Paying Students for Scores

The Houston Independent School District is trying another way to boost AP test scores-- offer students and teachers a bounty. For every score in the 3-5 range, students-- and their teachers-- get $100.

While this is new in Houston, HISD is actually joining several other districts around the country in this use of bribes incentives for high schoolers.

While there may be similar-ish programs in districts across the country, the big dog in the AP bribery biz is the National Math and Science Initiative. NMSI is an organization that was launched "to address one of this nation’s greatest economic and intellectual threats – the declining number of students who are prepared to take rigorous college courses in math and science and are equipped for careers in those fields." You may recognize that as a classic reformster talking point-- low test scores are a threat to our national security-- and in fact, the big launching funders of NMSI include Exxon, the Michael and Susan Dell foundation, and the Gates Foundation. Partners also include the US Department of Education and the College Board, because why not fund an advocacy group that is telling everyone that your product is really important. This isn't philanthropy-- it's marketing.

And market they do. The college-ready initiative that supports the AP score pay-off plan features writing like this:

The AP curriculum is the best indicator available of whether students are prepared for college-level work.  Students who master AP courses are three times more likely to graduate from college. For minority students, that multiplier is even greater: African American and Hispanic students who succeed in AP courses are four times more likely to graduate from college.

Or students who are more likely to finish college are more likely to do college-preppy things like take AP courses. Man, sorting out correlation and causation must be really hard, because so few people want to actually do it.

The operation is pretty simple-- NMSI unloads a giant pile of money with a college-prep program and the rewards begin as NSMI works to transform the culture of the school. This "grant" program has been operating since 2008, starting out in Alabama, Kentucky, Arkansas, Virginia, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. Press has been generally positive when the program popped up in big mainstream outlets like the NYT and US Today. 

Are there issues with this? Well, yes-- any time we inject monetary bribery into education, we are essentially admitting that we can't think of any better reason for learning. That kind of debasement of education is typical of the reformster movement which holds as a foundational belief that the only reason to do things is to get a financial reward.

On the other hand, bribery was already cemented into the foundation of the AP product anyway-- the whole selling point has always been, "Take this course, score well on this test, and it will save you some bucks on your college education. Ka-ching." The AP appeal is to take a challenging course and get college credit. NMSI's program doesn't do much more than move payday forward. The one new feature added by the program is the increased incentive for AP teachers to drop everything and lay into test prep with a vengeance. If you think AP tests are not open to test prep, I have a bridge to sell you. In some courses, the test prep looks enough like real education to be tolerable, though under David Coleman's leadership, that is changing. What is true across the board is that hooking into the AP universe can be just a way to pay the College Board to write your curriculum for you.

NMSI may have to crank their program up soon. It pays bounty on scores from 3 to 5, but at least in my neck of the woods, colleges are increasingly rejecting 3s. Because they have high standards about how often they're willing to give up their own revenue in order to bolster the College Board's business plan.

It would be nice to talk about things like getting ready for college by acquiring actual knowledge and skills. As I often tell my juniors, "I understand that you have to worry about getting into the college of your choice, but you do realize that once you get there, they'll want you to show that you know stuff, too." An actual education is worth more than a hundred bucks.

AP, Please Do Your CCSS Homework

Sally Ho, who works the Nevada/Utah beat for the Associated Press, tried her hand at a Common Core Big Standardized Test Explainer. She needed to do a little more homework, including a few more things not written by Common Core Testing flacks.

She sets out with a good question. Last year students were supposed to be taking super-duper adaptive tests that would generate lots of super-duper data. But in many states the computerized on-line testing was a giant cluster farfegnugen, and in many other states there was an "unprecedented spread of refusals."

So what is the impact of the incomplete data?

Common Core History

Ho's research skills fail her here, and she goes with the Core's classic PR line: The Core is standards, not curriculum. Also, it was totally developed by governors and state school superintendents "with the input of teachers, experts and community members." It's pretty easy to locate the actual list of people in the room when the Core was written.

Ho locates the opposition to the Core strictly in the right wing, reacting to Obama's involvement and a perceived federal overreach. Granted, she's a Nevada-Utah reporter, but at this point it's not that hard to note the large number of people all across the political spectrum who have found reasons to dislike the Core.

