DeSantis Versus the Left-Wing Educrats, Again

National Review Online

Friday, January 27, 2023

 

He’s getting smeared for it, but Ron DeSantis is creating the conditions for an important conservative victory in the education wars nationwide.

 

By warning the College Board, which oversees the Advanced Placement curriculum, that its African-American Studies program violates Florida’s Stop WOKE Act, he has forced the organization to say that it will undertake a series of hasty revisions.

 

The AP curriculum acts as a bridge from high school to college for the nation’s top students. It is also the closest thing that a federal system like the United States has to a national curriculum. Until now, AP courses were confined to subjects such as American and European history, biology, chemistry, calculus, and foreign languages. While the College Board’s materials have never been without controversy, the establishment of a “Studies” course would dramatically expand the beachhead in American high schools for ideologically warped scholarship and political indoctrination. African-American Studies could be swiftly followed by Women’s Studies, Queer Studies, etc.

 

The designers of the AP’s African-American Studies curriculum included Joshua M. Myers, whose scholarship explicitly rejects standards of neutrality in favor of open anti-capitalist advocacy. Leaked reading lists and teacher’s guides showed the course pushed critical race theorists such as Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, including his concept of “color-blind racism.” As Stanley Kurtz wrote here at NR, “If DeSantis were to approve a course pushing the idea of ‘color-blind racism,’ he would effectively be nullifying his own Stop WOKE Act.”

 

DeSantis wasn’t content to raise a few objections in conservative media. He took the unprecedented step of refusing to give the College Board Florida’s approval and invited the organization to revise the materials to conform to the legal standards approved by Florida’s state legislature. And the College Board’s initial response was to begin backing down, in hopes of preserving its position in red and blue states alike.

 

This walk-back has now been enormously complicated by the intervention of Governor J. B. Pritzker of Illinois. Pritzker has decided to threaten his own cancellation of AP African-American Studies until it sufficiently highlights “the role played by Black queer Americans” in American history. Pritzker’s letter said the state would “reject any curriculum modifications designed to appease extremists like the Florida Governor and his allies.”

 

Instead of quietly tamping down its radicalism, the College Board will as a result feel pressure to make its left-wing allegiances more overt. And that would, in turn, likely lead to more red states canceling the African-American Studies course. It could even lead in the long run to red states creating an alternative to the College Board itself.

 

We would welcome such an initiative. The College Board’s attempt to create a national curriculum offends America’s federalist system. It is an occasion for introducing left-wing advocacy into high schools. Other Republican governors and legislatures should follow DeSantis’s lead in saying “no.” The conservative counterrevolution in education may be just beginning.