A surprising number of people are convinced that the College Board, which administers AP tests, caved in to Ron DeSantis and the Florida Department of Education over their demands to water down the new African American Studies AP course. And maybe they did. God knows the College Board isn't above such things.
But I doubt it—at least in any substantial sense. This whole affair smells mostly like empty political grandstanding from DeSantis, with the evidence for this interpretation coming from his own hand. A few days ago the Florida DOE wrote a letter explaining their side of the story, and it tells us a few things:
- Their first communication of any kind related to course content was in July.
- The first meeting to discuss content was in November. There was another in December. There's no indication that the College Board took any action based on these meetings, and the course was all but complete by then anyway.
- There might be a memo somewhere outlining Florida's objections. If there is, they should make it public.
None of this is proof of anything one way or another. But if there were any evidence on Florida's side, I'm pretty sure it would have been in the letter. It's not. And in the face of conflicting evidence, if I had to choose between believing the College Board and believing Ron DeSantis, well....
Here's an annotated version of the letter if you want to judge for yourself.
Oh Kevin, are we back to not trusting Ron DeSantis and the state of Florida again? Yesterday, you insisted that the teachers and librarians of Florida could trust their own common sense in deciding which books were OK, including the bio of Clemente with just one reference to white people doing something bad in it. But today, we're all "if I had to choose between believing the College Board and believing Ron DeSantis, well...." Which is it? Can Floridians trust their state government's word or not? I mean, I know the answer to this... but you're the one having daily conflicts over whether we should respect what Ron says/does and whether he's committed some of the worst crimes against the Constitution and rule of law of any politician.
i think it's reasonable to
1) distrust desantis in general (that's a given really)
2) believe that in specific cases where desantis and another entity disagree, it may be more or less likely that it's desantis lying and
3) change in your opinion as you examine things in more detail
for a newspaper reporter the day to day vacillation would be less appropriate, but for kevin, on what is basically his personal blog where he throws out ideas and opinions pretty informally, i don't mind seeing his thoughts evolve.
as for whether kevin is actually correct on this, i really have no opinion
This is the best answer.
Since Kevin said none of the things you attribute to him I find your entire post to be worthless.
Where are links to the quotes in red pen?
"This DOE acts as a political apparatus."
I would love to know who said that, and what else they might have said.
Google thinks here:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/13/us/ap-black-studies-course-college-board-desantis.html
I don't have an access so didn't check.
Unlocked article. https://archive.ph/ya5Fa
Thanks!
"Articulation" in educational contexts refers to agreements, etc between schools, and levels of schooling, for example, community college to state 4-year schools.
Who teaches what? And at what level? What credits transfer? Who's on the hook for remediation? How do high schools fit into the landscape with dual enrolment programs?
That sort of thing. Most states have a body, or someone, who does this stuff, although in a small state like Maine it's probably one bod at the DoE.
When are educators (and other groups) going to stop talking in jargon? I still remember sitting through a 3rd grade open house in which the teacher kept talking about the cats. I knew she was talking about the standardized tests that were used in those days in my state —the California Achievement Test — but a lot of parents didn’t. I know that because I made a point of asking several of them if they knew what the teacher was talking about.
Journalists are also offenders, frequently using acronyms without explaining what they stand for.
From a Fordham Institute web page: "Articulation agreements are arrangements between secondary schools and colleges or universities that link high school–level courses to similar college courses." The word "articulation" is standard jargon in higher ed circles; I encountered it while on a statewide committee in Ohio to bring some standardization to freshman and sophomore college math offerings.
Oh, good to see Intersectionality as part of the debate. What is Intersectionality?
wikipedia: Intersectionality is an analytical framework for understanding how aspects of a person's social and political identities combine to create different modes of discrimination and privilege. ... [F]actors of advantage and disadvantage. ... include gender, caste, sex, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, religion, disability, weight, and physical appearance.
Wow, what a list! It includes everything, which means limitless possibilities for a person to find something they don't like. The very definition of enabling a grouch. Or sourpuss. Or scold. Especially a scold.
Look at all the axes you can play with to find, well, pretty much anything you want to, if you fiddle enough with the data. E.g. create your own polynomial with coefficients you choose in order to "prove" that community-college-educated, twice-married, overweight, left-handed, former Catholics who are descended from Catalonian immigrants are ... privileged? oppressed?