What Happened Last Year?

Ho's general outline is accurate, though her generous use of passive voice (the Clark County School District "was crippled") lets the test manufacturers and states off the hook for their spectacular bollixing of the on-line testing. She also notes the widespread test refusal (go get 'em, New York).

She also dips into the history of incomplete data, noting Kansas in 2014 and Wyoming in 2010. She might have spared a sentence or two to note that nothing like this has happened before because nobody has tried data generation and collection on this scale before.

How Are Test Scores Usually Used?

States are required to test all students and use their scores to determine how the school systems are doing, which can affect funding. Some states use the data for a "ratings" system. A few are using it as a part of teacher evaluations. In the classroom, schools generally share the data with teachers who use it to guide curriculum decisions and measure individual students.

True-ish, true (particularly with air quotes around "ratings"), true-ish, and false. We can call it etra false because it's not possible to effectively do all of those things with a single test. Tests are designed for a particular purpose. Trying to use them for other purposes just produces junk data.


How Will Incomplete Scores Affect the Classroom?

Ho has a wry and understated answer to this question: "Direct impacts on the classroom are likely to be minimal." I think that's a safe prediction from an instructional standpoint, though she rather blithely slides past "most states aren't using it for teacher evaluations yet," which strikes me as rather blandly vague, considering we're talking about the use of junk data to decide individual teachers' fates.

Still it's true that, since the test data never provided anything useful for classroom, having less of a useless thing doesn't really interfere with anyone's teaching. And if there's a teacher out there saying, "But how shall I design my instruction without a full Big Standardized Test Data profile of my students," that teacher needs to get out of the profession.

Ho might also have addressed the issue that in most states the data, incomplete or otherwise, doesn't arrive before the start of the school year, anyway.


She also claims that everyone says that test scores don't make the final call on grade promotion, which will come as news to all those states that have a Third Grade Reading Test Retention policy.

Oh No She Didn't

Ho answers the question of "Why even bother to test" with the hoariest of chestnuts, the Bathroom Scale Analogy-- "a school district trying to tackle chronic problems without standardize test scores can be like trying to diet without a scale." It is a dumb analogy. I have ranted about this before, so let me just quote me on this:

The bathroom scale image is brave, given the number of times folks in the resistance have pointed out that you do not change the weight of a pig by repeatedly measuring it. But I am wondering now-- why do I have to have scales or a mirror to lose weight? Will the weight loss occur if it is not caught in data? If a tree's weight falls in the forest but nobody measures it, does it shake a pound?

This could be an interesting new application of quantum physics, or it could be another inadvertent revelation about reformster (and economist) biases. Because I do not need a bathroom scale to lose weight. I don't even need a bathroom scale to know I'm losing weight-- I can see the difference in how my clothes fit, I can feel the easier step, the increase in energy. I only need a bathroom scale if I don't trust my own senses, or because I have somehow been required to prove to someone else that I have lost weight. Or if I believe that things are only real when Important People measure them. 

Ho tries to hedge her bets by going on to say that of course you need other data, but the basic analogy is still just bad.

What's Next? 

Studies looking at the validity of scores that states do have, which is kind of hilarious given that most of the BS Tests have never been proven valid in the first place.* So I guess states will try to find out if their partial unvalidated junk is as valid as a full truckload of unvalidated junk. That is almost as wacky as the next line:

For the next testing cycle, states say they don't expect problems.

Ho might want to check the files and see if the states expected problems this last time. You know, the time with all the unexpected problems. But Nevada has a new test manufacturer, Montana has no Plan B, and New York is leaning on parents. So everything should be awesome soon. And anyway, there's plenty of year left before it's time for the next puff piece on Common Core testing. Can I please request that AP reporters use that time to do some reading?

*I originally wrote that they have never been studied for validity; that's not true. Studies are out there. I and others remain unconvinced by them.

PA's Education Spending Gap

The AP has put research and specific numbers to something that those of us in the Pennsylvania ed biz had already figured out-- the gap between rich schools and poor schools has opened up tremendously over the four years of Tom Corbett as governor.

