Should Florida Have Veto Power Over the National African American Studies Curriculum?
Does the Black Lives Matter movement belong in that syllabus? Or Critical Race Theory? Is Black Conservatism an essential element, more important than the work of leading contemporary scholars in the field?
Florida has views. The College Board has ears.
Guest Post author John Farago was a college classmate. He was one of the founders of CUNY Law School, where he is now Emeritus Professor. He told me that many years ago he "played an infinitesimal role in wringing the last little spark of imagination out of the LSAT Writing Sample."
Guest Post by John Farago
One has to think like a College Board android to see that the path they walked to the release of the Black Studies AP curriculum is actually pretty well trodden, familiar, and business-as-usual for the CB, and perhaps rightly so.
The College Board, among other things oversees the entire AP testing program, and that includes the content outlines for the subject areas tested and the design and implementation of the tests themselves. They have a self-perceived mission to see to it that their tests are reliable, fair, and equitable to all constituencies that find themselves locked into angst-filled high school testing venues seeking to prove something to someone about their intellectual precocity.
Those designing the tests believe, as an article of what amounts to their own version of faith, that one should never endorse any curriculum component that might make even one student feel unsafe or even uncomfortable. They got to this place, back as far as the 1980s or before, out of an admirable sensitivity and response to the charge that their tests and curricula were culturally biased. They were concerned that their tests could alienate students who were raised in a culture that was not consonant with the premises of the discomfiting stimulus. They didn't want to write biased tests, or tests that reinforced the existing cultural hierarchies. In order to be fair to all, they tried to avoid questions and curricula that assumed that any one set of cultural values are the "right" ones. It’s a hard choice to repudiate.
This inevitably leads, however, to a flattening and blandification of the questions on all of their standardized tests, especially the essay questions, and by extension to the relentless regression toward uncontroversial content for the subject outlines for the subject-area-driven ones. They established curricula for AP classes that scrupulously avoid putting any analytic framework forward as uniquely valid and that jettison anything that makes waves.
The College Board got into writing curricula because if you are going to test someone on something it seems essential to fairness that they know what they’ll be tested on and have an opportunity to study the content of the test (and by extension that teachers be able to teach to the test, however deadening that may be to classroom colloquy). Hiding the content ball under a mainstream cultural bushel would advantage those who are already advantaged and only perpetuate the disparities of a stratified educational system. To fight against this you design and publish the content outlines, levelling the playing field and inexorably flattening the variability, vibrance, and engagement of the subject domain.
Weirdly, a concern for fairness walks hand in hand with a commitment to drabness.
For those who can recall being excited about the emergence of African American Studies, of critical scholarship about race and of privilege, about the emerging awareness of the validity and utility of concepts like institutional racism and Critical Race Theory, the adrenaline rush came in part from their divergence, their iconoclasm, their rarefied paradigms that functioned as secret handshakes.
But that ain’t the stuff of which AP test curricula are made, and the several rounds of test and curriculum design and study and tweaking and revision each serve to bulldoze the finished product into inoffensive blah.
It's not just the College Board that engages in this mix of flattening and adaptation, but virtually all major textbook publishers who work closely with state boards and departments of education to develop textbooks that are expressly designed to serve state-specific curriculum paradigms. And this isn't just social science textbooks. Publishers produce even science textbooks in versions that differ from state to state among the very large customer-states like NY, CA, FL, and TX. Even in relatively recent years publishers have understood that it makes no sense to publish a book that won’t get bought. Check out how evolution is handled in the textbooks sold to varying state systems.
What is distinctive in the case of Florida and the CB is not a textbook or curriculum publisher whoring up to a large state’s wishes. Rather it is that the state of Florida has overtly politicized its narrow-mindedness and parochialism, sacrificing fundamental academic values by mandating right and wrong modes of analysis and acceptable and banned areas of substantive content.
To be sure, every curriculum choice is ultimately political in nature. Curriculum channels students in one direction or another. But we are witnessing the subordination of the interests of the next generation to the current power-holders’ efforts to pander to a national media audience. It is one thing for a state attorney general to run for office by wielding prosecutorial discretion with both eyes on the media. It is another for the commissioner of education — whose constituents are too young to vote — to wield their power in order to stir voters’ worst prejudices.
DeSantis is, from the perspective of anyone who values academic freedom at all, loathsome, a frog not a prince. And the College Board is now and has always been motivated by the Prime Directive of being substantively inoffensive to any major constituency that announces itself. Nothing here is really out of character for any of the participants.
So it’s not that one caved in to the other, but rather that each, by simply following their most natural tendencies, have wound up conspiring to undermine academic freedom in the pursuit of academic righteousness, each blaming the other for the result.
Perhaps people haven't seen this, since it did not receive the same degree of media coverage as did the more controversial initial decision from Florida. Which is not to say it was not covered (otherwise, I wouldn't be able to choose between the links to it that I provide, below), only that it was not feature3d as prominently as were the words and actions of Ron DeSantis and the Florida Department of Education.
Three days ago (Sunday, 2/12), the College Board pushed back against the Florida Department of Education's "slander" of the AP course. In a lengthy statement of rebuttal, the CB said (amongst other things) that its reluctance to say something sooner was a mistake, and that "Our failure to raise our voice betrayed Black scholars everywhere and those who have long toiled to build this remarkable field.” The final course framework, released on February 1 (to coincide with Black History Month), did indeed include revisions and edits from the original field-test version. But, according to the CB, these edits had been made before Florida expressed its concerns. This should come as no surprise when the CB tells us that all it received from Florida was the letter stating it would not allow the course to be taught in Florida unless changes were made ... never was there any discussion about what was wrong with curricula material, or what changes should be made. “We had no negotiations about the content of this course with Florida or any other state, nor did we receive any requests, suggestions, or feedback,” the CB asserts.
Here is a link to one article describing the CB response; there are several others available: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/college-board-pushes-back-slander-florida-ap-history-course-rcna70484