Across the country, public school boards, parents, and politicians have been putting restrictions and what topics are allowed to be taught in the classroom. From race, parts of American history, gender, and sexuality, schools have placed bans and fought over curriculum.
Now, one of the nation’s largest and most influential non-profit organizations that prepares students for college is offering students a way to discuss some of these topics and get college credit simultaneously.
Advanced Placement (AP), run by The College Board, offers students in 60 high schools across the U.S. the 2022-2023 school year option to take AP African American Studies. The pilot program developed by the college board “is designed to offer high school students an evidence-based introduction to African American studies,” according to its website. The class covers literature, arts and humanities, political science, geography, and sciences to understand the African American experience.
The College Board offers 38 AP courses in seven subjects designed after an introductory college course. At the end of the academic year, students who take AP classes take an AP exam based on a standardized college-level exam. If students pass at a certain level on a grading scale of 1-5, they will receive college credit for the course in most institutions in the U.S.
2022 is the first year of the African American Studies AP pilot program and the first new offering from the College Board since 2014, according to The Washington Post. In the next few years, the program hopes to expand to be an option in all schools that offer AP courses and plans to give the first exam in the spring of 2025.
The Washington Post reports that the new course offering has been a decade in the making and reports the lessons to span over 400 years, beginning with the African diaspora and ending in contemporary times.
Patrice Frasier, a high school teacher at Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, is conducting one of the first pilot AP African American Studies classes. She told The Washington Post she believes the new course will help change how the African American story is taught in schools.
“African American history does not begin and end with slavery,” Fraiser told The Washington Post.
The introduction of the pilot program comes at a time when schools across the country are debating over teaching race and racism. Free speech organization Pen America shared a press release in August that 36 states had introduced 137 bills attempting to restrict teaching. The number of legislative proposals increased by 250% from 2021 to 2022 and said the majority of the censorship proposals limit the teaching of U.S. history, Race, LGBTQ+ history and identities. Nineteen states have passed some form of teaching restrictions, Pen America reports.
Some of the most famous restrictions come from Florida, where Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law last school year multiple pieces of legislation that limited what could be taught in the classroom regarding topics such as critical race theory and sexual identity.
“I don’t teach theory. I teach facts,” Frasier told The Washington Post. “These things actually happened. There are bad things that happened in history, but your not talking about that doesn’t make them go away.”