Pennsylvania has had school funding issues for a while. We are tops in the nation when it comes to local contributions; the state contributes a hair over 36% of the funding for secondary and elementary spending, which puts us well below the national average of 45.5%. We rank 45th out of 50 in state education financial support in K-12. Our state universities are likewise outstanding-- Pitt and Penn State boast the two most expensive in-state tuition costs in the country.

Local school districts carry a big part of the burden for funding their schools, which means, of course, that how much money a district can spend on its students is hugely affected by how much money the local district can gather through real estate taxes because, yeah, that's still how we do it here. A 2008 bill tried to make the funding formula compensate more equitably for local tax base weakness, but Corbett scrapped that and went back to an earlier formula, giving poor districts a double (at least) whammy.

Oh-- and no quick course corrections for PA schools. Act 1, passed in 2006, said that a district must ask for state permission and hold a referendum if they want to increase taxes beyond a very low ceiling. So even districts that have the means to make up the state shortfall are hogtied when it comes to raising tax revenues.

There's more. Remember how some people got suckered back ten years ago into thinking that real estate would be a constant source of vastly growing investment income? On that list of suckers you'll find the state of Pennsylvania, which bet the education pension fund on that giant scam. PA teacher pensions are defined benefit pensions, meaning that we get a pre-determined payout and it's up to the state to make sure the money's there to pay it. When the bottom fell out, the state and local school districts found themselves on the hook for massive pension payments to make up the non-growth of the investments. PA's legislature dealt with this potential crisis by saying, "Yeah, let's just wait and see if things get better on their own." They didn't. Now the state and local districts are trying to deal with the biggest balloon payment ever.

Wealthy districts have been able to pick up the slack from all these budgetary pressures. Poor districts have not. Critics are now saying that to bring poor districts up to parity with rich ones would cost at least a billion dollars.

In the meantime, the AP report shows that rich districts now spend as much as $4K more per student than the poorest districts. That's an increase of about $2,300 more per student. A study from the Center for American Progress last summer crowned Pennsylvania and Illinois the king and queen of school spending inequality.

Tom Corbett didn't create this mess single-handedly. Previous governor Ed Rendell, who was no friend of public education or the teachers who work there, created an extra booby-trap by spending stimulus money to prop up the regular education budget. The GOP-controlled legislature gets credit for making a hash of the pension fund. But if Tom Corbett is not the guy who set the house on fire, he is the guy who told the fire department to go home because they weren't needed.

Corbett has been steadfast in hewing to the classic line that throwing money at schools doesn't make any difference. If that's true, then there should be no problem in taking all that "extra" money away from the wealthy districts and redistributing it to poor districts. After all, the extra $4K per student isn't making a difference, right?

Asked this month about the growing disparity, Corbett didn't point to his administration's policies. Rather, he said, it is a subject of great concern that lawmakers must figure out. He also said a system of 500 school districts that make independent budgeting decisions will complicate the effort to decide how much should be spent to educate a child or achieve parity between the rich and poor.

Corbett has absolutely refused to see his policies as exacerbating the problem. He does have a point about the 500 school districts. In the 1960s the state had even more, and they were almost-forcibly combined,, but each tiny district could join with any district it touched. Consequently, some counties have one unified district. My own county has four district (plus bits of a few others). Students in my building are picked up in the morning and driven through another district and then back into our district (which is shaped kind of like a big backwards E). It is, frankly, an inefficient mess. Several governors have tried to address it, but communities are not going to give up their identities easily.

When confronted with the issue of moving money into poor districts, Corbett told the AP, "So who do I take it away from?"

Corbett's administration has been marked by a real reluctance to take money away from anybody. Pennsylvania should be cashing in on the big marcellus shale boom, but Harrisburg has been determined to charge as little in fees and taxes as they can. Corbett was also determined to make PA attractive to businesses by taking away as little of their money as possible. But critics say that his determination to reverse Pennsylvania's reputation as a business-unfriendly state has left the state treasury with a huge revenue gap. 

