Tag: advanced placement programs

Florida’s feud with the College Board’s AP Psychology course explained | CNN

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A long-simmering feud between the College Board, the non-profit that administers Advanced Placement courses, and Florida’s Department of Education became public this week, as officials argued over whether the Advanced Placement Psychology course could be taught in Florida without breaking state laws.

In Florida, students are prohibited from learning about sexual orientation or gender identity in the classroom.

But the College Board says these lessons are a core component of the AP Psychology course and have refused to change the curriculum.

On Thursday, the College Board announced that unless AP Psychology is taught in its entirety – including lessons on sexuality and gender – “the “AP Psychology” designation cannot be utilized on student transcripts.”

The future of the course appeared to be in jeopardy until, late Friday, Florida Education Commissioner Manny Diaz, Jr., informed school superintendents that students will be able to take the class “in its entirety” but only if the course is taught “in a manner that is age and developmentally appropriate.”

The public scuffle over the AP Psychology course is just the latest installment in an ongoing feud between the College Board and Florida education officials over what subjects can be taught in the state’s classrooms. Let’s discuss how we got here.

In July, a new law came into effect in Florida that banned classroom instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity for students in pre-K through the 8th grade. For high school students, instruction must be “according to state standards,” the Board of Education said.

But over the last year, Florida’s education officials have amended state standards to effectively ban all students from learning about sexual orientation and gender identity.

The changes are in line with Gov. Ron DeSantis’ vow to eradicate so-called “woke” gender ideology from Florida’s classrooms.

In 2022, the governor signed a bill titled “Parental Rights in Education,” which prohibited discussion of gender and sexuality issues in kindergarten through third grade. The bill also gave parents the right to take legal action if a school violates the law. DeSantis has since amended the law to prohibit instruction on sexuality and gender from pre-K through the eighth grade.

The governor has said he believes parents should “have a fundamental role in the education, health care and well-being of their children.”

Supporters say the bill allows parents to decide when to talk to their children about LGBTQ+ topics instead of the schools. But critics have dubbed it the “Don’t Say Gay” law and say it will further marginalize LGBTQ+ students.

The College Board’s AP Psychology course is organized into nine units of study. The unit on developmental psychology includes lessons on gender and sexual orientation.

According to the College Board, the course asks students to “describe how sex and gender influence socialization and other aspects of development.”

These lessons are now considered illegal under Florida law.

In June, Board of Education officials sent a letter to the College Board requesting the non-profit “conduct a thorough review” of all Advanced Placement courses to ensure they were compliant with Florida law.

In a statement, the College Board equated the request to censorship.

“(We) will not modify our courses to accommodate restrictions on teaching essential, college-level topics. Doing so would break the fundamental promise of AP: colleges wouldn’t broadly accept that course for credit and that course wouldn’t prepare students for careers in the discipline,” the non-profit said.

Advanced Placement courses are standardized to ensure students who pass the final exam can transfer college credits to participating colleges and universities nationwide. The College Board has said all required topics, including sexual orientation and gender identity, must be included for the course to be designated advanced placement and count toward college credit.

This isn’t the first time the College Board has sparred with the Florida Board of Education over what can be taught in Advanced Placement classes.

Earlier this year, DeSantis rejected the non-profit’s AP African American Studies course because it included lessons on reparations, Black queer studies, and the Movement for Black Lives.

The College Board initially attempted to revise the course framework, but the decision sparked outrage among academics and activists who said students should learn the “full history” of the Black experience in America.

“We have learned from our mistakes in the recent rollout of AP African American Studies and know that we must be clear from the outset where we stand,” the non-profit later said in a statement.

With days to go until students return to school, the College Board announced it would not remove AP Psychology lessons on gender identity and sexual orientation. Instead, the non-profit advised school districts to “not to offer AP Psychology until Florida reverses their decision and allows parents and students to choose to take the full course.”

Florida education officials responded by accusing the non-profit of “hurting Florida students.”

It is unclear how the state’s directive to teach the course “in a manner that is age and developmentally appropriate,” will be enforced.

“AP Psychology is and will remain in the course directory making it available to Florida students,” Diaz said in a statement.

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August 6, 2023
DeSantis says Florida requires African American history. Advocates say the state is failing that mandate | CNN Politics

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Facing accusations of whitewashing history after his administration blocked a new Black studies course for high-achieving high schoolers, Gov. Ron DeSantis has countered that Florida students already must learn about the triumphs and plight of African Americans.

