Office of Articulation (what a name!), asking the College Board to affirm that their AP Psychology course conforms to the new Florida law. Still not a "ban," but definitely the College Board is not engaged in the unprovoked attack on Florida that I was imagining. There was definitely some provocation.
I do still think this is more about grandstanding by the College Board than a straightforward application of the law, but I was wrong in thinking that the College Board was one-sidedly attacking the Florida Department of Education.
This is super weird. The College Board appears to be flat-out grandstanding; their interpretation of the Florida law, even assuming they are not being disingenuous for purely culture war reasons, is in absolutely no way binding on Florida residents. They're not a court, or a legislature. They are, if anything, arguably engaged in the unauthorized practice of law by giving legal advice to schoolteachers and administrators.
But then, apparently, some number of school districts have chosen to believe the College Board (or pretend to believe the College Board) over and above the advice of the Florida Department of Education. This is mind-boggling, like telling the President of the U.S. to fuck off because Google told you what the law really is. The district statement linked in the article says:
But the College Board is a private company that assigns AP credit entirely on the basis of a single exam. Eligibility to take the exam is not limited to students enrolled in "approved" AP classes! According to the registration page, "If you’re homeschooled or you go to a school that doesn’t administer AP Exams, you’ll need to arrange to take exams at a local school that does administer them." So long as some private school in Florida is approved by the College Board to administer the AP Psychology exam, there's nothing stopping students from pursuing that credit even if the College Board makes good on its threat, which it seems unlikely to do. And as I understand it, no AP class can cover all possible material anyway; the AP teachers I know are constantly working to guess what items will appear on the exam in which years, so as to better focus their lesson planning.
Basically, someone on the College Board appears to have decided to grandstand, and a whole bunch of gullible educators are now being used as props in an institutional campaign against Ron DeSantis, who doesn't even appear well-positioned to get the nomination at this point. I would be very interested in thoughts on how the College Board can be punished for this defection from the standard that educational advantages should not be denied to children based solely on the political identity of their state's governor.
EDIT:
Here is the relevant language from the letter the Florida people sent to the College Board in May:
So a government body says to a private company "hey, you're an important participant in our state's education program, but our new state law may have some influence on how that continues in the future. Can we get you to jump through some hoops so we can keep doing business with you?" And the private company responds, "[we] will not modify our courses."
It's really important to notice that wasn't the question! The letter raised the possibility of modification, but did not actually request it; what it requested was an audit ensuring compliance with state law, which is a perfectly normal request when dealing with private parties participating in public education. If I were running the College Board, my immediate response would be "Just conducted a content audit; seems to me that all the material in our course is age-appropriate for 9-12 graders. You might consider adding a permission/informed consent slip for parents to sign just in case, throw in some language about them agreeing that the material is age appropriate. Pleasure doing business!"
So yeah, this does look like it was a pretty one-sided attack from the College Board.
Quite a number of these sorts of CW issues, especially in Florida recently, seem to take the form of partisans from one side intentionally taking uncharitable readings of (admittedly often vague) laws enacted by the other side's lawmakers.
Legislature bans sexual content in elementary school libraries? Better make sure we clear out the most milquetoast books fitting that description and shout about how they're banning books. They aren't necessarily wrong about how the content limits are to be enforced (doubly so since they'd be the ones to blame if the content was found objectionable), but at the same time I think most reasonable people would agree that the collected works of Hugo finalist Chuck Tingle aren't appropriate for elementary school libraries.
Unfortunately I'm not aware of a better answer than more explicitly (heh) codifying exactly what is and is not allowed. But at the same time there is a reason for the "I know it when I see it" standard: it's not clear that sharp lines can be drawn at all.
This is the good old malicious compliance technique. You want to cut our budgets? We will find the program working with most sympathetic, most photogenic and most poor orphans and start cuts there, while crying "oh why you hate orphans so much!". You want to regulate our content? We find the most innocent content and maliciously misunderstand the rules to ban it, then go and complain to the local press. You want to inspect our programs? We'll ask you to sign off on every typo fix in every booklet, and then complain you're blocking us from fixing typoes because you hate education and want the students to be illiterate. And so on. It's a war, after all, even if just a culture war.
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This is a particularly astute comparison given that extant "obscenity" laws are only constitutional (if at all) based on a "community standards" approach. I have a vague memory of a case where someone (in Utah maybe?) was charged with obscenity and beat the charge by showing evidence that people in the community watched more porn than they cared to publicly admit. Post-Ashcroft, obscenity laws are what remain to regulate stuff like computer-generated or hand-drawn pornography that people wish was illegal, but is in many contexts protected by the First Amendment.
The alternative to explicitly codifying everything down to the letter, is to have a homogeneous community culture (or, perhaps, to have such a radically heterogeneous culture that no single group's values ever meaningfully interfere with the others). What we have in the U.S. today is, I think, increasingly just two cultures, violently competing for the upper hand. Each of these cultures is cheerfully authoritarian, with little inclination toward compromise (and, maybe, less such inclination with each passing day). Without recognizable "community standards" to govern these things, indeed with substantial numbers of people being directly contrarian about the very existence of community standards, I'm not sure that even explicit codification will suffice as a solution.
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