I am always cautious about using the cost-per-pupil figure, but even if we aren't certain what the figures mean exactly, the change in them sends a clear message. In Pennsylvania, the poor districts are falling behind with less revenue, less money for staff, for buildings, for resources, for basic maintenance. York is one example of what happens next-- after gutting their budget, the state can then declare that they are no longer fit to govern their own schools. This starvation diet is a perfect setting for privatization.

It's politically pleasing to lambaste Tom Corbett over this, and he certainly made things worse, but Pennsylvania has a problem bigger than partisan politics. In a few days, a new governor takes over. I have no idea if Tom Wolf is going to make things better or not-- Pennsylvania has not had an education governor in my lifetime. But I do know that things are as bad right now as they've ever been, and if you're in a poor school district, they're worse than that.

CAP: Core Is for Ladies [Updated]

The Common Core is great for the ladies.

At least that's what we can learn from a new CAP (Center for American Progress) article that combines two now-classic Core-boosting rhetorical techniques-- wacky leaps of logic, and taking credit for what was already happening.

The piece opens with a paragraph with a shout out to Title IX, then sadly shakes its head and notes that there are still gender-based inequities in education and employment persist, particularly for girls of color and from low-income background. Plus, girls often lack access to high-quality, rigorous STEMmy courses, which would prepare them for college and high-paying careers. Not that the author offers any evidence, or even an assertion, that they lack access to a higher degree than boys.

Next up: charts and data. The data is exclusively high stakes tests based, so here's what we know. More eight grade boys get proficient-ranked test scores on science tests than eight grade girls. The boys barely edge out girls on the math test results on the eight grade test. And as always, black and brown girls score lower on the test than their white counterparts. So that's a picture of how eight graders score on those two tests. What we can actually deduce from that about the entire educational system is a whole other debate. I just want to be clear on what we're actually talking about. 

Fewer females than males take the AP computer science test. Few females take STEM related AP tests. Also, female students and students of color take more college remedial courses (the article lumps women and minorities together a lot). And we get a section (well, two paragraphs) of data with a chart about the pay gap between men and women. This, the article tells us, exists even when controlling for college major, hours worked, and occupation.

So wait-- how is the Common Core fixing all this? Let's go back to the introduction:

The Common Core State Standards represent an important step toward closing achievement gaps and opening the door to higher-paying STEM fields for millions of girls. By establishing uniform and more-rigorous academic standards, the Common Core helps ensure that all students—both girls and boys, regardless of their income levels and backgrounds—are taught to the same high expectations. 

This is followed by the data establishing, sort of, that the gender gap exists. Then we arrive at this conclusion.

More engaging and challenging standards build a strong academic foundation for all students. Girls—and in particular, girls of color—have a lot to gain from more-rigorous learning standards that better prepare them for college and career success. By raising the expectations for student learning, the Common Core State Standards allow girls the opportunity to seize STEM learning opportunities while in grade school; to pursue a diverse set of college majors; and to obtain jobs that command higher salaries. The Common Core State Standards can expand on the progress girls have made since Title IX and can have a long-lasting impact on women in society.

Many of you will recognize a composition technique known as "recycling your introduction in new words as your conclusion."

That's it. That's the whole argument. CCSS will raise everybody's standards, so women (and, I guess, students of color) will just automatically be raised up to the level of white guys. Of course, that effect would theoretically work with literally any educational standards at all-- so why didn't the states (particularly those with super high standards rated by Fordham Institution as better than CCSS) already wipe out their own gender gaps? And how can rigorous education wipe out the pay gap when the pay gap, as CAP just said, is controlled for occupation? Will lady engineers suddenly be paid more because they have a Common Core seal of approval stamped upon them?

This has to be one of the laziest arguments I have ever seen for pretty much anything. I guess it's good that they didn't print a special CCSS edition in pink for girls, but the implication that girls have been doing poorly because, well, it's just that nobody asked them to do better-- it's somehow insulting to everybody. If CAP is going to try to score social justice points, they're going to have to do much better than this.

[Update 10/30] The evening that this post went up, several of us were contacted by CAP chieftain Neera Tanden who asked if anyone wanted to take issue with the data.

