A hugely influential private organization plans to release courses that will teach America’s top students extreme racial and other leftist politics, all with public institutions and funds, according to documents obtained by researcher Stanley Kurtz. The College Board, whose products are sold in almost every American high school, is developing curricula modeled on colleges’ identity politics departments such as gender and racial studies, the documents show.
A draft Kurtz obtained of College Board’s forthcoming Advanced Placement African American Studies (APAAS) course shows, he writes:
APAAS clearly proselytizes for a socialist transformation of the United States, although its socialism is heavily inflected by attention to race and ethnicity. …
The topic descriptions sound neutral, but the readings almost uniformly consist of neo-Marxist agitation — pleas for a socialist transformation of America, inspired by African Americans and infused with their cultural style. APAAS’s ‘debates,’ such as they are, explore precisely what sort of leftist radical you should be.
The College Board already helps gatekeep American students’ access to higher education with its SAT college entrance exam. After College Board hired one of the “architects” of Common Core as its president, the nonprofit overhauled its SAT exam to fit Common Core, after which the SAT’s market share of the college entrance exam market declined.
College Board also licenses to both public and private schools advanced courses that offer students dual credit, for both high school and college, called Advanced Placement. These help secure the private organization major influence over what the United States’s most promising high school students learn and more than $1 billion in annual revenue that comes in large part from American taxpayers.
Under Common Core architect David Coleman, College Board also revamped its existing history classes, which are often the last history class America’s college-educated citizens ever take. The revised Advanced Placement courses were infused with identity politics and anti-American and anti-Western readings of history, found independent reviews by academics assembled by the National Association of Scholars.
Kurtz finds that at least one of the five writers of College Board’s forthcoming African American studies class for high schoolers is an open Marxist sympathizer and proselytizer who ‘bemoans the false objectivity of historians whose writings “rarely target capitalism for condemnation and destruction.'”
At National Review, Kurtz explores in-depth the draft curriculum’s structure and selections that promote political violence and hatred for the American system, which are presented approvingly instead of as representative of the dangers of Marxist ideology. As Kurtz notes, such a curriculum clearly would violate new state laws against state-sponsored promulgation of critical race theory.
It’s no wonder, then, that polls and studies consistently find that the youngest Americans and those with the most exposure to politically corrupted education institutions are the most anti-American and most supportive of Marxist permutations, including socialism and identity politics. This is an existential crisis for a country built on citizen self-governance and widespread respect for fellow citizens’ inalienable natural rights, with which Marxism is at war. Certainly no country should fund hatred for its own history, citizens, and ideals, either directly or indirectly.
As Kurtz writes, Americans who want honest history taught to the next generation must repel and replace the College Board’s one-sided monopoly offerings for America’s top students. That goes not only for its in-development identity politics courses but also its compromised existing oeuvre. America’s kids deserve far, far better than this, and our future depends on them getting an honest education rather than an indoctrination in racial hatred, cynicism, and self-loathing.
