By MIRANDA OWEN, Staff Reporter.
U.S. History is just one of the several Advanced Placement courses offered to high school students by the College Board, a non-profit corporation dedicated to preparing students for higher education, but it seems to be the only one generating debate amongst scholars and lawmakers.
The course, which is designed for high schoolers to take for college credit, underwent a framework change that took seven years to develop, and was finally implemented in the fall of 2014 by the College Board. However, the new framework, which focuses more on understanding key concepts than memorizing names and dates, has been deemed as “unpatriotic” and “partisan” by some, including the Republican National Committee (RNC).
Craig Windt, an AP U.S. History teacher at Bay City Central High School, agrees that the framework allows for more freedom on the part of the educators.
“APUSH is typically more controversial because individual states do not control the curriculum of what is taught,” Windt explained, “whereas, in a regular history course, there is a great deal of state or local control. In many states, then, the regular courses don’t delve into areas that those states find unpatriotic or embarrassing to the state or country.”
The RNC published a statement from their Counsel’s Office saying “a new framework for the APUSH course reflects a radically revisionist view of American history that emphasizes negative aspects of our nation’s history while omitting or minimizing positive aspects.” However, historians such as Delta College Associate Professor Dr. Amy French disagree with this view and believe that the new AP U.S. History curriculum is much better off with the changes implemented.
“Calling it a ‘curriculum’ is a misrepresentation,” French said, “it’s a framework.” The framework itself is 60 pages, and is divided into nine periods, ranging from 1491 to the present day. It outlines the important concepts and ideas for students to learn from each period and gives teachers more freedom in how to structure their curriculum around the framework, which can vary on what is considered important depending on location.
The new AP U.S. History framework thus focuses on important areas of the United States’ history, regardless of whether or not the people and events covered left a positive or negative impact on the nation. However, many educators believe that the negative aspects of American history are crucial to learn about.
“The negative aspects of our history is what has inspired generations of people from abolitionists, to suffragettes, to civil rights leaders to make a positive change,” Windt said, “in order to understand those movements, you have to know the negative parts that inspired them.”
On the accusation of APUSH being “radical revisionist,” Lee White, the Executive Director for the National Coalition for History, published a statement on the Organization of American Historians’ website illustrating the necessity of some revisions in historical curriculum.
“History is, by its very nature, evolving,” White said, “As in all fields of knowledge- science, medicine, and American history- new sources, new methods, and new conclusions build on distinguished earlier research to move the nation to deeper, more advantageous understandings of our past, present and future.”
Historians of the past once didn’t see slavery as negative until they examined once-overlooked sources that made them think otherwise. Historians of today must do the same thing with documents and sources their academic ancestors ignored if they want students to grasp a better understanding of history. To quote Dr. Amy French, “Why wouldn’t I want our future generations to be more informed?”