The answer was, of course, that the data about gender gaps were fine, but there was no data at all to indicate that CCSS could close the gap. Tanden cited gains in the College and Career Readiness Ratings for girls in Kentucky, one of the first states to adopt the Core. I asked how those gains for girls compared to gains for boys, and she referred me to this site, where Kentucky parks all their reports on student achievement.

This actually raised more questions than it answered, because the high school data clearly shows that girls outpace boys by large margins in most tested areas (boys win on the social studies test) and that the gender gap on the College and Career Ready ratings also runs in favor of the girls. I asked about this, but have yet to hear a response (it's twitter-- I don't read much into the silence). My conclusion, however, is that the CAP article profiled above makes even less sense than it did before.]

SAT: Going Nowhere Fast

The latest news from the College Board folks has been widely published since being released (see here and here). The lede in most cases is that SAT performance is flat, followed by breathless concern that not enough students are taking advantage of opportunities to be college and career ready (which seems to mean, generally, that they aren't consuming enough of the College Board product line).

Three thoughts here:

One. What other corporation in America does such a good job spinning its marketing reports as legitimate news?

Seriously. If Ford has a drop in sales, they don't manage to get writers across America to wax rhapsodic about the state of automotive transportation, or decry the gap that leaves so many people without a vehicle. And they certainly don't get writers to talk about Ford as if it were the only company producing cars.

But somehow every time the College Board makes another bid for more market share, it's treated as a referendum on the State of American Education. I'll give David Coleman this-- he and his people sure know how to sell shit.

Two. Do you mean to tell me that after the years of Common Core high stakes corporate education reformster baloney, SAT scores haven't gone up??!! Are you saying that a product which markets itself as the premiere arbiter of college readiness says that our students are no more college ready than they used to be? You mean to say that Common Core didn't fix everything??!! I'm shocked. Shocked!!

It's particularly notable that coverage has studiously avoided mentioning that David Coleman, College Board Head Honcho, is also David Coleman, Common Core Architect. In fine government-revolving-door style he has positioned himself to profit from his own regulatory work, and yet, nothing has budged. Both the test results and the SAT market share are stuck.

Three. Corporate baloney. Cyndie Schmeiser, College Board chief of assessment, declares the low performance level "a critically low level" that cannot be tolerated. The whole release this time ties together all the College Board products, with reports on the PSAT and AP classes.

Why put it all together? Nick Anderson at the Washington Post suggests that the College Board is trying to transfer some of the sheen of their better-performing products onto the flailing and failing SAT, which is now the nation's number TWO college entrance exam (though you would not know that from any of the "coverage" we're seeing).

This fits the CB overall plan, which has featured ideas like using PSATs to generate AP "recommendations" sent directly to parents to try to create some market pressure. Coleman repeats his mantra that we don't need more tests-- we need more opportunities. And by "opportunities" we mean "opportunities to give the College Board money."

It reminds me that David Coleman's College Board career is an odd second act, his previous work writ small. Pretend to be trying to launch a movement rooted in social justice and educational opportunity when you're really just a corporate marketer, shilling for a product and a profit.

David Coleman To Fix Inequality in America

David Coleman is here (well, not here here-- he's actually in Aspen) to explain how the College Board is going to recapture market share by synergistically monetizing its products break down the walls of inequality in education.

David Coleman (Common Core writer and current president of the College Board) is deeply concerned with fairness. Huffington Post has a report from the Aspen Institute (because "let's solve America's social problems" is so often associated with "let's go to Aspen") on Coleman's "conversation" with Jane Stoddard Williams of Bloomberg EDU, and the excerpts presented give us a picture of how Coleman plans to boost the College Board's bottom line bring educational equality to the US.

He is sure to tout his free test prep deal with Kahn Academy, by which the College Board will get a foot firmly in every door of the market make test preparation available to every student in America. (Perhaps the new SAT will include references to pieces of 21st Century wisdom such as the new idea that when it comes to websites, if you're not paying for it, the product is you.)