“The state of Florida education standards not only don’t prevent, but they require teaching Black history,” DeSantis said last week. “All the important things, that’s part of our core curriculum.”

Indeed, Florida has required its schools to teach African American history since 1994, long before the recent push in many states to move toward a more complete telling of the country’s story. The stated goal at the time was to introduce the Black experience to a generation of young people. That included DeSantis himself, then a student in Florida’s public school system when the mandate became law.

But nearly three decades later, advocates say many Florida schools are failing to teach that history. Only 11 of the state’s 67 county school districts meet all of the benchmarks for teaching Black history set by the African American History Task Force, a state board created to help school districts abide by the mandate. Many schools only cover the topic during Black History Month in February, said Bernadette Kelley-Brown, the principal investigator for the task force.

“The idea that every Florida student learns African American history, it’s not reality,” Kelley-Brown said. “Some districts don’t even realize it’s required instruction.”

The persistent focus in Florida on instruction of African American topics comes as DeSantis has partially built his Republican stardom by targeting public schools for signs of progressive ideologies. His administration has forced K-12 schools to comb their textbooks and curriculum for any evidence of Critical Race Theory or related topics and he championed a new law that puts guardrails on lessons about racism and oppression. Both measures were cited in the state’s decision last month to block a new Advanced Placement class on African American Studies from Florida high schools. (On Wednesday, the College Board, which oversees AP courses and exams, released an updated framework of African American Studies class that did not include many of the authors and topics DeSantis had objected to. His administration said it was reviewing the changes to see if the course now complies with state law.)

Black Democratic lawmakers say the state Department of Education under DeSantis has shown far more zeal in enforcing these new restrictions on how race can be taught in schools than the state, in almost 30 years, has ever demonstrated toward ensuring that Black history is taught at all.

“If we say that the speed limit is 70 and someone goes 80, the Highway Patrol is there with some consequences,” state Sen. Geraldine Thompson said at a recent press conference. “But there have been no consequences for not teaching African American history.”

The governor’s office and the Florida Department of Education did not respond when asked about the state’s efforts to enforce the mandate to teach Black history. But DeSantis recently elaborated on how he expects the subject to be taught.

“It’s just cut and dried history,” DeSantis said. “You learn all the basics. You learn about the great figures, and you know, I view it as American history. I don’t view it as separate history.”

For a state that had to be dragged to desegregate all of its schools well into the 1970s, the move to require African American history in Florida classrooms was notably unceremonious. Lawmakers unanimously approved the mandate in 1994 with little debate. Few newspapers covered then-Democratic Gov. Lawton Chiles signing the bill into law.

After it passed, the state created the African American History Task Force to help school districts with this new directive and to come up with a strategy for implementation. But neither the law nor the Florida Department of Education set a deadline for districts to comply.

Former state Rep. Rudolph Bradley, the Black lawmaker who sponsored the bill to require African American history back then, now says there was a major flaw in the legislation that kept it from accomplishing what he set out to achieve: Lawmakers didn’t set aside any money for school districts to update their textbooks, buy new instructional materials or train teachers.

“The mistake on my part, being a freshman, I didn’t understand the importance of attaching appropriations,” Bradley told CNN in a recent interview. “I didn’t understand what an unfunded mandate was and how difficult that would make it for school districts to incorporate it.”

Even districts that had sought to comply with the law faced hurdles. Among those early adopters in 1994 was Pinellas County, where efforts to incorporate African American history into their lessons were underway prior to the law’s passage – and where a teenage DeSantis was entering sophomore year of high school that fall.

At Dunedin High School, a predominantly White school within walking distance of Florida’s gulf shores, DeSantis should have been among the first wave of students to be exposed to this more complete telling of history. The school already offered African American history as an elective and the district had tapped the teacher of that class, Randy Lightfoot, to guide Pinellas schools into compliance with the new law. (Lightfoot said DeSantis was not a student in his African American history class.)

Lightfoot and his team met after school for three hours a day, four times a week for months to forge a plan to incorporate Black history, culture and figures into every grade level, he told CNN in a recent interview. They printed a blueprint called “African American Connections.”

