Is the new AP U.S. History really anti-American?
What changed and what didn’t in the latest “Common Core” version of the class
Martin Luther King Jr., Benjamin Franklin, George Washington Carver, James Madison and Rosa Parks. If you’ve heard that the new AP U.S. History course description doesn’t mention these legendary Americans, you have not been misled.
But whether the new version of the class skips over key moments in United States history – and even disparages the nation – are still being hotly debated across the country.
Here’s a look at how the controversy began, what’s really different in the new APUSH (a nickname for the class that critics and supporters still agree on), and how the national war over Common Core is influencing the battle.
The controversy
In October 2012, College Board, a nonprofit that develops and distributes not only the AP exams but also the SAT, revamped APUSH to encourage teachers to go more in depth into fewer topics. The class is College Board’s second most popular, after AP English Language and Composition, with 442,890 students taking the exam in 2013. After the changes, the course description for the first time also called for teachers to impart critical thinking skills to their students, ideas in line with the Common Core, a set of guidelines for math and English that most states have adopted. These changes first went into effect this school year.
The new course description raised little notice until July, when some members of the Texas State Board of Education expressed concern that the class would bring Common Core into Texas schools. State law bans Common Core.
In August, the Republican National Committee brought national attention to the controversy when it passed a resolution asserting that the new curriculum “reflects a radically revisionist view of American history that emphasizes negative aspects of our nation’s history while omitting or minimizing positive aspects.”
The fight reached a boiling point in September.
On September 19, the Texas State Board of Education passed a resolution asking that the AP U.S. History curriculum be rewritten “in a transparent manner to accurately reflect U. S. history without a political bias.”
Around the same time, Julie Williams, a school board member in Jefferson County, Colorado, a district of more than 84,000 students just west of Denver, proposed completely revamping the college-credit-earning course in the local schools because she said the new version had “an emphasis on race, gender, class, ethnicity, grievance and American-bashing while simultaneously omitting the most basic structural and philosophical elements considered essential to the understanding of American History for generations.”
In response to the proposal, hundreds of Jefferson County students skipped school in protest, citing concerns that the plans would lead to censorship.
Students protest against a Jefferson County School Board proposal to emphasize patriotism and downplay civil unrest in the teaching of U.S. history, in front of their school, Jefferson High, in the Denver suburb of Edgewater, Monday, Sept. 29, 2014. (AP Photo/Brennan Linsley)
And in South Carolina, a group calling itself S.C. Parents Involved in Education also raised concerns about what isn’t explicitly mentioned in the new course – the founding fathers, civil rights leaders and wartime heroes – and what is – “wartime experiences, such as the internment of Japanese Is the new AP U.S. History really anti-American? | The Hechinger Report:
