Story at a glance
- Some high school students will get the chance to take a new AP course this fall on African American Studies.
- The College Board, which oversees college-level classes in high school, is offering the course at 60 high schools this fall.
- If all goes well, more schools will get the chance to offer the class in the spring with the goal of allowing all interested schools to offer the course by 2024.
Some high school students will have the chance to take a new Advanced Placement course this school year.
The College Board, which oversees the instruction of college-level courses in high schools, is introducing an AP African American Studies course this fall.
The course will only be offered to students at 60 schools across the country as part of a pilot program the organization announced earlier this year.
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“AP African American Studies will introduce a new generation of students to the amazingly rich cultural, artistic, and political contributions of African Americans,” said Trevor Packer, senior vice president of AP and instruction at the College Board. “We hope it will broaden the invitation to Advanced Placement and inspire students with a fuller appreciation of the American story.”
If all goes well this fall, the College Board plans to offer the AP course to more students next school year. College Board officials expect that the course will be available to all interested high schools in the U.S. during the 2024-25 school year.
The course is interdisciplinary and will draw from literature, political science, geography and the sciences to delve into the contributions and experiences of African Americans.
The course comes during a critical time in the country’s culture war where the idea of instructing critical race theory in schools has become a flashpoint for conservative lawmakers.
Since the beginning of the year, lawmakers have introduced 137 educational gag order bills in 36 states, according to the free speech group PEN America. Those bills mainly target the instruction on race in the United States and LGBTQ+ history.
That number represents a significant increase in efforts to censor what is being taught in schools from last year. In 2021, lawmakers introduced 54 similar educational gag order bills in 22 states, according to the organization.
No course syllabus has been shared by the College Board but a “course framework” will be posted on the AP Program website so that “anyone can read the course material directly and see the evidence-based content and skills” students lean in the course, according to a College Board spokesperson.
High school teachers who helped craft the pilot program met at Howard University this summer to review its framework.
“A solid understanding of how African Americans have shaped America, its history, laws, institutions, culture and arts, and even the current practice of American democracy, sharpens all knowledge about our nation,” Nikki Taylor, chair of the Howard University History Department said in a statement to Changing America.
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