The accurate teaching of African American studies, the document said, “explains the causes of racial division in society, including prejudice, stereotyping and discrimination” and the “systematic oppression perspective of Africans and African-Americans and their resistance to that oppression.”

The state heralded Lightfoot’s efforts as a model for adhering to the new law, according to news accounts from the time. The Florida education commissioner liked it so much he handed a copy to every school district, Lightfoot said. DeSantis more recently has called the idea of systemic racism “a bunch of horse manure.”

By 1996, Lightfoot was warning that his efforts were being stymied by lack of resources. Lightfoot struggled to convince the Pinellas school board to acquire textbooks that included the new lessons on Black history, according to the St. Petersburg Times, which also noted that the district cut his staff.

The attempts to expand the curriculum to teach African American history also came during a period of racial strife in Pinellas County. In 1996, riots broke out in St. Petersburg, the city 20 minutes south of DeSantis’ suburban home, after the police killed an unarmed Black teenager during a traffic stop, and again when the officers involved were cleared of charges. Meanwhile, graduation rates for Black male students remained stubbornly low in Pinellas, the Times reported, and the county school board had broached the controversial idea of curbing forced busing to desegregate the public schools, leading to a period of distrust between the board and Black residents.

By the time DeSantis graduated in 1997 – having earned recognition as a decorated Advanced Placement history student, according to his senior yearbook – getting African American history in Pinellas schools was still a work in progress, Lightfoot said.

Statewide, only a handful of schools had earned “exemplary” status from the African American History Task Force by the end of that decade, meaning they had reached benchmarks for compliance. “Exemplary” school districts must demonstrate their curriculum included African American topics beyond Black History Month, training for teachers in the subject, involvement of parents in the learning and collaboration with a local university for support. In 1999, a bill that would have required public school textbooks to include African American history went nowhere in the state legislature.

Carlton Owens, a Black classmate of DeSantis’ at Dunedin High, said he only saw people like himself reflected in the curriculum during Black History Month or lessons around slavery and the Civil Rights movement.

“There’s so much more history that’s inspiring that is interwoven in the American story as a whole,” Owens, now a lawyer and small business owner, said. “And that wasn’t highlighted then, and that needs to be happening now.”

The state “put the material out there for districts,” said Lightfoot, now a history professor at St. Petersburg College. “But they didn’t put the kind of money in to check and make sure everyone is doing what they’re supposed to be doing.”

“We were trying to fill in the gaps and the holes in history,” he added. “At the same time, we had Black male students who we thought we could help improve their grades if they saw their stories in history and science and literature. Where it worked, we had pretty good success with it. But we had the support of state leaders to do it. It was a different climate then.”

In a 2019 press release, the Florida Department of Education announced it would require districts for the first time to report how they were teaching required subjects including “Holocaust education, African American history, Hispanic heritage, women’s history, civics and more.”

A CNN review of those reports for the 2021-22 school year found wide discrepancies in how districts lesson-plan around the subject of African American history. Some districts provide lengthy plans for weaving the African American experience into social studies from kindergarten through high school graduation; others suggest exploration comes primarily during Black History month. More than a dozen submissions largely parroted the requirements listed in state law without including any details of the instruction.

Leon County, declared an exemplary school district by the African American History Task Force, included details like its lessons on African American scientists, songwriters and artists during grades K-5. Dixie County, near the Florida Panhandle, submitted 1,600 words on how it teaches African American history to high schoolers. Madison County, a school district near the Florida-Georgia border, simply wrote: “Courses are taught on a daily basis by a Florida certified teacher. The district also stresses Black History Month with daily mini-lessons for all grade levels.”

The Florida Association of School Superintendents did not respond to a request for comment.

Democrats and advocates contend the state has done little with this information. They also say the administration has not yet indicated how it will ensure schools are complying with a new state law signed by DeSantis that requires annual instruction of the 1920 Ocoee massacre, when dozens of Black Floridians were murdered in a horrific Election Day racial cleansing.

Democratic lawmakers say they intend to introduce legislation that would require the state to enforce whether school districts are teaching African American history as the law intends, though its supporters acknowledge any bill is unlikely to gain traction in a statehouse controlled by Republicans.

“It won’t go anywhere,” said state Sen. Shevrin Jones, a member of the legislature’s Black caucus. “But it’ll be a helluva message that we’re getting behind true and accurate Black history being taught in the state of Florida.”

