Many high school students know at least a little bit about the College Board. The organization controls the curriculums for all Advanced Placement classes, and plays a major role in college admissions and applications. Over the years, the College Board has been criticized when it comes to the teaching of race in history classes. According to the Washington Post, the Republican National Committee objected to the framework put out by College Board in 2014 for the teaching of AP U.S. History classes, resulting in the framework being revised.
The revisions included an addition of a section on “American exceptionalism” and a retraction of a unit recognizing immigrant exploitation that looked at how the Founding Fathers viewed race. These revisions not only changed the way high school students learned about American history, but also brought to light diversity issues within the College Board and AP classes themselves. According to Judd Legum, a writer for the site Popular Information, “the College Board recognizes it has a problem with diversity…. [Minority] students are underrepresented in AP courses. Since AP courses are a key factor in admission to selective colleges, the failure to enroll more of these students perpetuates inequality in higher education.”
Legum continues, “critically, the College Board recognizes that this is not a matter of Black or Latino students being unprepared for AP coursework...Thousands of these students are prepared but are not enrolling...Over 26,400 students in that group (48%) did not take an AP Exam in any of those subjects.”
However, these barriers appear to be of the organizations’ own making. Todd Huston, the Republican Speaker of the Indiana Legislature, continues to push a bill that would limit the teaching of race-based topics in classrooms. While this would be a fairly common line within today’s political environment, Indiana education reporters Chalkbeat point out, Todd Huston has been paid over $400,000 by the College Board as their Senior Vice President for State and District Partnerships. This conflict of interest has caused Huston to resign from the College Board after Legum drew attention to Huston’s second job on social media.
According to Huston, “‘Since taking on the role of House Speaker, I've contemplated how I could best balance the tremendous level of responsibility required in my substantial role at the College Board and as a public servant," he said. "Ultimately, I decided to leave the College Board family.’”
Even so, AP history teachers like Mrs. Rybarczyk believe that the classes themselves allow for some flexibility in the curriculum. According to Mrs. Rybarczyk, “AP History classes lend themselves to diversity in the classroom. We include material from differing viewpoints with each unit and encourage students to provide their own interpretation of the events that occur in history.” Overall, confidence in the College Board has not been impacted significantly.
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