Conservatives in Colorado and elsewhere are alarmed by the College Board’s new Advanced Placement US history test, which the Republican National Committee has called a “radically revisionist view of American history that emphasizes negative aspects of our nation's history.” Brooke speaks to Liana Heitin, who has been covering the conflict for Education Week, about what’s actually going on with the test.
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Comments [7]
You'll love this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjxBClx01jc#t=76
Saudi Arabia and other Islamic nations, Russia, China, etc...
These are nations which whitewash history, obliterating the truth in the hopes of indoctrinating the mindless so that they can't tell the difference between facts and blind, nationalistic jingoism.
Conservatives in America truly are the U.S. equivalent of the Taliban.
It's so sad for our country's future that conservatives still hold so much sway and power.
This Colorado county's school board might well be dominated by narrow-minded U.S. triumphalists, but here's the fishy flip side of this story:
Why did the College Board rewrite this -- or any -- Advanced Placement test around "Common Core" standards?
Love them or loathe them, "Common Core" are K-12 curricula. But AP tests are intended to cover college-level content.
They're supposed to expand high-school teaching, not reinforce the morass of K-12 curriculum politics, reductive standardized testing, and teaching down to dumbed-down tests.
Presumably, university professors advise the College Board on AP tests' contents. So one would hope to see these advisors telling high schools what they expect students to have learned in a college-level course in their subject. Not be genuflecting to the latest fashion among high-school teachers and school administrators, who are presumably less-expert in these disciplines and less-qualified to outline -- let alone teach -- college courses.
Gladstone's usual snark emphasizes the exact problem. Leftists have taken over education and the new goal is indoctrination rather than learning. The sneering tone used for any topic on which there is disagreement has no place in education.
Liana Heitin correctly concludes that "tension in education is good," but she completely misidentifies the positive tension. The tension between proponents and opponents of the new AP US history test is destructive, not constructive. The constructive tension is within the new test itself. The test presupposes that students can analyze historical events and documents in all sorts of ways. Putting together those analyses into a coherent argument is the essence of history and the basis of constructive debates about history. The debate between proponents and opponents of the new test is not tension over the study of history, but tension about whether to teach history or ideology.
Maybe the AP curriculum should become the national standard for history. If other College Board curricula are comparably stringent, they might be useful as well.
I am saddened to hear that the Texas school board wrote that materials used to teach history should "promote citizenship, patriotism, essentials and benefits of the free enterprise system", but apparently failed to list the one thing I always thought history was supposed to teach: the truth.
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