Early in his first term, there was some hope from the state’s Black community that DeSantis would forge a different path than some of his Republican predecessors. In one of his first acts as governor, DeSantis voted to pardon the Groveland Four – two Black men who were lynched and two who received lengthy sentences for allegedly raping a White woman in 1949 – widely considered one of the darkest episodes in Florida’s violent past. Former Gov. Rick Scott, who served two terms prior to DeSantis taking office, had refused to pardon the four men despite overwhelming evidence of their innocence.

But DeSantis’ posture changed following the 2020 killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. DeSantis responded to the national unrest by mobilizing the state’s national guard and pushing through what he called an “anti-riot” law that included harsh new penalties for protesters if a demonstration turns violent.

DeSantis then turned his attention to schools. In June 2021, he urged the state Board of Education to ban the teaching of Critical Race Theory, an academic framework based around the idea that systemic racism is embedded in many American institutions and society. His administration then rejected math textbooks on the grounds that they included Critical Race Theory and other forbidden topics. Last year, lawmakers approved one of DeSantis’ top legislative priorities: the so-called “Stop WOKE Act,” which said schools cannot teach that anyone is inherently racist or responsible for past atrocities because of their skin color. The bill, which DeSantis signed into law, also said schools could teach that oppression of races has existed throughout US history but not persuade students to a particular point of view.

The controversies around these actions have catapulted DeSantis into the national conversation on teaching race and helped fuel his rise as a potential presidential contender. Throughout these episodes, DeSantis has often maintained that African American history is built into Florida’s education framework.

“Florida statutes require teaching all of American history including slavery, civil rights, segregation,” DeSantis contended during his debate against his Democratic opponent last year, Charlie Crist. “It’s important that that’s taught. But what I think is not good is to scapegoat students based on skin color.”

Reginald Ellis, a professor of History and African-American Studies at Florida A&M University, said if students were adequately learning Black history, he would see it first hand in his classroom.

“What I find, even at a historically Black college, the vast majority of students have not really been exposed to much African American history and experience,” Ellis said. “It is a law on the books. There is a task force. But, for the most part, it clearly isn’t a curriculum that is being enforced. School districts effectively have the option to opt-in or opt-out.”

Bradley, the original bill sponsor, said the law’s shortcomings fall on those who have held power in Tallahassee and in school districts for the past three decades, and not DeSantis. Bradley, who changed his party affiliation from Democrat to Republican later in his political career, said he was supportive of DeSantis’ education agenda and accused activists of using schools to “drive a wedge between Blacks and Whites.”

“The law is still a work in progress, but if we want to use it as a tool to divide then that is a total violation of the spirit of the law,” Bradley said. “When I passed that bill, it was designed to bring people together, not divide.”

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February 5, 2023
A new partisan era of American education | CNN Politics

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A version of this story appears in CNN’s What Matters newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here.

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Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis says he’s protecting kids from indoctrination and political agendas, but the zeal with which he has pushed expansive efforts to remake the Florida education system also represents an effort to influence young minds.

However you view DeSantis’ motivations, he is getting results.

The College Board, the nonprofit organization that oversees the Advanced Placement program offered across high schools, said it would change a new AP African American studies course that DeSantis said violated a state law to restrict certain lessons about race in schools.

His state’s Department of Education complained the college-level course mentioned Black queer theory and the idea of intersectionality. Read more about why Florida rejected the course.

“Governor DeSantis, are you really trying to lead us into an era akin to communism that provides censorship of free thoughts?” the civil rights lawyer Ben Crump said at a press conference on Wednesday in Florida, where he announced he would sue DeSantis on behalf of three high school students if DeSantis would not negotiate with the College Board about the AP course.

DeSantis recently demanded a list of names of staff and programs related to diversity at public colleges and universities, part of a crackdown on “trendy ideology.”

Separately, he wants details on students who sought gender dysphoria treatment at state universities.

DeSantis also wants to remake the New College of Florida, a small, public liberal arts school, as a sort of “Hillsdale of the South,” according to Florida Education Commissioner Manny Diaz.

Hillsdale, as USA Today points out, is a private, conservative Christian college in Michigan.

A new DeSantis appointee to the New College of Florida board of trustees has clashed with board officials over his request to open every meeting with a prayer.

Republicans across the country are focused on education. They want to guard against anything perceived as pushing equity rather than merit.

