‘Cowering to politics’: how AP African American studies became the most controversial course in the US

Keziah Ridgeway says teaching African American history is about “being the teacher that I never had”. The Philadelphia public high school teacher remembers growing up learning a “sanitized” version of Black history: MLK, Rosa Parks, maybe Malcolm X. It wasn’t until she pursued a degree in history and “began to read everything I could get my hands on” that she realized how much she had been missing. “African American history, when taught correctly, creates critical thinkers. And it creates children who question: ‘Why are things the way that they are in society?’”

Offered in some form at most US colleges and universities, African American studies – an interdisciplinary field that examines the history, culture and politics of Black Americans – isn’t always found in high school curriculums.

That could change soon thanks to a new advanced placement (AP) exam by the College Board, the country’s largest standardized test company. High schools are incentivized to offer their AP courses because many colleges and universities grant students credit for passing marks on AP exams. But few AP courses have been as divisive as this one.

AP African American studies is the product of nearly a decade of work by the College Board, prominent African American studies scholars and high school educators. A pilot version of the course is being taught by 60 teachers across the country, and the exam won’t officially launch until 2025.

But it became a heated national controversy last month after Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, vowed to block schools from teaching the course, saying it violated state law and “significantly lacks educational value”. The Florida education department then cited examples in the pilot of what it termed “woke indoctrination” that would run afoul of recently passed Florida laws that clamp down on class discussions about racism.

Among the things Florida objected to: the course’s discussions on reparations, queer studies, feminist thought and intersectionality – referring to the way various systems of oppression are interconnected. The state also singled out the inclusion of writings by Black scholars like Angela Davis (for being a “self-avowed Communist and Marxist”), bell hooks (for using the phrase “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy”), and Kimberlé Crenshaw, who coined the term “intersectionality” to describe the way different forms of oppression interconnect.

That led to another firestorm last week, when the College Board published a revised framework for the course – on the first day of Black History Month – with those scholars’ writings removed, along with all other secondary sources. The new version also changed Black Lives Matter from a required to an optional topic, and added “Black conservatism” as a potential research subject.

The blowback was swift. David J Johns, executive director of the National Black Justice Coalition, called the move “infuriating”. Crenshaw said that the revisions were reinforcing a system of “segregated education” in the country. Ta-Nehisi Coates, another prominent intellectual struck from the course, said the College Board shouldn’t have to bend to politicians who “just want a curriculum that makes people feel comfortable and feel good about themselves”.

The College Board quickly issued a statement denying that the changes were politically motivated, claiming that it had finalized its revisions before DeSantis’s rebuke. However, on Thursday, a leaked letter from the Florida department of education claimed the College Board had been in consistent contact with the DeSantis administration about the course.

The letter details numerous complaints made by the administration to the College Board about the teaching of topics such as intersectionality and the social construction of race, claiming that they would not comply with Florida law.

The College Board issued a letter of its own denying that the concerns of the administration had in any way shaped the course changes. It said: “We never received written feedback from the Florida education department specifying how the course violates Florida law, despite repeated requests.”

Then, in a slightly frantic PR strategy, the College Board released a new letter on Saturday acknowledging it had made “mistakes in the rollout that are being exploited” but wanted to “clear the air and set the record straight”. It went on to accuse the Florida education department of “slander” and said scholarly articles were still to be added to the course.

“We should have made clear that contemporary events like the Black Lives Matter movement, reparations, and mass incarceration were optional topics in the pilot course,” it wrote, adding that “Florida is attempting to claim a political victory by taking credit retroactively for changes we ourselves made but that they never suggested to us.”

This robust, at times enraged statement, is a contrast in tone to a New York Times interview given by David Coleman, the head of the College Board, on 1 February. Then he justified the removal of works by contemporary Black scholars by saying students might struggle to connect with secondary sources by theorists as they were “quite dense”.

Despite what the College Board now says, earlier versions of the syllabus included structural racism, racial capitalism, mass incarceration, reparations, intersectionality and Black Lives Matter as required topics. Later revisions do downgrade these topics to optional, while introducing other new optional topics like Black conservatism.

Ridgeway, the Philadelphia public high school teacher, called that “a cop-out”. Her students learn better by reading both primary and secondary sources, and removing scholars like Davis, hooks and Crenshaw would only lead back to the same kind of depoliticized history she was taught growing up, she says. And even if theoretical texts might be dense, teachers can find ways to make them more accessible. “How dare you deprive them of the opportunity to learn from different perspectives of incredible intellectuals within the field?”

Ronda Taylor Bullock, a former high school teacher who now runs We Are, a non-profit that provides antiracism training for children, parents and educators, agrees: “The changes that are happening aren’t edits – they’re the erasure of Black voices, Black academics, Black experiences. It’s cowering to white supremacy, cowering to political power, versus recognizing the academic merits of how the curriculum was from the beginning.”

But one teacher who has been teaching the pilot course says the uproar is overblown. Melissa Tracy, a Delaware charter school teacher among the 60 chosen for the trial by the College Board, says she’s “still in the process of digesting the new changes”, which “are to be expected in a pilot”. The course is no different than any other AP course she’s taught, “and you can supplement your curriculum as needed with secondary sources, projects, et cetera. That’s always been the case with AP since day one, since I started teaching AP in 2008.”

It’s also not the first time that an AP course has been caught in a political maelstrom. In 2014, the Republican National Committee blasted a framework for AP US history as anti-American, saying it “emphasizes negative aspects of our nation’s history while omitting or minimizing positive aspects”. That prompted the College Board to issue a revised framework emphasizing that teachers would have leeway to develop their own examples for the course.

Adam Laats, a historian of American education, argues that the College Board isn’t so much making political choices as market calculations. “The company makes $96 per student, per test. And the company just wants the maximum number of people to take the maximum number of tests. So they’re bowing to the market pressure that the political pressure represents.”

Laats says the College Board’s revisions to AP African American studies reflect its formula for developing products: “The College Board tends to move to the middle in terms of what is already accepted as standard knowledge. In the first draft, they try to hit the middle of the academic community, and then they plan to move to the middle of broader society with the second.”

The influence of the college board on US education is on some teachers’ minds. “People are asking more questions about the validity of the College Board, or whether to even support them at this point, considering how they’ve shifted so quickly after the criticism,” Bullock says.

Ridgeway says she’s undecided as to whether she will teach the course at her school when it’s offered, though she’s signed up for a training. “But if a lot of it is whitewashed or incorrect, I would be very leery about teaching the material and will probably end up supplementing with my own reading.”

Delaware charter school teacher Tracy hopes the skeptics will give the course a chance. She says she’s gotten overwhelmingly positive feedback: “Some of my students are actually frustrated with what is happening in other parts of the country, because they truly believe that all students should have access to the course,” she says. “I have some students who have commented: ‘This is the first time I really see myself in the social studies curriculum.’”

And not just the students, but their families. At the beginning of the school year, she spotted one student on her cellphone during the class: “I said: ‘Hey, put that away.’ And she said: ‘Well, I’m recording notes and sharing information with my mom, because she never got to take it. And so she’s taking the course with me.’”