College Board Slams FL's Response To AP African American Studies Class

FLORIDA — Weeks after Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration banned a new Advanced Placement African American Studies course from Florida schools, the College Board has slammed state for its comments about the class, calling it “slander.”

“There is always debate about the content of a new AP course. That is good and healthy; these courses matter,” the College Board said in statement released Saturday. “But the dialogue surrounding AP African American Studies has moved from healthy debate to misinformation.”

Now, DeSantis plans to rethink Florida’s relationship with the College Board, possibly doing away with AP courses altogether, according to the Tampa Bay Times.

During a Monday news conference in Naples, the governor suggested said that “there are probably other vendors who may be able to do that job as good or maybe even a lot better."

“This College Board, like, nobody elected them to anything,” DeSantis said. “They are just kind of there, and they provide a service and so you can either utilize those services or not.”

In a Jan. 12 letter to the College Board, which oversees AP coursework, the Florida Department of Education’s Office of Articulation claimed that the course violates state law and questioned its historical accuracy, CNN reported. State officials wrote in the letter that the course is “inexplicably contrary to Florida law and significantly lacks educational value.”

They told the College Board that if the organization was “willing to come back to the table with lawful, historically accurate content, FDOE will always be willing to reopen the discussion.”

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Tweeting about the course in January, Manny Diaz Jr., Florida’s education commissioner, said the course was rejected because it is “filled with critical race theory and other obvious violations of Florida law.”

He added, “We do not accept woke indoctrination masquerading as education.”

The AP course is a pilot program that will be offered to all U.S. schools by the 2024-25 school year. The class, once available nationwide, “will be the most rigorous, cohesive immersion that high school students have ever had in this discipline,” the College Board said in its statement Saturday.

The not-for-profit organization said that it regrets not speaking out sooner regarding comments made by the DeSantis administration and Florida education leaders.

“We are proud of this course. But we have made mistakes in the rollout that are being exploited. We need to clear the air and set the record straight,” the board said. “We deeply regret not immediately denouncing the Florida Department of Education’s slander, magnified by the DeSantis administration’s subsequent comments, that African American Studies ‘lacks educational value.’ Our failure to raise our voice betrayed Black scholars everywhere and those who have long toiled to build this remarkable field.”

The course’s framework, released Feb. 1 by the board, “is only the outline of the course, still to be populated by the scholarly articles, video lectures and practice questions that we assemble and make available to all AP teachers in the summer for free and easy assignment to their students,” the board said. “This error triggered a conversation about erasing or eliminating Black thinkers. The vitriol aimed at these scholars is repulsive and must stop.”

Each AP teacher will be required to include works by scholars in the field in the syllabus they submit to the organization for course authorization. The board said that it’s requesting copyright permission for all works it plans to include in the AP Classroom digital platform available to teachers.

“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,” the College Board added. “Our lack of clarity allowed the narrative to arise that political forces had ‘downgraded’ the role of these contemporary movements and debates in the AP class. The actual pilot course materials teachers used were completed on April 29, 2022 — far prior to any pushback. In these pilot materials, teachers were told to pick only one such topic. This topic could be assigned after the exam since it didn’t count and would have no impact on the student’s AP score.”

The updated framework for the course, developed after consulting with more than 300 African American Studies professors across the U.S., now includes three weeks dedicated to a student research project on a topic of their choice.

“This model better aligns with the flexibility colleges themselves often provide students to do an extended paper on a topic of their choice. We encourage students to focus their projects on contemporary issues and debates to ensure their application of knowledge to the present,” the board said.

Despite claims from Florida officials that the board has held conversations with the state about the course’s content, “this is a false and politically motivated charge,” the organization said. “Our exchanges with them are actually transactional emails about the filing of paperwork to request a pilot course code and our response to their request that the College Board explain why we believe the course is not in violation of Florida laws. 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 College Board’s full statement can be read here.