Virginia’s governor sees a conspiracy in how school districts recognize distinction in a scholarship program based on scores on the PSAT.

The state attorney general has launched a discrimination investigation into whether the Fairfax County Public Schools system – including Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, a nationally recognized Virginia magnet school – discriminated against students by not informing them of recognition under the National Merit Scholarship program.

The students qualified for recognition but did not advance in the competition for a scholarship.

Virginia Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin, according to CNN’s report, claimed these revelations were a result of the “maniacal focus on equal outcomes for all students at all costs.”

“The failure of numerous Fairfax County schools to inform students of their national merit awards could serve as a Virginia human rights violation,” the governor’s office said in a previous statement provided to CNN.

Fairfax County Public Schools superintendent Michelle Reid told CNN the recognitions should have come earlier, but cited a lack of a “division-wide protocol” rather than any kind of mania about equity. Read more about the controversy.

Texas officials also have their eyes on the state’s colleges and universities, according to CNN’s Eric Bradner.

“Our public professors are accountable to the taxpayer because you pay their salary,” said Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick in an inauguration speech. Bradner notes Patrick has pushed to end tenure at Texas public colleges and universities.

“I don’t want teachers in our colleges saying, ‘America is evil and capitalism is bad and socialism is better,’” he said. “And if that means some of those professors that want to teach that don’t come to Texas, I’m OK with that.” Read Bradner’s full report.

Meanwhile, in South Dakota, lawmakers are looking to develop a social studies curriculum based on “American exceptionalism,” propelled by the governor’s desire to put more patriotism in the classroom.

The focus by Republican politicians on issues of race in colleges and the classroom is mirrored by the potential for a court-mandated turnaround in how American students are viewed for admissions.

The Supreme Court heard arguments in October in two separate cases regarding affirmative action and seems poised to say colleges and universities cannot consider race in admissions.

Nine states have already outlawed affirmative action for public universities. Voters in California were the first to do so, and the end result was falling enrollment, in particular among Black students at top public schools in the University of California system and at the University of Michigan. Those states both encouraged the Supreme Court not to outlaw affirmative action.

Florida, which also ended the practice, encouraged the court to throw affirmative action out.

Education was a major focus for Republicans in the recent election. While it clearly worked for DeSantis in Florida and a year earlier for Youngkin in Virginia, the mixed results for Republicans writ large may call the strategy into question as the 2024 election looms.

I read on the education news website Chalkbeat about a new study that predicts more politics in the classroom as Americans increasingly sort themselves by political ideology.

In the working paper, David Houston, an education policy professor at George Mason University, argues that previous debates over desegregation, prayer and sex education in public schools were divisive but not inherently partisan.

He points to the moderate positions of previous presidents as proof. Then-President George W. Bush worked with then-Democratic Sen. Edward Kennedy on education reform in 2001. Former President Barack Obama was praised by Republicans in 2012 for his work on education.

Those stories feel like they’re from a different universe when today’s Republican governors are looking to root out liberal extremism in schools.

Houston argues in his study, which is based on survey data, that the US may be on the cusp of a new and divisive era with “heightened partisan animosity across all aspects of education politics.”

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January 25, 2023
Florida gives its reasons for rejecting proposed AP African American Studies course | CNN Politics

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Florida rejected a proposed Advanced Placement course focused on African American Studies because it included study of topics like the Movement for Black Lives, Black feminism and reparations, according to a list of concerns provided to CNN on Friday by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’ office.

The one-page document prepared by the Florida Department of Education also questions the inclusion of certain Black authors and historians whose writings touch on critical race theory and Black communism. For example, the state objects to the inclusion of writing by Robin D.G. Kelley, a professor of American history at UCLA, who “warns that simply establishing safe spaces and renaming campus buildings does nothing to overthrow capitalism,” according to the document.

The state also said the course framework for the study of reparations – the argument to compensate Black Americans for slavery and other historical atrocities and oppressive acts – includes “no critical perspective or balancing opinion in this lesson.”

“All points and resources in this study advocate for reparations,” the document said.

The state based its assertions of the course on an 81-page syllabus from February 2022. According to the list of concerns, their objections cover six topics of study, all in the fourth and final unit, when students study “Movements and Debates.”

