Common Sentences

Even With The College Board's Miscues, AP African American Studies Can Still Be a Great Course; Committed, Vulnerable Teachers Will Determine Its Fate

Welcome!  I’m Richard Schwartz, a retired high school Social Studies teacher from Morristown, New Jersey.  In “Common Sentences” I’ll share my thoughts on history, sports, popular culture, politics, religion.  I hope you’ll find it engaging.

When a winter squall broke over the proposed Advanced Placement course in African American Studies, I felt a moment’s twinge.  I thought: I would have liked to have taught that course.

The course may or may not reach large numbers of students, and it will be a test of the craft of teaching.  But where it is offered and taught well, AP African American Studies promises much good.

Getting it adopted could be a challenge.

Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida has emerged as the political leader of opposition to all forms of “wokeness.”  (Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times argues that this is in part to divert attention from DeSantis’s desire to go after Social Security and Medicare.)   Having signed into law the Stop WOKE Act of 2022, DeSantis was delivered a political opportunity when drafts of The College Board’s proposed AP African American Studies course got leaked.

In September 2022 Stanley Kurtz of National Review argued to his largely conservative audience that the course would open the floodgates.  Institute a course entitled AP African American Studies, Kurtz argued, and before long you’ll get AP courses in women’s studies, ethnic studies, LGBTQ+ studies, queer studies, all anathema to many conservatives.  Channeling McCarthy-era politicians, Kurtz spotlighted Marxist scholars whose works appeared in the draft course of study.  He also accused the curriculum writers of one-sidedness, of excluding Black conservatives who might obstruct a conspiracy to sell Black radicalism to American high school students. 

In January, Florida’s department of education announced that the course would not be offered in that state without significant revisions.  The College Board quickly announced changes.  Florida is a big state, with potentially many students who might take the AP Exam in African American Studies, at a sticker price of $97 per student.  As of this writing, Florida has not responded.

Will districts around the country adopt the course?  Some surely will.  But administrators and elected boards of education have just been through the nightmare of trying to run schools during the most severe pandemic in American history.  National political tensions have made themselves felt at board of ed meetings.  Armed militia have shown up at school board meetings.  Many boards of ed may opt for the path of least resistance, either out of sheer exhaustion, or because they know that in some predominantly white communities they may bring down on themselves the furies if they adopt the course.  One or two outraged people can create a lot of angst for local officials.

Teaching it well will not be easy. 

Because it’s not AP African American History but AP African American Studies, teachers must be especially versatile.  It’s partly history, partly literature.  Music and other art forms are also parts of your brief as a teacher of the course.   

Complicating matters is that, in what many on the left see as appeasement of DeSantis, the final version of the course dropped controversial secondary source readings.  The College Board missed an opportunity.  Retaining radical and progressive views while at the same time including moderate and conservative voices would have been a strong educational practice.  Widening the range of viewpoints would have held the virtue of presenting multiple versions of truth and letting students decide for themselves.

The College Board explained that it was more important for students to work with primary sources.  No argument here on the importance and fun of working with documents.  But college instructors assign lots of dense scholarly essays on platforms such as JStor.  Eliminating them, do we really give high school kids a college experience?

I was especially sorry to see one source get dropped from the final draft.  A few years ago, at the tail end of an AP US History I course, we staged an in-class seminar on the legitimacy of reparations.  Students had to reckon with the long history of state, local, and national government complicity in the denial of equal protection of the laws to Black Americans.   I had wonderful kids: eager, hard-working, articulate, fine critical thinkers.  I linked an ambitious reading list.   The source that got the most commentary was Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Atlantic essay “The Case for Reparations.”

The quality of student discussion of that essay—the active listening, the civil disagreement, the textual analysis--made me feel as though we had come a long way since September.  Students had learned about slavery, Black resistance, and the “unfinished revolution” of Reconstruction in the course.  But they’d not yet been taught about Jim Crow, about federal-based redlining and the racially restrictive elements of the GI Bill.  They learned about these things from Coates.

