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February 15, 2023

A Call to the College Board to Restore the Integrity of the AP African American Studies Course

TO: David Coleman, CEO, College Board

We write as faculty and administrators in higher education who teach, write, research and lead in the areas of African American and Black Studies, a rich body of interdisciplinary academic production that incorporates indigenous, gender, queer, ethnic, feminist, and social movement scholarship.

Hundreds of us signed an Open Letter published on January 31, 2023, to express our opposition to Ron DeSantis’ slanderous comments about the draft course. We denounced his threats to hold the new AP offering hostage to Florida’s censorial anti-woke law, and urged the College Board to make revisions to the draft curriculum in their normal customary fashion.

It was our hope that the College Board would stand true to its stated commitments against politically-motivated meddling into the content of its AP courses, but the subsequent release of the pilot course on February 1 revealed that our hope was misplaced. We are gravely disappointed that the College Board’s Revised Framework for the Advanced Placement African American Studies (AP AAS) course effectively aligned the course with Florida’s “anti-woke” specifications, which fundamentally demean, malign and caricature Black life and the study of it. Consequently, it falls significantly short of the College Board’s own stated goal to develop a curricular framework that “reflects the academic rigor of introductory college courses within the discipline.”

As the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH) noted in its February 2023 statement, the decision to excise dozens of foundational concepts, scholars, and theories from the course undermines the “College Board’s credibility as a site for knowledge on the experiences of Black folk and the concepts and theories used to analyze their experiences.”  

For the College Board to restore its credibility and preserve the integrity of the course, it must reinstate the content, concepts and frameworks from the February 2022 “Course Framework and Exam Overview” preview document that were further elaborated in the Fall 2022 Pilot Course Guide. If the course continues to lack rigor and completeness some faculty will advise our institutions to reject advanced placement credit for the course.

The Excised and Censored Content

The latest curricular framework released on February 1, 2023 reveals that dozens of concepts and topics had been excised from the earlier course framework. They were either eliminated entirely or assigned to a “sample topics” section of the framework that students may never be allowed to engage.

The College Board has now acknowledged that the Florida Department of Education (FDOE) sought to influence the course not because of scholarly concerns or pedagogical standards but because that body was acting as a “political apparatus.” The CB’s admission that it removed the mention of concepts like “systemic marginalization” and “intersectionality” because they had become “politicized” only serves to reward that same political apparatus. The decision and reasoning affirms censorship and disinformation. It does not allow students to decide for themselves how those concepts shed light on the African American experience.

As a result, students may take the course without ever encountering key words and related concepts in the field including intersectionality, Black feminism, racial color blindness, institutional racism, and Black Lives Matter. Students and educators cannot engage these topics and ideas if the terms themselves are censored, as the terms themselves convey critical insights that are central to African American Studies. African American Studies is more than the study of the Black past.

African American Studies is the study of the persistence of anti-Blackness and the connections between historical and contemporary efforts to resist structural racism. It is an interdisciplinary engagement with the ways in which people of African descent remade and re-envisioned the world through ideas, art, politics and social movements despite the enduring character of white supremacy.

Students who take the course without encountering these concepts cannot achieve college-level comprehension of African American Studies. Indeed, they will be ill-equipped to engage in further learning and discussion in upper level African American Studies courses without a robust understanding of these concepts.

In addition, excluding Black Lives Matter and other topics from the post-1965 and contemporary period from the core and consigning them to the optional “sample topics” portion of the framework violates the integrity of the course as a whole.

With regards to other courses, the College Board understands clearly why foundational course concepts cannot be removed from the curriculum. For example, in a recent statement condemning censorship, the College Board explained that “the concepts of evolution are at the heart of college biology and a course that neglects such concepts does not pass muster as AP Biology.”  

In the same way, the College Board’s initial interviews with college faculty indicated that "Intersectionality, Cultural Production and Appropriation, and Structural Racism were selected as the most essential themes” within the existing college courses, yet all of these concepts were excluded from the latest framework. As such, the current curricular framework “does not pass muster” as AP African American Studies.

