In response to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ refusal to allow the College Board’s new explicitly Marxist high school course, the College Board appears to have backed down. Just days earlier, the Biden White House had endorsed the new course. On Tuesday, the large curriculum corporation said that it is changing its draft AP African-American studies course and will reveal the modifications within a week.
On Friday and Sunday, respectively, the press secretary of the White House and the United States vice president openly chastised the DeSantis government for denying Florida access to the class. Both Harris and Jean-Pierre labeled the class as “American history.” A review of the materials shows that the course is loaded with critical race theory-heavy instructional materials that glorify violence and racial struggle and offer neither opposing nor alternative viewpoints.
On Monday, DeSantis reacted by noting that draft versions of official materials for the class, which the College Board has refused to make public, include “queer theory” and depict Black Panther-style radical racial ideology as representing black Americans.
Monday, DeSantis reacted by noting that versions of official materials for the class, which the College Board has refused to make public, include “queer theory” and depict Black Panther-style radical racial ideology as representing black Americans.
As DeSantis Press Secretary Bryan Griffin said above, this is a victory, but it is not yet a full victory. Multiple factors justify continuous monitoring, if not a probe of the College Board’s educational materials in every state governed by the Republican Party.
People who cannot determine that their draft was racist lack credibility.
The initial draft of this class is the first and most clear explanation. As admitted by College Board, this course’s racist early draft is currently being implemented in dozens of high schools. A corporation like the College Board that distributes such materials to schools cannot be trusted to correct its flaws.
In addition, the corporation disseminated this abominable draft in secrecy. College Board asserts that its public school curricula, supported almost exclusively by taxpayer cash, include “trade secrets” and thus cannot be disclosed to the people who pay for them. Such secrecy and intimidation are inherently suspect and should be seen as such.
Everything administered to students in public schools should be publishable or, in the case of tests, accessible to outside evaluators on behalf of the public. Those who oppose fundamental public openness, which is demanded of every government organization and action, do not deserve government contracts.
A third reason not to give the College Board the benefit of the doubt is its tight relations with the Democrat-controlled White House to propagate misinformation about its draft curricula and politicize American history. As DeSantis remarked, it’s utterly absurd to define “queer theory” as relevant to African-American history. However, this is precisely what the White House did when interfering on behalf of the College Board on this course.
Common Core was the brainchild of David Coleman, president of the College Board. Due to this background, he is acquainted with numerous high-level education administrators in the Obama White House. This situation has been mirrored to a considerable extent in the Biden administration. He attempted to maintain his corporation’s profitable curriculum monopoly by using his extraordinarily high-level Democrat connections.
This is hardly the behavior of a trustworthy and apolitical company. It is the behavior of a politically motivated private corporation playing hardball to maintain its use of its education monopoly to aid its favorite political party. Bringing in the Democratic White House to solve your PR problem is a bold move, but it should instantly preclude College Board from doing business with Republicans. All Republicans should oppose corporations who are utilizing White House contacts to maintain a monopoly.
A fourth reason to be skeptical of the College Board’s promised “revisions” is that the organization has historically responded to criticism of overtly leftist curricular bias by concealing but keeping such bias. The National Association of Scholars has established that the College Board accomplished this in its recently redesigned U.S. and European history curriculum.
This is an important reason why neither DeSantis nor any other Republican education official should be content with College Board’s activities over the proposed African-American studies course. They should study the other courses offered by College Board and consider prohibiting their usage in public schools.
This contributes to the fifth cause for skepticism regarding the promised improvements to this course and the overall Advanced Placement (AP) series by the College Board. These AP classes award both high school and college credit upon achieving a passing score on the final exam. They are meant to provide high school pupils with college-level coursework. It is a brilliant idea, but it also highlights the poor quality of most American high schools. However, the well-documented far-left tilt of higher education institutions makes it a risky proposition.
According to a recent article by Scott Yenor in American Reformer, the political right has been vocal about leftist bias in academics since the 1950s. However, the quality of higher education has deteriorated to the point that the great majority of college courses today are not designed to teach but to indoctrinate. The time has come to cease pretending to improve this wasteful system. Instead of showing its deference, it is time to raze it and construct alternative infrastructure.
Studies indicate that more than one-third of individuals who enroll in college do not earn a degree, with many incurring debt. Nearly half of the individuals who receive a diploma have learned nothing. They wasted four or, more commonly, six years of their young lives and millions of dollars in government expenditures without acquiring any knowledge. In other ways, Ivy League college graduates are less intelligent after spending more time in school.
Extending this dysfunctional and biased system into high school, as the Advanced Placement program of the College Board proposes, is the incorrect strategy. It may provide intelligent adolescents with more intellectual engagement, but at the expense of miseducating them with far-left myths about reality. Instead, what is required are truly good classes, not mediocre ones with a veneer of excellence.
It is time to stop having faith in College Board. Too long has this group propelled up a crooked system and misused its position behind the backs of parents and taxpayers. It is time for a thorough examination of all the materials College Board produces, how its classes seem in classrooms, and the flawed and corrupt higher education system they imitate.
Simple textual alterations are insufficient. The offending materials may be readily altered — and have been altered in the past — to conceal how instructors are instructed to utilize them in College Board training and teachers’ colleges with a Marxist orientation. Given the situation, we should anticipate that this will occur.
No more “trust, purchase, and then verify” from the profoundly corrupt American educational institutions, especially College Board. Verification must begin with these well-compensated liars.