The College Board’s new AP American-history framework is bad in places, but there’s a reason. The College Board’s new framework for teaching Advanced Placement U.S. History has become a flashpoint in the education debate. Much of the criticism is hysterical and inaccurate . . . but not all of it. The critics make a legitimate case that the framework is ideologically slanted and infused with 21st-century progressivist bias.

That’s not because the College Board set out to tamper with the country’s past. And it’s certainly not the case that (as some have alleged) Board president David Coleman did. The new framework was completed before Coleman even arrived, and the committees that assembled it were reasonably representative of currently fashionable thinking among historians — which, alas, is not the thinking that most Americans want their high schools to embed in the minds of their kids.

Let’s be clear that a number of the oft-heard criticisms are over the top and ill-informed. The new framework does not remove historic personages like Benjamin Franklin or Martin Luther King; they were not in the old five-page framework and are not in the new 50-page one (both of which focus more on overarching topics than on naming individuals). And the new standards do not ignore the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence.

That said, the framework has a full measure of shortcomings, starting with its inattention to America’s motivating ideals. The only acknowledgment that the American Revolution had any historical significance is a clause mentioning that it had “reverberations in France, Haiti, and Latin America.” There is no discussion of the intermediary institutions or civic organizations so central to our culture, society, and government.

While identity is declared a major “theme,” and the framework brims with references to ethnic and gender identity, there’s no specific attention to the emergence of a distinct American “identity.” Discussion of race routinely refers to “whites,” washing away real historical complexities in favor of conventional 21st-century racial tropes. The import of anti-Catholic sentiment is absent. Special attention is paid to Mexican immigrants in the 1930s and 1940s (a relatively tiny population), yet the crucial Irish-Italian tensions of the early 20th century are absent.

There’s little about economics that doesn’t feel caricatured or framed in terms of government efforts to combat injustice. Students are introduced to decade after decade of American racism and depravity, with little positive context for the nation’s foreign engagements or its success creating shared prosperity for tens of millions. Little is said of “Manifest Destiny” other than that it was justified by beliefs in “white racial superiority” and “American cultural superiority.” The old framework paid attention to World War II–era “fascism and militarism in Japan, Italy, and Germany.” Featured instead in the new one is the suggestion that sundry U.S. actions during World War II, such as the internment of Japanese Americans, debates over segregation, and dropping the atomic bomb, “raised questions about American values.”

The bias is especially stark when it comes to the 20th century’s iconic presidents. FDR and LBJ are treated reverently. They are depicted as battling to “provide relief to the poor,” “stimulate recovery,” “end racial discrimination,” and “eliminate poverty.” Indeed, the framework explains that “liberal ideals were realized” through their efforts, with the expansion of “democracy and individual freedoms,” only to trigger backlash from small-minded conservatives who “mobilized to defend traditional visions of morality.” While FDR and LBJ are warriors for justice, however, Ronald Reagan is described only as a man of “bellicose rhetoric” who later “developed a friendly relationship” with his Soviet counterpart.

We understand full well that responsible parties at the College Board are caught between a rock and a hard place. The idea of Advanced Placement, after all, is to provide high-school students with college-level coursework that, if successfully mastered, will be accepted by colleges and yield credits to students upon entry. But securing post-secondary credit for work done in high school means that the College Board’s AP courses need to resemble those that the students would take in college — which means their content will be driven primarily by what college professors teach in their own lecture halls. Which, in turn, means that every pedagogical and political fad to be found on today’s postmodern campuses will creep into courses taught to high schoolers.

Moreover, the College Board defends its AP course content by saying that such courses are supposed to be taken on top of previous instruction in the subject. In other words, they expect school kids to have studied U.S. history before they get to the AP course. Swell if true. But how many high-school students take U.S. history twice? And how satisfactory is the grounding they get from whatever history they studied during K–8 “social studies”?

More than two decades ago, in What Do Our 17-Year-Olds Know?, Diane Ravitch and one of the present authors found that few high-school seniors could even place the Civil War in the correct half-century. They were essentially clueless about the central developments of the country’s past. When that study was partially replicated a few years ago, the results were equally dismal. The percentage of kids deemed “proficient” in U.S. history on the National Assessment of Educational Progress is abysmal, and hasn’t budged over the decades. This widespread ignorance calls for an AP history class that eschews today’s academic fads in favor of rigorous, fair-minded instruction that lets students explore and assimilate their history without fear or favor.

The College Board says it is committed to doing just that. It recently announced a process for annually revamping the course framework and signaled that it is interested in making sure that its handiwork is subjected to a robust critique that includes feedback from a wealth of perspectives. The College Board also promised to make the AP test itself public after it’s administered (and has already released a pretty good pilot version). This is a healthy response — provided, of course, that the Board delivers on these promises.

This entire affair will sound depressingly familiar to NRO veterans. Yet again, we see the price paid when the commanding heights of culture and academe are surrendered to the brigades of grievance liberalism. Of course we should demand that the College Board do all it can to ensure that U.S. high-school students get a fair and robust account of their nation’s remarkable history. But rather than fuming at the College Board for responding to its constituents, critics would do better to step up efforts to combat ideological hegemony in higher education with more than frustrated harrumphs.




— Frederick M. Hess is director of education-policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. His books include Making Civics Count. Chester E. Finn Jr. is president emeritus of the Fordham Institute and a fellow at the Hoover Institution.