What's interesting is that the factors are restricted to the human - biology and culture - and not so much to the environment. Are people who grow up in blue states with robust government services privileged over those from red states? Of course they are. What should we do about that? Intersectionality is largely absent from that debate, if it's part of it at all.
Intersectionality has been around formally for nearly 40 years and there’s only one set of people who use that framework to concoct the kinds of absurd hypotheticals you pose here.
What about people who grew up in areas that are polluted by things like lead? Kevin has written extensively about the extensive evidence that lead exposure in childhood is correlated with lower IQ and impulse control/crime.
Here's how we know that they are BSing when they say that the course "includes content that may not be permissible" under FL law. FL HB7 says: “Paragraph (a) may not be construed to prohibit discussion of the concepts listed therein 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.” Hence, teaching the supposedly impermissible content is perfectly legal under FL law as long it is done so objectively.
Add to that the fact that the AP African American Studies course description say, as all AP course descriptions usually say, “Individual teachers are responsible for designing their own curriculum for AP courses and selecting appropriate college-level readings, assignments, and resources… The intention of this publication is to respect teachers’ time and expertise by providing a roadmap that they can modify and adapt to their local priorities and preferences.“
Moreover, they mean it. I have been to a few AP trainings, and they very much push the idea that there are no required readings and no required curriculum, and that teachers are responsible for choosing how to cover the material. The course description is not a curriculum; it is a list of topics and skills that the course includes, and there is not even a requirement that all topics be covered; the College Board is will aware that it is impossible to cover everything (in the case of AP AAS, there are 90+ topics, to be covered in fewer than 180 days (since all exams are given in the first 2 weeks of May).
I think it was over at Talking Points Memo a while ago where they mentioned this was probably just DeSantis grand standing. There was some circulation of information of was what being considered by the College Board, and then there was the final product. If someone from FL with connections to DeSantis was on the board that gave final approval--then he'd be aware of the changes--and decided to grand stand before the final versions were released publicly.
Like the rooster taking credit for the sunrise.
^^^ This. The Board may even have signalled verbally at the December meeting the changes they had decided to make to the pilot. Oldest trick in the book is to get private advance notice of something, publicly demand it be done, and then take credit for it.
Maybe I’m missing something but all I see here is the CB kowtowing or at least trying to. It shows CB seeking guidance and not finding any, they decide, for political reasons, to remove what they think are, the more objectionable aspects of their curriculum.
On Tuesday DeSantis threatened to eliminate all of the Advanced Placement programs not just the African American studies course. He does like picking fights with major institutions. Almost 200,000 Florida students take AP courses.
As a Florida resident, everyone here knows he was just blowing off steam. The AP courses aren't going anywhere.
Ron DeSantis is a big fan of AP. The more AP his high school students take, the less godless liberalism they will be exposed to in college. So it is no surprise that he doesn't want his AP students learning anything about racism, Jim Crow or slavery.
The College Board release states "FDOE first notified us on September 23, 2022, in a letter entitled "CB Letter AP Africain [sic] Studies.' " I fail to understand why none of the media coverage has mentioned that a governmental organization saying a course “lacks educational value” can't even spell its name. https://allaccess.collegeboard.org/our-commitment-ap-african-american-studies-scholars-and-field
Charlie Sykes at The Bulwark found this quote from the College Board: "We have made the mistake of treating FDOE with the courtesy we always accord to an education agency, but they have instead exploited this courtesy for their political agenda. After each written or verbal exchange with them, as a matter of professional protocol, we politely thanked them for their feedback and contributions, although they had given none."
The full letter is here. Whether or not the College Board "caved" to Desantis or FDOE, they seem not to feel Florida was being straight with them, nor doing much to assist in the process.
Worth pointing that College Board has now deleted that entire press release from their website due to the many false claims they made - https://popular.info/p/update-college-board-scrubs-website.
Kevin, CB's not a reliable actor here. I highly recommend reading Jon Boeckenstedt (the VP for Enrollment Management at Oregon State and a hugely respected voice in college admission) at Slate here: https://slate.com/human-interest/2023/02/college-board-ap-florida-curriculum.html.
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