Today's blog is directed at folks who are busy protesting and disrupting school board meetings across the country. If you are concerned about what really is being taught at your student's school, read on. Spoiler alert: Anti-CRT protests are a distraction! The main theme of this post? Not all districts are equivalent in the curriculum they offer their students! (You’re not shocked, are you?)
FACT: there are roughly 32,000 high schools, private and public, in the United States. Only 22,000 of them offer one or more of the 38 possible AP classes. There is verifiable and actually relevant inequity in how many AP classes are offered to a student! In my theoretically well-resourced County of San Diego, Valhalla High School offers only 10 APs and, appallingly, just one language program. At Canyon Crest Academy, a public school just 20 miles away, students can select from 28 APs and five different language programs. Given the importance colleges place on academic rigor in high school, THAT disparity in educational opportunity surely ought to be worth a protest or two.
FACT: Taught in grad school, CRT is a legal/structural analysis, focusing on the differential outcomes produced by inequities built into institutions (eg healthcare, criminal justice, housing markets). AP US History is a college-level class, offered at the high school level, that covers topics such as: the Constitutional Convention and Debates over Ratification, The Red Scare, Reagan and Conservatism--as well as--The Society of the South in the Early Republic, Slavery in the British Colonies, Labor, Slavery, and Caste in the Spanish Colonial System. If your school board budgeted for APUSH at your particular school, then your student gets to learn amazing details about US history-- the heroic, the stoic, and yes, the barbaric. If your school does not offer many APs, imho, that’s worth grabbing a sign, heading to a school board meeting and protesting vociferously!
If you are dismayed by your student's classwork including an introduction to the harsh reality of US History, then feel free to move to one of this nation's 14 states where, unbelievably, US History still isn't even a requirement to graduate from high school. Being afraid of a conversation about facts, wasting everyone's time asking the wrong questions in front of a school board, worse yet plagiarizing those questions from the uninformed commentariat, modeling for your student how not to think critically about the past, let alone ignoring how a 20th century perspective seems to be repeating itself in the 21st century...well, if this were an AP Gov class, and only because of grade inflation, I'd give you a C- with a ‘NS’ for behavior.
Get the facts and demand your student receives an intellectually rigorous curriculum that encourages curiosity and critical thinking.
Note: I was super upset by a local school board protest and wrote this blog during AP Exam week 2022. Is your student one of the over 2.5 million that are, indeed, taking an AP exam this month? Why not ask them what they learned in APUSH and see if it coincides with what your opinion leaders are saying…
