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School districts call state ed department’s bluff, keep AP African American Studies on the books [1]
['Austin Bailey', 'Austin Bailey Is The Editor Of The Arkansas Times', 'Loves To Write About Government', 'Politics', 'Education. Send Me Your Juiciest Gossip']
Date: 2023-08-17
UPDATE: This story has been edited to reflect that every school that had planned to offer AP African American Studies will continue to do so.
Schools in Little Rock, North Little Rock and Jonesboro say they’ll continue to offer AP African American Studies, despite a last-minute maneuver by the Arkansas Department of Education to defund and discredit the class.
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The Little Rock School District’s Central High, North Little Rock High School, Jacksonville High and the Academies at Jonesboro, along with the charter schools North Little Rock Center for Excellence and eStem High School, have all confirmed they will offer the course and calculate grades on the same elevated, 5-point GPA scale as other Advanced Placement classes.
A message sent to eStem parents revealed details about how the state conveyed the last-minute news to schools. In fact, eStem students had already been in school for more than a week before their high school director got word of the state’s decision.
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Joke’s on the state, though, since eStem will not only continue offering the class, but will award the school’s first Medal of Historical Pursuit and Valor to students who complete it.
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A spokesperson for Jacksonville Public Schools, the sixth Arkansas district that planned to offer the course this academic year, said Wednesday that they were still in discussions with the Arkansas Department of Education and had not yet finalized their plans.
The Jacksonville North Pulaski School District confirmed Thursday that they will also continue to offer the class.
Education supporters and representatives for these Arkansas schools that committed to offering the class said they’re exploring options for covering test costs for the AP African American Studies exam, since the state will not do so — unlike with every other AP class.
It remains unclear why the education department waited until the Friday before school started for most students in the state to pull the plug on state recognition of the course. Students at Central High in Little Rock and at the Academies at Jonesboro took a first-year pilot version of the class last year, and the state honored the credits. Added to the state’s system in 2022, the class was not removed from the its database of approved classes until Friday afternoon.
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The College Board, the organization that approves curricula and crafts exams for these high-level courses that can qualify students for college credits, is expanding this year on last year’s pilot. More than 700 schools across 40 states and Washington, D.C., will offer the class this school year. Of those, Arkansas is the only one to so far raise a fuss. (Florida is not among the states offering the course, after Gov. Ron DeSantis banned it in January.)
The College Board’s rollout of the course extends beyond the norm, with two pilot years instead of one, as the organization finalizes curricula amid a conservative freakout about academic attention on traditionally marginalized groups.
AP African American Studies is now in its second pilot year. Students can take an exam to potentially earn college credit for the first time in May 2024. While the Arkansas Department of Education has claimed one reason to not recognize the course is that “the course may not articulate into college credit,” more than 200 higher education institutions — including the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville — have committed to give credit to students who score well on the exam.
And because colleges and universities set their own rules on which AP courses to accept for credit and which to reject, Arkansas schools already offer multiple AP courses that may never count toward college hours.
Arkansas teachers who trained over the summer to qualify to lead the class got phone calls Friday from an education department official letting them know the state would not recognize the course as counting toward state graduation requirements, nor would the state cover the $90+ exam fee.
Confusion reigned through the weekend. On Monday, the Arkansas Department of Education put out a statement suggesting the class is “based on opinions or indoctrination,” and said teaching it may even violate state law. Arkansas Education Secretary Jacob Oliva pitched other reasons for the decision to not honor AP African American Studies, but those were easily debunked.
The Keystone Cops performance as state officials dispatched a pileup of flimsy reasons for cutting the course is prompting national media attention and mockery.
It’s all happening under the leadership of Oliva, who left a job in Ron DeSantis’ Florida Department of Education to come to Arkansas. Waging the culture war was part of his job description there as well. As their chancellor of K-12 education, Oliva policed policy rewrites on locker rooms, pronouns and other LGBTQ issues as required by Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law.
Upon taking on his Arkansas role as education secretary, Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders instructed Oliva to target “indoctrination” and “critical race theory.” Sanders made it official with both an executive order and a section in Arkansas LEARNS, her wide-reaching school voucher act passed this spring.
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[1] Url:
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2023/08/17/school-districts-call-state-ed-departments-bluff-keep-ap-african-american-studies-on-the-books
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