But Coleman's not here primarily to tout the new means of amassing data on every college-bound student in America free SAT prep, though he says it's an example of how the College Board is "leaning into" challenges. There's also a hefty chunk of conversation where Coleman artfully inserts himself in an imaginary conversation between imaginary test critics and imaginary test proponents; it's a pretty clever way to position himself as a perfectly reasonable guy trying to find a middle way in the midst of this contentious and imaginary debate. But that's not why he's here. He's here to talk about AP.


When we worry, perhaps rightly, that assessment can discriminate, let's remember that there's another thing that we know ... that can discriminate more, which is adults.

Yup. That's the problem. Because Coleman says he has learned from "my work in K-12" that we've got to change our game. And that test anxiety is bad. And, using one of his new marketing slogans educational insights, American students don't need more tests, they need more opportunities.

And let's give Coleman credit-- he hasn't said anything that's particularly wrong. What the most capable of reformsters understand is this simple process:

       1) Say something true as a premise
       2) Do something awful that does not actually follow from #1 at all

Coleman's genius marketing idea solution to educational inequality is to take human bias out of the equation and replace it with hidden human bias and testing.

See, he's worried that African-Americans and women and Latinos are missing out on the chance to give College Board their money the opportunity to take AP courses. But it turns out that a great predictor of AP success is the PSAT!! So let's use the previously maligned and increasingly skipped-over PSAT as a marketing booster for AP a means of finding worthy students. AP, we are to understand, is a massive cash cow for the College Board a doorway to opportunity, and if we get more students into AP courses it will be a great payday for the College Board step forward for America.

So let's use the PSAT to generate sales leads AP course recommendations. Let's send letters to parents and lists to guidance departments and let's get students moved into those courses by the carload.

Look, the lack of minorities and women in certain fields is a legitimate problem, and it's a problem the education world should be addressing, and addressing aggressively. But the fact that Coleman can correctly diagnose the disease does not mean we should keep listening when he says, "So you should buy a bottle of Dr. Coleman's Miracle Cure, made of oil squeezed from the finest snakes in Arabia."

We knew this was coming. The Coleman College Board is a business that has leveraged some genius marketing strategies; who else has found the giant brass balls to get their product made part of state policy (well, other than Common Core-- one more reason Coleman's new job makes sense). And if AP were as great as it says, or at least benign, that would be swell. But even as the College Board struggles to regain market share, they are also working feverishly to mess with their products. The SAT has been redesigned to match the Core, and AP courses have begun a transition from loosely structured high-quality courses to CCSS-aligned tightly structured products in a box.

But Coleman's recasting of the College Board quest for new markets as a drive for social justice is the work of a master salesman. Coleman may not know jack about education, but he can sling bullshit like a pro probably change the world with his audacious plan to sell the solution to reviving College Board's revenue stream social and economic justice.

Will "AP" Stand for "Assessment Prep"?

In Which I Have To Take Back Some of the Nice Things I Said About AP Courses

When I last wrote about the AP courses, I praised the looseness of the course design. I should have known better. Alert readers pointed me at the news from AP-land; apparently the looseness is now seen as a design flaw to be fixed.

Some courses, like the Literature and Composition, still sum up the basics in a half-dozen pages. But courses are being redesigned. AP US History is due to roll out new and shiny next fall, and its course summary is now close to 100 pages. Why the added detail?

The redesign of the AP U.S. History course and exam accomplishes two major goals: it maintains AP U.S. History's strong alignment with the knowledge and skills taught in introductory courses at the college level, and also offers teachers the flexibility to focus on specific historical topics, events, and issues in depth.

Yes, by providing a more specific and detailed course outline, the College Board folks will be giving teachers more flexibility, much like a straightjacket provides more freedom and ignorance is strength. In fact, "the lack of specificity put pressure on many teachers: uncertain about what the AP Exam would assess, they attempted to cover every detail of American history."

The AP folks have been working to erase some of that uncertainty for a while now. If you haven't looked under the AP hood in a while, you may not know that for the past five years or so, the College Board has required that all wannabe AP teachers must submit their syllabus for an audit annually. If that seems like a great deal of work, the College Board offers sample annotated syllabi-- in other words, you can now get AP courses in a can. In the case of AP History, it's a nineteen page can.