Finally, the censorship of foundational content was not limited to course concepts, themes and scholars alone. Course goals and learning outcomes were also revised to suggest that the course was not intended for students to assess “real world problems,” “systematic marginalization” or to evaluate the “past, present, and future implications” of major social movements, as the chart below reveals.

Allowing students to connect knowledge produced in the classroom to their own questions, experiences, and hopes is foundational to African American studies.

To restore the integrity of the APAAS course, the College Board must:

1. Rescind the “Curricular Framework” published on February 1, 2023 and restore critical concepts, scholarship and frameworks to the AP AAS course.

The College Board should initiate a process guided by faculty and teachers qualified to review the materials that have been removed from the required portion of the curriculum, restore critical concepts, scholarship and frameworks to the document and devise ways to support educators in engaging these concepts with their students.

Put simply, the curriculum must restore the history of Black Studies, Black feminism, Black LGBTQ+ formations, and the conceptual frameworks that have grown out of the post 1960s Black freedom struggle up to Black Lives Matter in order to be called African American Studies.

2. Provide resources to create new platforms (including online and other asynchronous formats) so that Florida students and others confronting censored AP content can take the course and sit for the AP exam.

The College Board should make arrangements for colleges and universities that accept AP credits to accept this online course for Florida students and others in states that may reject the course in the future. Students in these states should not have their learning held hostage by political leaders who demand the censorship of the course in return for their official endorsement. The College Board’s policy on censorship states clearly that “if a school bans required topics from their AP courses, the AP Program removes the AP designation from that course…in the AP course ledger provided to colleges and universities.” To remedy the loss of learning and opportunity that will result for such students, the College Board should develop alternative platforms, at its expense or through its own fundraising capacities, to promote their inclusion and engagement.

3. Cease and desist from making public claims that the censored Curricular Framework is capable of introducing students to the foundational concepts, themes, and commitments of African American Studies. It cannot.

The curriculum was not simply reorganized to make it more streamlined or efficient. It has been scrubbed of much of its critical and contemporary content, and the framework that remains does not fully and accurately reflect the state of the field. This course is not AP African American History. Educators and students cannot be told that the adoption of this emaciated framework represents a “first step” in introducing more people to the field. This claim falsely suggests that the only choices available are a censored curriculum or no course at all. The CB must meet its obligation to stand behind this course as envisioned and designed. To withdraw now would be to sanction the lie that the field is not a valid and important academic discipline and that the students’ quest for this knowledge is illegitimate. This is the very message that FDOE and DeSantis have sought to convey, and to withdraw or cancel the course would be to hand political operatives intent on censoring Black knowledge a total victory.

4. Assume a leadership role in fighting against widespread efforts by states to censor anti-racist thought and expression.

The College Board must make a clear stand against so-called “anti-woke” legislation in every state where it appears. These laws are authoritarian in spirit, a threat to democratic principles and an open society by design, and are eroding academic freedom and national educational standards. The College Board should lend its support to legal efforts against these educational gag orders and memory laws, including filing amicus briefs where appropriate. It must dedicate its significant resources to fight these measures that are antithetical to quality teaching and learning in a mulitracial society. College Board must vigorously protect the academic freedom to teach and to learn.

The College Board’s February 11, 2023 apology acknowledged that it failed to condemn the FDOE’s spurious attacks on the course and individual scholars who were falsely maligned and targeted for political gain. Further, it is evident from the same statement that the Board’s initial comments regarding private exchanges between the CB and FDOE were misleading and incomplete. This allowed FDOE and the DeSantis administration to claim a victory in censoring the course.  

The College Board’s ineffectiveness and lack of transparency in dealing with a foreseeable challenge also did a grave disservice to the several hundred scholars in the field who were recruited to design the course, but were neither consulted nor informed about the decisions to eliminate key concepts, ideas and materials.