A previous draft version of the concerns sent to CNN by DeSantis’ office included an objection to the study of “The Black Power Movement and The Black Panther Party.” The draft version asserted that “The Black Panther Party (BPP) was based on the ideology of Marxism- Leninism. Goal of the BPP was to fundamentally change or overthrow the American government.” However, in an updated version of the state’s concerns, the references to the Black Panther Party were removed and replaced with an objection to the study of “Black Queer Studies.”

The state Department of Education on January 12 informed the College Board, the organization that oversees the Advanced Placement program, that the course violated state law and rejected its inclusion in Florida schools.

The course, which is the first of its kind, was first introduced in the fall as a pilot in about 60 schools and will be offered nationwide starting in the 2024-25 school year. It was developed over the last decade and is intended to be a multidisciplinary study of the African American diaspora that includes literature, the arts, science, politics and geography.

The College Board declined in a previous statement to CNN to directly address the decision in Florida but said, “We look forward to bringing this rich and inspiring exploration of African-American history and culture to students across the country.”

DeSantis’ office said the state would reconsider the decision if the course is changed to comply with Florida law.

Under DeSantis – whose standing among conservatives has soared nationwide following his public stances on hot-button cultural issues and who is said to be weighing a potential 2024 presidential bid – the state has banned the teaching of critical race theory. Last year, it moved to prohibit instruction that suggests anyone is privileged or oppressed based on their race or skin color.

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January 21, 2023
DeSantis administration rejects inclusion of AP African American Studies class in Florida high schools | CNN Politics

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The administration of Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida is blocking a new Advanced Placement course for high school students on African American studies.

In a January 12 letter to the College Board, the nonprofit organization that oversees AP coursework, the Florida Department of Education’s Office of Articulation said the course is “inexplicably contrary to Florida law and significantly lacks educational value.”

The letter did not elaborate on what the agency found objectionable in the course content. A spokeswoman for the department did not immediately respond to a CNN inquiry.

“In the future, should College Board be willing to come back to the table with lawful, historically accurate content, FDOE will always be willing to reopen the discussion,” the letter stated.

In a statement to CNN, the College Board declined to directly address the decision in Florida but said, “We look forward to bringing this rich and inspiring exploration of African-American history and culture to students across the country.”

The rejection of an Advanced Placement African American Studies course follows efforts by DeSantis to overhaul Florida’s educational curriculum to limit teaching about critical race theory. In 2021, the state enacted a law that banned teaching the concept, which explores the history of systemic racism in the United States and its continued impacts. The law also banned material from The 1619 Project, a Pulitzer Prize-winning project by The New York Times to reframe American history around the arrival of slave ships on American shores. Last year, DeSantis also signed a bill restricting how schools can talk about race with students.

The College Board unveiled plans to offer an African American studies class for the first time last year. The course is being offered as a pilot in 60 schools across the country during the 2022-23 school year, with the goal of making the course available to all schools in the 2024-25 school year. The first AP African American Studies exam would be administered in the Spring of 2025, according to the College Board website.

It was not immediately clear if Florida had any schools currently participating in the pilot program. The College Board said the Advanced Placement Program has been working with higher education institutions to develop an African American Studies program for a decade.

“Like all new AP courses, AP African American Studies is undergoing a rigorous, multi-year pilot phase, collecting feedback from teachers, students, scholars and policymakers,” the statement said. “The process of piloting and revising course frameworks is a standard part of any new AP course, and frameworks often change significantly as a result. We will publicly release the updated course framework when it is completed and well before this class is widely available in American high schools.”

In a Twitter post Wednesday, Democratic state Sen. Shevrin Jones, who is Black, noted that Florida offers other cultural AP courses.

“This political extremism and its attack of Black History and Black people, is going to create an entire generation of Black children who won’t be able to see themselves reflected at all within their own education or in their own state,” Jones said.

DeSantis’ move comes as his standing among conservatives has soared nationwide following his public stances on hot-button cultural issues and against public health officials and bureaucrats during the Covid-19 pandemic. He is said to be weighing a potential 2024 presidential bid.

A group of Republican state legislators in Michigan seeking to draft him for the 2024 contest signed on to a letter that was hand-delivered to the Florida governor last month, asking that he “seek the presidential nomination of our Republican Party.”

The letter was signed by 18 GOP members of the Michigan Senate and House, who wrote that DeSantis is “uniquely and exceptionally qualified to provide the leadership and competence that is, unfortunately, missing at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.” In closing, they said they “stand ready and willing to help you win Michigan in 2024.”

