A Few Reflections on the AP African American History Clash

Education Next

Frederick Hess, executive editor of HKS’s Education Next and a faculty associate with Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance, weighs in on the College Board’s AP African American studies course. As he explains, “The Florida clash wasn’t really about whether to offer AP African American history but to what degree historical instruction should be explicitly political, and whether students should be allowed to encounter skeptics, competing voices, or conservative perspectives.”

After the pilot framework “ran afoul of Florida law banning critical race theory and indoctrination in public schools…which featured one-sided takes on topics like reparations, Black Lives Matter, and intersectionality,” a new framework was put forth by the College Board. Critics were outraged, claiming that Black history is being erased by Florida’s Governor DeSantis. “For his part, DeSantis noted that Florida law actually mandates that African American history be taught in schools and said the issue wasn’t a matter of history but of ideological agendas.”

According to Hess, “In furiously denouncing revisions which trimmed out advocacy-based introductions to Critical Race Theory, Queer Theory, Black Lives Matter, and reparations…[critics] give lie to previous attacks on DeSantis… It turns out that he was right to criticize the course for commingling history and advocacy; his critics are now conceding that was the point.”

In its revision, the course’s final framework, “seeks to respect the distinction between history and the ideological agendas that currently predominate in the academy.”

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