And their sense of injustice flared.   Grappling with a demanding essay, these students became more aware of a long train of abuses, even as they enhanced their reading, thinking, and discussion abilities.  The experience will serve them well, long beyond college, in their neighborhoods, their families and their workplaces. 

Most of the students in that seminar were white.  Coates opened their eyes to injustices that they probably hadn’t known about.  But opponents of teaching this content worry that white students will feel guilt when confronted with these hard truths.

Perhaps, but if my white students felt guilty it didn’t cause many to support reparations.  Outraged many may have been at the injustices, but most ended up making rational arguments against a system of financial reparations, even as others argued effectively in favor of some form of restitution.

Coates himself had not insisted on cash reparations.  He endorsed a more holistic form of making Black Americans whole, including enhanced study of the Black American experience.  I can’t help but wonder if dropping him from the AP African American Studies curriculum might be especially dismaying to him, given his essay’s argument.

Were I to teach AP African American Studies in my old school district, I would assign “The Case for Reparations.”  As a professional educator trying to deliver the best possible course to my students, I would deem it worthy of inclusion.  I’m quite confident that I would get the necessary support. But sadly, if I taught at a Florida high school, I might pull back given the power of the state.

The College Board erred twice.  First, its early draft raised legitimate concerns about one-sidedness in the drafters’ selection of scholarly readings.  Then, by all but eliminating contemporary secondary sources in the final draft, they passed the potential risk from their own tax-exempt corporation into the laps of serious teachers. Determined to make the course truly “advanced placement,” committed teachers will have to inject into their classrooms academic essays of their own choosing.  In some states, those choices could put teachers in violation of anti-woke laws.  So The College Board has set up classroom teachers of AP African American Studies in “anti-woke” parts of the country to teach as though they were pilots flying into a storm of flak on a mission from which they might not return intact.

Still, even with the final revisions, the course could be a meaningful experience for student and teacher, and good things happen when that is the case.   

A gifted teacher using a student-centered approach grounded in class discussion and student engagement could still lead pupils through a tragic, inspiring, infuriating, complex, uplifting study that would enhance analytical skills, calling on a rich array of sources.   If taught with sufficient rigor—ideologically-diverse undergraduate-level secondary readings not optional--it would do what any good AP class should do at base: arm students with undergraduate survival skills.  Critical reading and analytical writing.  Classroom discussion skills.  The capacity to write papers outside of class while observing scholarly ethics.  Resilience, self-discipline, time management, teamwork.  AP African American Studies could help students do more than survive their first year of college.   It could help them to thrive.  If I were still on active duty, I would want to teach it.

But even more, to explore with students the culture of Americans who trace their lineage back many centuries, Americans who have left such a profound mark on the nation…that would be a powerful motivator for me as an educator.  In a multiracial democracy, which is what we contend that we are, this would be a valuable experience for students (and teachers) regardless of their race.

I have a feeling that states that support students and teachers who meet up in a good AP African American Studies course will end up with stronger high schools, more engaged, empathetic, and college-ready students, and more accomplished, energized, confident teachers.  Somehow that promotes the general welfare, promises to secure the blessings of liberty, and promotes a more perfect union, doesn’t it?

Let’s not come at this course of study from a place of fear.   Trust American high school students, guided by gifted educators, to evaluate evidence, think for themselves, and sound off on what they think.  They don’t need to be protected from learning about a rich, diverse African American culture, and they will almost certainly benefit from it.

Notes:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/24/opinion/desantis-florida-culture-w.html

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/desantis-ap-african-american-studies-program-violates-florida-law/

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/19/us/desantis-florida-ap-african-american-studies.html

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/neo-marxing-the-college-board-with-ap-african-american-studies/

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/01/us/ap-african-american-studies-course.html

https://apcentral.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/ap-african-american-studies-course-framework.pdf

https://www.stuyspec.com/opinions/college-board-s-monopoly#:~:text=Despite%20fitting%20into%20this%20definition,should%20be%20viewed%20as%20such.