LETTERS REVEAL TALKS OVER AP COURSE
While the College Board was developing its first Advanced Placement course in African American studies, the group was in repeated contact with the administration of Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, often discussing course concepts that the state said it found objectionable, a newly released letter shows.
When the final course guidelines were released last week, the College Board had removed or significantly reduced the presence of many of those concepts — like intersectionality, mass incarceration, reparations and the Black Lives Matter movement — although it said that political pressure played no role in the changes.
The specifics about the discussions, over the course of a year, were outlined in a letter Tuesday from the Florida Department of Education to the College Board.
The existence of the letter was first reported by The Daily Caller, a conservative news site. A copy of the letter was posted on Scribd. Its authenticity was verified by the Florida Department of Education, which released a copy Thursday.
The College Board responded to the letter with one of its own, released Thursday, saying that Florida’s concerns had not influenced any revisions to the course, which had been shaped instead by feedback from educators.
“We provide states and departments of education across the country with the information they request for inclusion of courses within their systems,” the letter said, adding: “We need to clarify that no topics were removed because they lacked educational value.”
The Florida letter suggests discrepancies with the College Board’s account of events. Florida publicly announced that it had rejected the AP course in January, a few weeks before the College Board released its final guidelines — too little time, the board said, to make any politically motivated revisions. But according to the letter, the state informed the College Board months before, in September, that it would not add the African American studies class to the state’s course directory without revisions.
The Florida letter also outlines a key Nov. 16 meeting to air differences between the state and the College Board over the course. In the meeting, the state said that the AP African American studies course violated regulations requiring that “instruction on required topics must be factual and objective and may not suppress or distort significant historical events.”
According to the state, the College Board acknowledged that the course would undergo revisions, while pushing back against the state’s request to remove concepts like “systemic marginalization” and “intersectionality,” which the College Board saw as integral to the class.
By the time the course’s final framework was released Feb. 1, those terms had largely been removed.