Details of the letter were first reported by Politico.

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January 19, 2023
Instruction about race may be under siege across the US, but this course is empowering students at a Southern high school | CNN

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CNN
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In the early 2000s, when I was a student at Ridge View High School, in Columbia, South Carolina, I loved to parse the legacies of certain historical figures: W.E.B. Du Bois, in AP US History; Malcolm X, in AP English Language and Composition.

At the same time, I wanted more. Too often, Advanced Placement curricula seemed to give attention to just a handful of Black heavyweights and, as a result, neglect the countless ways Black Americans have shaped US society. Only rarely were Black students like me reflected in lessons. (I remember learning about “A Raisin in the Sun,” Lorraine Hansberry’s jewel of a play about a Black family in south Chicago, from my mom and wondering, Why aren’t we studying this in school?)

But things are beginning to change. Ridge View is one of about 60 high schools across the country piloting AP African American Studies in 2022. The interdisciplinary course will be the newest addition to the College Board’s panoply of AP offerings and delve into the history of the African continent and Black contributions to music, literature, science, politics and mathematics, among other fields. Mere weeks into the pilot course, students and faculty at Ridge View already see AP African American Studies as something of a salve. The course arrives at a moment when instruction about race is under siege: Educational gag orders abound, and “critical race theory” has become a lightning rod for the right.

Given the meager representation I observed as a high school student, I was stunned – and thrilled – to learn that Ridge View, which is majority Black, is piloting AP African American Studies. It would’ve been so welcome, I thought, to see myself in this context, to probe questions of identity and inheritance.

Plus, it’s no small thing to test out the course in South Carolina, which didn’t banish the Confederate battle flag from statehouse grounds until 2015, in the heartrending aftermath of a White supremacist massacre.

The significance of the moment isn’t lost on Ridge View students.

“It really makes me happy to be in this class – to know that I’m a part of history,” Nacala McDaniels, a senior, told CNN.

In August, the Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., one of the architects of the AP African American Studies curriculum, stressed the course’s educational value.

“Nothing is more dramatic than having the College Board launch an AP course in a field – that signifies ultimate acceptance and ultimate academic legitimacy,” he told Time magazine. “It is a mainstream, rigorously vetted, academic approach to a vibrant field of study, one-half a century old in the American academy, and much older, of course, in historically Black colleges and universities.”

Like so many in the Ridge View community, McDaniels wants AP African American Studies to help not only other Black students but all students become well-versed in under-told histories and cultures and incubate meaningful discussions about race.

“I hope that the course will be offered to other people who look like me and to other people who just want to learn about history that’s been covered up and history that’s been ignored,” she said. “And I hope that the course makes room for more conversation. Lots of people are scared to talk about race, but with more conversation comes better understanding.”

High schools had been hungry for an AP African American Studies course for years. However, when the College Board asked universities about a decade ago if they’d give credit for a corresponding exam, they said no.

But the uprisings of 2020 caused a long-overdue shift.

“The events surrounding George Floyd and the increased awareness and attention paid toward issues of inequity and unfairness and brutality directed toward African Americans caused me to wonder, ‘Would colleges be more receptive to an AP course in this discipline than they were 10 years ago?’” Trevor Packer, who heads the College Board’s AP program, told Time.

Yes, was the answer.

Maybe the most exciting thing about teaching AP African American Studies is the fact that educators get to talk about people, subjects and slices of history students don’t know much about, according to Daniel Soderstrom, who leads the course at Ridge View.

“Over the past few decades, we, as a society, have done a better job of teaching Black history and African American Studies. But I’d argue that many teachers still fall short,” he told CNN. “What I mean is that our kids hear the same stories every year. And that’s not to diminish the contributions of Rosa Parks or Martin Luther King Jr. But if those are the only people our students are learning about in school, they’re missing a lot of what’s really there.”

The first part of the course examines early African kingdoms and some of their foundational figures, including Queen Nzinga of Ndongo, located in present-day Angola.

“She was a very strong woman – a heroine – and fought on the front lines with her soldiers,” Soderstrom said of Nzinga, celebrated for pushing back against Portuguese colonization and the trade of enslaved people in Central Africa in the 16th and 17th centuries. “But we tend to skip the stories of people from Africa.”

So far, the lessons appear to be resonating with the kids.

