Education Next – Chester E. Finn, Jr.
“What’s taught to American children is often controversial nowadays, and our schools will forever be buffeted by the cultural waves that roil our universities. But in that storm, the College Board deserves a cheer for trying to stabilize the vessel known as Advanced Placement U.S. History (APUSH). This particular tempest blew up when a new “framework” for high school instructors who teach the subject turned out to be biased in its treatment of the nation’s past. History has been part of the AP program since the mid-1950s. Among the thirty-eight subjects now spanned by that program, it’s the second-most-popular with high school pupils seeking the possibility of college credit. The end-of-course APUSH exam was always plenty rigorous, lasting three hours and scored during the summer by veteran instructors assembled by the College Board. The problem was that those actually teaching the course to tens of thousands of kids had no useful guidance to prepare students for it. They could consult a vague “topic outline” and look at old exams, but teachers complained that racing through so vast a subject in a single year, combined with the dearth of primary and secondary sources that surfaced on the tests themselves, led to neglect of the nation’s founding documents. More generally, it necessitated the sacrifice of deep student understanding in favor of scads of near-random facts.”(more)