You've probably heard that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has banned the new AP African American test because it is "inexplicably contrary to Florida law and significantly lacks educational value." No further explanation or detail was provided, so nobody knows precisely what this means.
However, if you're curious about which sections of the test probably offend DeSantis, here's a very short summary of several sections from Unit 4 of the class curriculum:
I don't know much about these subjects, nor am I familiar with most of the authors who are recommended reading. However, other people do, and this is likely the battleground they'll be fighting on.
One way to get past the ban would be for some university to offer a MOOC on Afro-American studies specifically designed to prepare students for the AP test. Harvard would be the best choice, since it has the resources to do an excellent job, it has the prestige, and it is already heavily involved with the leading MOOC platform, edX.
If Florida public schools won't allow the College Board to administer the exam, it should be possible to find alternative sites or offer a proctored examination online.
The university would need to support the course after it developed it; not just put together a package and throw it onto a web site, but have a TA monitor the course and make a technical expert available to resolve any system problems. So there would be an ongoing expense.
If some university wanted to do this, I'm willing to send then $100 to help develop and support the course. I may even take it myself. It would be worth the money just to spite Governor DeSantis.
Start making more money weekly. This is valuable part time work for everyone. The best part ,work from the comfort of your house and get paid from $10k-$20k each week . Start today and have your first cash at the end of this week. Visit this article
for more details.. https://createmaxwealth.blogspot.com/
In most schools, AP classes count for high school credit as well as possible college credit. After all, students only have so much time in the school day, and have to earn a minimum number of credits. Providing an online AP test that will not count for any high school credit, and may not count for college credit, is going to be a satisfactory alternative for very few students.
OTOH, Florida offers Early College classes, part of a program where high school students can enroll in some college classes -- either at a local college or by having a college instructor teach a section at their high school. This has steadily been gaining popularity at the expense of AP classes. Early College classes are offered by Florida colleges and count for college credit. It would be interesting to see Gov. DeSantis ban high school students from taking classes offered by Florida colleges!
Back in the 1980s I took the AP US History test without having taken AP History and scored 5 out of 5 - at the time VA Tech gave me credit for the entire 3 quarter entry level US history sequence. I've read now though that colleges are getting stricter with offering credit for AP classes even in some cases when students have scored 5 out of 5.
Notice that the letter from the FL Dept of Ed's internal "Office of Articulation" was not signed by an individual?
Also too funny that they were unable to articulate supposed reasons why the curriculum violates FL law, instead just saying it "inexplicably" does
I don't think "inexplicably" means what they think it does.
Inconceivable!
"I don't know much about these subjects ..."
The first thing you need to know about any subject involving people in positions of power is whether they care about the effect of their use of that power on the people whose lives are being influenced by that use, as Biden obviously does, or whether they think of those lives as relevant only to the extent that they are an opportunity to be exploited and/or a threat to be neutralized, as DeSantis obviously does. All else is merely technical detail informing how much better things are likely to get with the former and how much worse things are likely to get with the latter.
Thanks for the edit function.
I doubt any of those things in particular offended Republicans/DeSantis. The very concept of the course is probably what offends them.
APs being optional who cares? What f’in moron.
I wonder about the format here--is it similar to other AP topics? From what little I know about the example texts mentioned, there's little recognition of diverse voices, which bothers me.
It sound to me like the letter was written by somebody that did not agree with it, but was told to write it from above.
That would explain the lack of signature and the language which seems to be intentionally dumb.
What offends them is that it has anything to do with African Americans, the eternal grit in their oyster for which no pearl will ever appear.
Exactly. That's some monumental guilt trip, which of course must be taken out on the actual victims.
I'll venture a guess that "inexplicably" was actually meant to be "inextricably", and that it was an error of dictation.
Your first point is, clearly, almost certainly correct. Your second point, however, uhhh, not so much. After all, this is only a minor usage mistake (both words can actually be correctly used in that sentence even if the meaning is vastly different) from the people who rail against wonton killings, refer to peach tree dishes, call for marshal law, and decry (unforgettably) the gazpacho police.
After all: "“You’ve got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know … morons.” They are also people who have never heard of Gutenberg and would probably believe it if told that books were produced by hand by monks, since they never seen one except, maybe, Right Wing Conspiracy Theories for Dummies.
Agreed, except that's "morans".
DeSatan knows his voters. They are not nice people. Not a one. You really can’t govern a place this dysfunctional. Eventually this will all end in disaster.
End in disaster, as in "see recent news on Antarctic Ice Sheet and Greenland glaciers." I wouldn't mind seeing th4 end of Florida as a political force, but it's also got the Everglades and other ecological treasures that rising seas would destroy. And let's not forget NASA. It's located in FL so as to be closer to the Equator.
And lest I forget, all the people there, many of whom are not wingnuts...
I wasn’t thinking of climate disaster, though that seems inevitable at this point. I was more thinking along the lines of social chaos when Republicans get more power and actually use it to harass and attack the rest of us. They are getting warmed up. Admittedly, this silly thing is very trivial and affects practically no one. I’m not sure why the media is even paying attention to it.
