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**FEBRUARY 3, 2023**

Kuttner on TAP

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**** The African American Studies AP Debacle

How DeSantis and the College Board enable each other's corruption

"The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and
from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was
which." -George Orwell,

**Animal Farm**

On Wednesday, after a threat from Gov. Ron DeSantis to ban the new
Advanced Placement curriculum on African American studies in the state
of Florida, the College Board released a watered-down version. The new
curriculum is mainly historical. It deletes critical race theory and
expunges or minimizes references to Black Lives Matter and the issues of
reparations and Black incarceration. Some issues are removed from the AP
curriculum entirely; others are left as optional topics for papers. The
course still covers the slave trade and the civil rights movement but
excises the work of several Black radical scholars.

DeSantis took a victory lap, declaring that the revised curriculum still
had to be reviewed by the state department of education. The College
Board CEO, David Coleman, denied that political pressure from DeSantis
had anything to do with its revisions, releasing documents showing that
alterations were in process in December before DeSantis launched his
attack. But those changes were partly in response to pressure generated
by right-wing media after an early draft of the curriculum was leaked
last summer. The

**National Review** began its campaign against the curriculum
<[link removed]>
last September. And this became a meme on right-wing social media.

The College Board's cave-in will only invite more pressure from the
right, as ideological censors in several states turn from picking over
African American studies to the content of courses in history and the
humanities. "The Board should have told the state of Florida, if you
want any AP courses you have to take them all," says Harry Feder,
director of the group FairTest. "No AP course in African American
studies, then no AP course in physics or calculus."

Most Americans were only vaguely aware, if at all, that the AP courses
in their local high school are a branded product of the College Board.
So this debacle invites a closer look at that dubious institution.

The College Board is a classic case of a large nonprofit that behaves
exactly like a profit-maximizing business. Its annual budget is about a
billion dollars a year, and according to its most recent tax filings,
Coleman, its CEO, was paid $2.849 million in total compensation in 2020,
which included $1.6 million in bonus and incentive compensation.

The College Board's income comes mainly from two sources: the fees it
collects from the SAT exams, and the money it makes from licensing
schools to use its AP curricula and charging for AP tests.

But the SATs are on the ropes. Thanks to a long-standing campaign
against the overuse of standardized testing by FairTest and other
critics, at least 1,835 colleges and universities, a majority of all
higher-education institutions, now either don't use the SAT or make it
optional <[link removed]>. Its total revenue
dropped from $1.1 billion in 2019 to $779 million in 2020, the year of
its most recent tax filing. So the College Board is now even more
reliant on AP curricula and tests.

We Can't Do This Without You
<[link removed]>

The recent history of the metastasis of Advanced Placement courses and
tests illustrates the College Board's reliance on AP as a profit
center. As recently as the 1980s, there were fewer than ten AP courses,
in math, the sciences, and English. Today, there are 38
<[link removed]>, including human
geography, psychology, art history, and Japanese culture and language.
The AP African American studies curriculum is brand-new, to be launched
in the 2023-2024 school year.

AP classes have long been criticized by educators
<[link removed]>
on multiple grounds. According to FairTest, most of the last month of
each semester is spent mainly on test prep.

Beginning about 15 years ago, there was a movement among educators to
wean high schools from the College Board's branded AP courses in favor
of homegrown advanced curricula. Most of the high schools that opt for
their own curricula are private schools.

Exactly one elite public high school, Scarsdale High (my alma mater!),
opted for its own advanced curriculum, called Advanced Topics
<[link removed]>,
which has been available since 2007. Students who take Advanced Topics
may sit for the College Board's Advanced Placement exam if they wish.

The movement to shift from AP courses to homegrown advanced classes
stalled, largely because of parental pushback. If students couldn't
show AP courses on a transcript, maybe they'd be less likely to be
accepted by a prestige college.

According to the principal of Scarsdale High, that's not the case.
"Feedback from colleges indicates that they just want to know what our
college-level designation and course code is, not whether we have AP or
something else," Kenneth Bonamo told me in an email interview. "In the
15+ years since we made the switch, we have not seen a diminution in
college admissions."

And Bonamo added, "Having our own 'brand' of advanced, college-level
courses allows us the latitude to be creative in curriculum,
instruction, and assessment, and to respond to student interests. We
also have the space to create AT courses without AP analogs, such as AT
Entrepreneurship, AT Constitutional Law, AT Linear Algebra, and AT
International Politics."

Parental worry about college acceptances in the absence of AP classes is
fomented by that other famously corrupted institution, the

**U.S. News** rankings. In ranking high schools, one major

**U.S. News** weighting factor is how many kids take AP courses-a
perfect symbiosis between two unsavory education players.

But even though few public high schools devise their own advanced
curricula as Scarsdale does, the College Board's AP program does have
new competition. One is the respected International Baccalaureate (IB)
program, which provides advanced studies for high school students and is
far less commercialized than the College Board. For the most part, high
schools that offer the International Baccalaureate don't use AP.

Another option, used by many small and rural high schools that either
can't afford AP or don't have enough students, is to partner with
local community colleges. In Franklin County, Massachusetts, many high
schools offer "dual enrollment" with Greenfield Community College, which
gives them college-level courses and course credit.

So the College Board's craven capitulation to the censors of the far
right may bring unwelcome publicity and hasten its demise. It would be
poetic justice if DeSantis and the College Board took each other down.

~ ROBERT KUTTNER

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