By Zoe Yu and Siddhu Pachipal
Governance & Society
Teen Vogue
As newly minted high school graduates with a combined 38 Advanced Placement (AP) classes under our belt, we know the College Board better than most. For four years, we were walking College Board ambassadors: diligently annotating College Board study guides, drilling College Board questions, and marking up College Board rubrics. But it was only after we wrapped up our last exam, AP Macroeconomics, that we stopped to ask ourselves: What, exactly, had we learned?
Every day, when we walked into first-period AP Economics, we walked in with an assumption: The College Board, the billion-dollar, not-for-profit organization in charge of our curriculum (and curricula in roughly 70% of American public high schools), would take a middle-of-the-line approach on "political" topics, keeping the ideological seesaw from tipping too far left or too far right. This approach, we thought, was for good reason. We are living through a time when even actual facts are controversial in classrooms, which have become the latest battleground in America’s culture war.
But as we worked our way through the College Board units, it felt like only one side of the story was being told. For example, in Unit 3: How to Grow an Economy, our textbook stated good fiscal policy is giving tax cuts and investment credits to businesses — point blank. We were told that alternatives, such as raising the minimum wage, expanding federal aid programs, and taxing corporations, would end up causing a domino effect of inflation and fiscal harm.
It seems the College Board doesn’t engage meaningfully with the kinds of policy proposals that would be on a progressive’s wish list, to the extent that teachers felt compelled to periodically remind us that they were teaching from official course materials, not projecting their own opinions.
Why, then, don’t schools switch to a different educational model? Teachers say it's about following the money. Many state governments subsidize AP exams and funnel hundreds of millions of dollars toward tests. The AP name carries a lot of weight after high school, showing that students are capable of college-level work, even giving them a leg up in their college course load. After all, a score of three or higher isn’t just for bragging rights; at the vast majority of colleges, it’s the quickest way to get credit, and the closest we’ve come to standardization in a patchwork of conflicting local and state curricula.
So, how did the College Board find itself with so much power over what is taught in our public schools? It goes back to the 1950s, when a Cold War America went to bat against an increasingly powerful Soviet Union. That meant doing anything and everything we could to measure up: rigging up our military, growing our economy, and — most important to this story — overhauling our schools.
Part of this “upgrade [to] the education of able students in American secondary schools” was the introduction of AP courses. In 1952, APs started humbly, with 11 subjects, but as the roster grew to 38, they’ve become what they are today: synonyms for rigor and achievement, mainstays of the college admissions process, and fixtures in the schedules of 1.1 million (and counting) high school students.
To its credit, the College Board has been more or less transparent about how it creates an AP course from scratch, spending two to six years working with “department chairs and college faculty” to develop content for its classes and questions for its exams.
When that much time and energy goes into developing a single course, every detail makes a statement. So, when our economics course offers easy answers, like one-size-fits-all supply-side economics, to questions economists like Marshall, Keynes, and Marx have spent centuries debating, it's making a statement. When it recommends students read from a textbook written by the same person who wrote a paper called “Defending the One Percent,” it’s making a statement. And when it allows students to think that graphs and models can tell us everything we need to know about economics in our country, it’s making a statement.
In AP Environmental Science, the College Board had us spend days dissecting problems and solutions from every possible angle — overfishing and aquaculture, clear-cutting and sustainable forestry — but in econ, we weren’t afforded a single day to talk about how supply-demand curves might not be perfect.
This conservative-friendly bent isn’t only in AP Economics. In 2018, AP World History became AP World History: Modern, conveniently starting — not at 10,000 BCE, as it had for the past decade and a half — at 1200 CE, right before Europe dusted itself off from the Dark Ages and took over most of the world. On the chopping block were more than ten thousand years of human history that AP World teacher Tyler George described to The Atlantic as “some of the most rich, diverse content of the entire curriculum.” As a result, there will now be students who never learn about the towering pyramids of the Mayan empire, the lush poems of the Shang Dynasty, and the boundless riches of the Mauryans. Student voices are left on the back burner.
Time and time again, the College Board has altered its coursework after conservative politicians have asked it to, while maintaining that it’s not being politically influenced. This was the case in 2014, after AP United States History was condemned by the Republican National Committee (and soon after, conservatives in Oklahoma, Georgia, and Texas) for preaching a “radically revisionist view of American history that emphasizes [its] negative aspects.” One can only assume that “radical revisionism” is a view that touches on slavery, Jim Crow, and their enduring legacy.
Soon after, the College Board updated the course, and its 2015 edition included a few minor tweaks — with major implications. As reported by NPR, in the 2014 course version, Europeans “helped increase the intensity and destructiveness of American Indian warfare.” In the 2015 version, they were kind enough to just “stimulate cultural and economic changes” in Native communities. New ideas, such as those about America’s positive influence on the rest of the world, were penciled in — concepts far from having a historical consensus. How could so much of our history change in one year?
And just this past year, Florida's Republican governor Ron DeSantis called out the College Board for its AP African American Studies course, rallying against coverage of “Black queer studies” and “Black feminist literary thought.” Before long, topics like critical race theory, the queer experience, and Black feminism were struck from the required framework, as was the Black Lives Matter movement. The College Board has since insisted that these changes weren’t products of political pressure. Regardless of that claim, though, the legacy is clear: Critical concepts have been watered down, entire histories flushed out.
For all the commotion about “leftist indoctrination” in the classroom, it feels precisely the opposite for students behind the desks. The problem with letting a private organization — and one with a vested interest in maintaining its “monopoly in the college admissions game” — be at the helm of our public education is that it can turn a blind eye to the students and educators who pay the price for its decisions. That is what’s happening today. Students may be calling for syllabi that cover Asian and African continental histories, the Black Panthers, or Nazism and fascism in more depth, but at the end of the day, we don’t have a say in the decision-making process.
Instead, we have the illusion of choice: We can either take AP classes and cash in on extra points in the college admissions race and GPA game, or lose out. The College Board is a monopoly — which it admits — in its own AP Microeconomics course, and it's a sign of an imperfect system.
It’s not radical to think that classrooms should be places where students learn how to think, not what to think. Sidelining entire perspectives and histories from our curricula can only serve the latter. So when AP exam season rolls around again, and the College Board fires questions at a new crop of high schoolers, we’ll fire one right back: When politicians throw their punches, will you stand firm or waver?
Photo credit Mario Tama/Getty Images
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