Everyone one is acting out… from my local news in Michigan:
Last December, Hamilton tweeted:
“Whiteness is so evil, it manipulates then says I won’t apologize for my dishonesty and trauma inducing practices and thinks you should applaud it for being honest about its ability to manipulate and be dishonest..
About DeSantis's claim that the AP course is "inexplicably (sic) contrary to Florida law," I suppose he's referring to the Stop WOKE Act he signed last year.
A federal court issued an injunction blocking enforcement of the law because it violates the First and Fourteenth Amendments.
From that injunction:
“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen,” and
the powers in charge of Florida’s public university system have declared the state has unfettered authority to muzzle its professors in the name of "freedom.” ... The law officially bans professors from expressing disfavored viewpoints in university classrooms while permitting unfettered expression of the opposite viewpoints. Defendants argue that, under this Act, professors enjoy “academic freedom” so long as they express only those viewpoints of which the State approves. This is positively dystopian. It should go without saying that ‘[i]f liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.’”
The law would make it difficult for professors and teachers to teach American history lessons about slavery and other racial injustice without fearing loss of their jobs or prosecution. Meanwhile, students are mandated to learn about the suffering inflicted by communist regimes under Stalin, Mao, and Castro.
DeSantis is a clear and present danger to the idea of academic freedom. Schools that teach an ideological curriculum to satisfy the government regime in power is a far bigger threat than the isolated incidents we here about at places like Hamline.
"here about"?
Oops. My 5 minutes is up.
The Gleichschaltung of Florida's public schools is advancing apace.
I don't support government bans on certain curricula, but given how low-quality the broader AP U.S. History curriculum and exam are, I am reluctant to expand the awarding of college credit for taking high school level courses.
"Low-quality" comopared to what? APUSH is a much more demanding course than most freshman-level undergraduate level history courses. The topics covered are as comprehensive as any US history survey I've seen. See https://apstudents.collegeboard.org/courses/ap-united-states-history
I don't teach the course any more, but I used to. It was impossible to teach it all due to time constraints, so students had to master quite a bit of content on their own to do well on the exam. As for college credit, that's a mixed bag. I've been to public and private colleges as an undergraduate and the APUSH course I taught was in the middle in terms of difficulty. The DBQ section is famously hard.
Are they going out of their way to reverse their recent progress with Black voters?
Also, I'm stating the obvious here, but DeSantis is only going to grow meaner, pettier and more vile as we approach the GOP primaries. Support of the MAGA base must be nailed down if he is to be the nominee. Should make for a highly Fascistic 2023 in the Sunshine State.
It is perfectly explicable; Ron DeSantis has presidential ambitions and the theater over CRT is a bullhorn to the white supremacists that DeSantis is their man, just as the hand ringing over "grooming" is a call out to the religious bigots. DeSantis learned the lessons of Trumpism that they don't teach at Yale and Harvard.
This point is too cynical for a newspaper or any respectable publication, where the fiction of the "sane Republican" must be maintained at all costs.
But it's true. DeSantis, like many R pols, targets the groups hated by the most hateful and bigoted people because they are now the people who get to decide in the Republican Party.
Odd that the selected Topics ended-up in an order different than they appear in the source.
I have no idea whether the percentage of DeSantis's complaints that are justified are 0%, 1%, or higher. But Stanley Kurtz in National Review has been providing extensive detail on what he thinks is wrong with the program. I suspect what he's been writing about is much of what DeSantis's Department of Education would be complaining about.
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/neo-marxing-the-college-board-with-ap-african-american-studies/
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/desantis-ap-african-american-studies-program-violates-florida-law/
About NR:
1. A federal court has issued an injunction blocking FL's Stop Woke Act bc it violates the 1st & 14th Amendments. To claim the AP course violates a law that's (as it is now) unenforceable and unconstitutional is a ludicrous argument. No one should take that claim seriously.
2. NR can critique some of the suggested writings, but so what? The purpose of the course is to expose students to a wide range of viewpoints that offer important perspectives on the subject. Among the authors of the commonly used texts: W.E.B. DuBois, MLK, Jr., Frederick Douglass, Langston Hughes, Thomas Jefferson, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Booker T. Washington, Malcolm X. How do you teach about the African American experience without engaging with these and other writers? Students are not required to agree with everything they read. The authors themselves have differing views. The purpose of education is not to indoctrinate students with a government-approved list of "correct" viewpoints. It is to open students to different ideas and let them reason through them.
Back when I was in school, our governor had better things to do than stick his nose into what we were learning in the classroom. I remember required reading as diverse as Karl Marx and Ayn Rand, and a host of "philosophers" from Nietzsche to Jesus Christ. Some, if not all, were radical in one way or another. We also read Orwell, who offered a warning about what happens to society with people like DeSantis in charge.
I see nothing wrong with the curriculum.
God forbid that highly-capable high school seniors (many of whom are adults) actually read the texts that inform current political debate.
DeSantis is a pathetic, racist thug.