But if we look under the new extended course framework hood, what do we find? Some conservatives, like the folks at the Heartland Institute, a righty thinky tanky, think we find a newly biased version of history. The framework breaks the course into four areas. Let's look at each:

I. Historical Thinking Skills

These are just what the title implies-- various skills useful in organizing and interpreting historical information, like being able to determine plausible cause and effect linkage. I would be happy to teach this stuff. No problems here.

II. Thematic Learning Objectives

Now it gets dicey. Whether we're talking about the history of the rise and fall of the Ottoman Empire or the history of Bob and Ethel's tempestuous dating relationship, we're going to make some judgments about what themes/factors drive the narrative. My college history professor said 19th century European history was all about war, nationalism, class, and...um, something else. (What do you want from me? It was a long time ago!) And that in itself was a judgment.

I was going to get specific here, but there are seven large thematic objectives and each is broken down into several more for a grand total of  fifty specific learning objectives, for example:

Analyze how changing religious ideals, Enlightenment beliefs, and republican thought shaped the politics, culture, and society of the colonial era through the early Republic

Fifty of those, so basically one a week. Holy smokes.

III. The Concept Outline

Uh-oh. Here's the part that's going to start to piss people off.

This breaks down the historical periods that teachers are supposed to use, and provides the conclusions that the students are supposed to reach. For instance:

Reinforced by a strong belief in British racial and cultural superiority, the British system enslaved black people in perpetuity, altered African gender and kinship relationships in the colonies, and was one factor that led the British colonists into violent confrontations with native peoples. 

This outline is exceptionally specific, and notable for what it does and doesn't include. It favors economic factors, and is not very interested in social or cultural matters. It isn't interested in military history at all-- wars appear briefly but little is said about how they are fought and won. The outline was also clearly not the product of any historians who believe in the Great Man theory of history-- very few individuals appear at all. Lincoln, FDR, and Reagan are barely seen in relation to the historic moments associated with them. The closer we get to modern times, the more evident are the attempts to touch all the properly balanced or politically correct, depending on how you feel about such things. We cover Japanese-American internment camps, but not the national collective actions to support the fight against the Nazis. And if you think God helped make America great, you will not love the new AP version.

I'm not prepared to argue that any of these things absolutely need to be included in a summary of US history. It's very much open to debate, or at least it's open to debate any place other than in an AP History class. In this large section, the AP folks have imposed one specific reading of American history. Here comes the straightjacket of flexibility for AP History teachers.

Speaking of which, the section begins with a nice outline that tells us how much instructional time to devote to each period, and how much of the test will cover the indicated span.

IV. An intro to the test itself. Let's let that be.

This is going to anger some folks on the right (and it should anger the left as well). The same people who think creationism should be taught in science class will object to this outline's omission of America's exceptional God-given role in the world, or the implicit criticism of America in some of the goals. They are wrong. Some things just have no basis in fact and there's no reason for us to teach them in school.

But they will be right about one thing-- they will call this course outline biased, and in that they will be correct. And when studying history, I don't care whether your bias is widely accepted or Crazypants McFringebob-- part of the whole point of doing history is the give-and-take, back-and-forth, argue-and-support of differing viewpoints about exactly what happened, why it happened, why it mattered, and what happened next because of it. Real authentic history is about the never-ending wrestling matches over these questions-- not the learning to accept the answers that a current authority offers.

Beyond that-- remember back at the top when the College Board said that one benefit of this reboot would be more time to study pieces of history in greater depth? Can we talk about the history of coming up with that claim, because it had to have involved being on some historically strong drugs. Who knew that AP would turn into the class where teachers said, "Boy, I'd like to continue this discussion, but it's Tuesday and we have to move on the next unit right now."

Somehow the College Board (now run by our old buddy David Coleman) has taken AP US History from a loose framework for college-level inquiry and deep freewheeling study and exploration to a hog-tied tightly dictated connect-the-dots learn by numbers course.

But teachers can rest easy, knowing that they will now be able to do a better than ever job of prepping students to take the US History AP test.