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The College Board rejected claims Thursday by Florida officials that some aspects of the state’s new history standards align with an Advanced Placement African American Studies course that Florida officials banned earlier this year.
Florida’s state Board of Education approved new African American history standards last week that have been widely criticized for including language on how “slaves developed skills” that could ultimately be used for “personal benefit.” In defending the new state-created standards, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and other state officials have argued the College Board used similar language in the framework for its course.
But College Board officials denied that the AP course echoes the new Florida standards, noting that while the course “includes a discussion about the skills enslaved people brought with them that enslavers exploited as well as other skills developed in America that were valuable to their enslavers,” the class does not frame slavery in a positive light.
“We resolutely disagree with the notion that enslavement was in any way a beneficial, productive, or useful experience for African Americans,” the College Board said in a statement to USA TODAY. “Unequivocally, slavery was an atrocity that cannot be justified by examples of African Americans’ agency and resistance during their enslavement.”
Jeremy Redfern, DeSantis’ press secretary, posted Thursday on X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter, a portion of the College Board’s curriculum that discusses various trades that enslaved people learned. A learning objective for AP course states that “enslaved people learned specialized trades” and “once free, African Americans used these skills to provide for themselves and others.”
Alex Lanfranconi, communications director for the Florida Department of Education, made a similar argument on the social media site.
“The AP course supported by the NAACP, teachers’ unions and White House includes nearly IDENTICAL language about the skills learned by slaves,” Lanfranconi wrote Thursday. “Something tells me this conspiracy theory about Florida’s new African American History standards is about to go away.”
Still banned:As demand for AP African American Studies surges across US, it’s still blocked in Florida
Florida vs. the College Board
The College Board’s rebuttal is the latest in a series of disagreements between the nonprofit and Florida’s Department of Education.
The College Board, which administers the SAT and the Advanced Placement program, college-level courses taken by high school students, spent over a decade creating the AP African American history course. It was piloted at about five dozen schools last school year and will be test run at about 800 schools this fall, twice as many as originally planned.
Just ahead of the deadline to apply to join the second year of the pilot program, Florida’s Department of Education banned the course in mid-January, stating in a letter that it is “inexplicably contrary to Florida law and significantly lacks educational value.”
Florida said the College Board’s curriculum violated the state’s Stop WOKE Act and specifically flagged topics like the Black Lives Matter social justice movement, Black queer studies and the reparations movement.
The decision – which sparked national outrage – prompted the College Board to revise the course and remove some of the content Florida officials took issue with. After being pummeled for some of those changes, the company apologized and said it would revise the content once again, reinstating certain concepts.
The course development committee, along with experts in the subject, are in the process of building the course and exam. A final framework for the course will be released later this year, the College Board has said.
“We are proud that AP African American Studies will offer a holistic introduction to the history, literature, and arts of Black people in the United States,” the College Board said. “From origins in the African continent to the trans-Atlantic slave trade to the movements for equal rights, this course will provide an unflinching encounter with the facts, evidence, and invaluable contributions of African Americans.”
When asked about the College Board’s statement on how Florida is teaching slavery late Thursday, Redfern dismissed the nonprofit organization’s stance.
“College Board is free to deny all they want,” he said. “Regardless, the learning objective I described in the tweet is undeniable…Also, I never claimed that the entire curriculum was similar. I stated that the above-cited learning objective is the same.”
Meanwhile, DeSantis told reporters Thursday in Iowa that what his state just approved “makes it very clear about the injustices of slavery in vivid detail … And that particular provision about the skills – that was in spite of slavery, not because of.”
CONTRIBUTING: Brianne Pfannenstiel, Des Moines Register.
‘Undermining history’New slavery curriculum in Florida is latest in century of missteps
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