“I didn’t even know that there were any queens in Africa in any time period. Like, at all,” Ashton Walker, a junior, told CNN. “We got to learn about Queen Nzinga and Idia. They’re both very interesting because they were powerful women leaders who did amazing things for their kingdoms.”

Walker, who’s White, sees AP African American Studies as a means toward visibility for her Black peers, who get to be participants in their history.

“It matters that we get to learn all these things as a society. We don’t ever really get to hear about any of these figures or what they went through,” she said. “And my (Black) classmates deserve to hear this history. It’s awesome that Ridge View is a majority-Black school and gets to help create this course.”

Her mother, Nicole Walker, who was involved in bringing the pilot course to Ridge View and is the director of the school’s Scholars Academy Magnet for Business and Law (she also was my 9th grade English teacher), echoed some of these sentiments.

“We know that what’s best for kids is for them to see themselves reflected in the curriculum, for them to celebrate their cultures, for them to feel valued,” she told CNN. “We know that a kid who feels safe and valued is going to do better in school.”

Jacynth Tucker, a senior, is intimately familiar with the power of inclusivity. She said that at a previous school, she and other Black students felt invisible.

“I can’t even remember a time when we really explored Africa – talked about the history and the culture,” she told CNN. “Being in a class where that’s more of a focus is very special to me.”

Further, the course gives Black Americans more dimension, per Clementine Jordan, a senior.

“One activity I really liked was when our teacher showed us a collage and asked, ‘What do all these people have in common?’” she told CNN. “Their commonality was that they’re all Black. But the point of that discussion was that, yes, they’re all Black, but there’s so much diversity within the Black community, within my community: diverse religions, gender expressions, sexualities, things like that.”

Crucially, Soderstrom noted that AP African American Studies isn’t a standard-issue history course, though it proceeds in a relatively chronological fashion and will eventually make its way to the US.

“We’re studying Black excellence and African American success through art, through literature, through culture, through dance, through mathematics, through science, through lawyering,” he said. “It’s interesting that one day we’re looking at an art piece, the next day we’re listening to music, the next day we’re reading a poem and then the day after that we’re listening to a mathematician speak.”

In other words, while the course charts struggles – including the mid-century civil rights movement – it also underscores Black excellence in a variety of disciplines.

It’s pretty much impossible to separate the debut of the AP African American Studies pilot course from the Republican-led racial panic looming over many schools.

According to an August analysis by PEN America, a literary and free expression organization, legislators in 36 states have introduced 137 laws this year restricting discussions about race, US history and gender in K-12 schools and higher education. This figure is a 250% increase over 2021.

And last month, the American Library Association predicted that the number of attempts this year to censor books in K-12 schools, universities and public libraries grappling with race, gender and sexuality will exceed 2021’s record count. The ALA tallied 681 attempts between January 1 and August 31; the 2021 total was 729.

These attacks seek to determine what content is and isn’t legitimate in an academic context; they’re part of a much broader counter-mobilization against efforts to topple racial and social hierarchies.

“We’re not seeing different political conflicts. We’re seeing one big political conflict – one big reactionary political project,” as Thomas Zimmer, a visiting professor at Georgetown University, where his research focuses on the history of democracy and its discontents, told CNN in July.

Yet Soderstrom minced no words: AP African American Studies is a vital course, regardless of anyone’s political affiliation.

“Henry Louis Gates Jr. is one of the senior minds when we’re talking about American studies and African American history. He was quoted recently explaining that the course isn’t political,” Soderstrom said. “We’re teaching factual information, and everything is verifiable.”

Lylou, a sophomore, shared this conviction.

“I’m a White person, and I wanted to take this class because I don’t know that much about Black history,” she told CNN. “The course should be in the curriculum. Because why would we want to ignore this history?”

(Lylou’s mother asked that her daughter’s last name not be included, given the intense political climate hovering over lessons about race in the US.)

The pilot course is expected to expand to include additional high schools next year and then be available to all interested schools the following year, per the College Board.

Ridge View kids, for their part, seem eager to see how the rest of the year unfolds.

“The class is a learning opportunity for everybody. I take every interaction I have with anybody as a learning experience,” McDaniels said.

Then, mirroring the same fundamental curiosity I had as a high school student nearly two decades ago, she added, “I’m just excited to see what’s next.”

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October 2, 2022