The College Board’s Racial Pandering Rather than directing help at struggling students, it establishes a new AP course in African American studies. Jason Riley
Ever wonder why Democrats push so hard to expand the mission of K-12 public education even while the system continues to underperform in its core tasks?
Even before the pandemic, a majority of fourth- and eighth-graders were unable to read or do math at grade level, and outcomes are even worse for minority students. New York City Schools Chancellor David Banks said last year that 65% of his black and Hispanic students never reach proficiency on standardized tests and then quipped, “If everybody in the Department of Education went home and all the kids went to school, you could get those same results.”
Nevertheless, Democrats from President Biden on down advocate for “universal” prekindergarten programs, even though studies have shown little to no evidence that they improve test scores. Progressives also want explicit sex education in earlier grades and have fought successfully to introduce racial propaganda into curricula via the controversial New York Times Magazine “1619 Project.”
The latest evidence that reading, writing and arithmetic are secondary concerns comes by way of the College Board, the nonprofit organization that runs the Advanced Placement program. AP courses are offered to nearly three million students in more than 22,000 high schools across the country. Students who complete the courses take a final exam, graded on a 5-point scale, and those who score a 3 or higher can be eligible for college credit.
Last month, the College Board announced that it will begin offering a course on African-American studies. In recent years, gifted-and-talented programs and exam schools have increasingly been attacked by political progressives for their lack of racial balance. The AP program hasn’t escaped similar criticism, because many low-income minorities who complete the courses don’t score high enough to receive college credit. The best way to address this achievement gap would be to direct help at struggling students. Instead, the program has decided to lower its standards and pander to black kids.
The College Board declined to release a sample syllabus of the new course but did allow on its website that students will “look at the history, politics, culture, and economics of North American people of African descent.” It also explained that students will “examine the hardships African-Americans faced during their history” and “dive into the difficult issues, such as unequal educational opportunities, they deal with today.” There is nothing wrong with high schoolers learning about America’s past treatment of blacks, from enslaving them to legally segregating them to twice electing one of them to the White House. It’s all part of our history.
But if the College Board description is any guide, expect ideology to trump pedagogical concerns. The course is likely to punctuate white mistreatment of blacks in the past and uncritically cite it as the only plausible explanation for social and economic inequality today. Jews and Asians also faced “hardships” in the past that included lynchings, internment camps and “unequal educational opportunities,” yet today both groups outperform white Americans academically and economically and have for decades. What are the chances that the new AP African-American studies course will provide that sort of context?
We shouldn’t be surprised that these developments have coincided with the ascendance of the progressive left. In the late 1960s, under similar pressure from liberal radicals in general and black separatists in particular, the first black-studies programs began appearing on college campuses, and higher education has never been the same. Like the AP program today, colleges were acting out of expediency. If schools wanted a more diverse faculty and student body, it was much easier to establish black-studies programs with weak standards than it was to incorporate blacks in established academic disciplines.
Yet not all black intellectuals at the time signed on to this approach. J. Saunders Redding, the first black faculty member at an Ivy League school, wrote in 1970 that the “concept ‘Black Studies,’ conceived in frustration and bitterness by an articulate and highly emotional minority, is of questionable validity as a scholarly discipline.” The civil-rights activist Bayard Rustin, a confidant of Martin Luther King Jr., was also highly critical of these programs and posed some pointed questions about their intent. “Is black studies an education program or a form of ideological indoctrination?” he asked in a 1969 essay. “Is it designed to train qualified scholars in a significant field of intellectual inquiry, or is it hoped that its graduates will form political cadres . . . ?” And “finally, does it offer the possibility for better racial understanding, or is it a regression to racial separatism?”
Excellent questions. And they apply equally to the latest effort to turn students who haven’t even learned to read and write into social-justice warriors.
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