This year the College Board—the organization responsible for the SAT and the Advanced Placement courses—is piloting a new AP course devoted to African American studies. Sixty schools are piloting the course, which covers 400 years of Black contributions to American music, literature, politics, science, and other fields.
According to the Florida Department of Education, the course violates the state’s “Stop W.O.K.E. Act.” This act prohibits classroom instruction that privileges one race over another, discriminates against students based on race, makes students feel guilty because of their racial identity, or claims that students are guilty of “actions committed in the past by the other members of the same race, color, national organization, or sex.”
If any of these things are happening in K-12 classrooms, it is fair to say that the teachers presiding over those classrooms are committing pedagogical malpractice. While I have no doubt that there are teachers engaged in this kind of malpractice, most of the teachers I know—and I have trained history teachers for two decades—are not discriminating against their students in this way. Unfortunately, there are enough anecdotes about bad pedagogical behavior for people like Ron DeSantis to craft an “anti-woke” narrative that ultimately serves his political ambitions. If he and the rest of the “anti-woke” Republican Party (including newly elected Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy) can instill enough fear in white conservatives about the threat of African-American studies permeating the nation’s schools, these culture warriors just might have a shot at controlling all three branches of government in 2024.
As expected, DeSantis and the Florida conservatives behind the law have their intellectual defenders. In September 2022, National Review writer Stanley Kurtz claimed to have obtained a copy of the AP African-American Studies curriculum and argued that it “clearly proselytizes for a socialist transformation of the United States, although its socialism is heavily inflected by attention to race and ethnicity.” Kurtz’s critique, which was based on the last quarter of the course, focused almost entirely on the work of historian Robin Kelley, a historian of Black communism whose work Kurtz suggests is “the key to the agenda that structures virtually the entire modern section of the course.” In another piece published on Wednesday, Kurtz said that DeSantis’ ban of the course in Florida is “entirely justified.” (While I disagree with Kurtz’s assessment, I do think the College Board should seriously consider his point about releasing more information about the course content.)