Neo-Marxism floods Advanced Placement courses in the US

Some of America’s most popular college-credit history classes for high schoolers are littered with anti-Western ideas, identity politics and other neo-Marxist concepts, national scholars…

Some of America’s most popular college-credit history classes for high schoolers are littered with anti-Western ideas, identity politics and other neo-Marxist concepts, national scholars say.  

The College Board is the foremost provider of Advanced Placement (AP) courses, licensing and selling curricula to high schools with the promise of “dual credit” for the student at both high school and college.  

The board has a storied history in post-secondary education, and a near monopoly on college entrance testing through its SAT exam.  

And despite earning the bulk of its revenue from taxpayer dollars passed through public schools, the College Board is a private organization – and a very profitable one, with more than $1 billion in annual revenue. 

In response to allegations of implicit racial, cultural and social bias in SAT test questions, the company is continually reconfiguring its signature product to reflect greater student diversity in experience and culture. The argument is that some questions favor white students, and minority students don’t have the cultural background to fully grasp the questions. 

David Coleman, one of the architects of Common Core, is president of the College Board – and the reconstruction of the SAT was heavily weighted toward Common Core curricula, with a significant reduction in questions relating to the “hard sciences.”  

Between the frenetic trying-to-please-everyone adjustments to the test, and its new emphasis on failed Common Core curricula, the SAT has seen a significant decline in market share. With revenues from the SAT declining, the College Board re-emphasized its Advanced Placement offerings.  

But under Coleman, the organization updated its history classes, infusing them with a heavy dose of identity politics and an overemphasis on anti-Western history texts. 

A review from the National Association of Scholars found each module in European, American and World History to be “careless and politicized” to the point of “demolishing the past.” 

The College Board’s suggested overhaul of Advanced Placement African American Studies (APAAS) moves the same direction. The draft curricula obtained by researcher Stanley Kurtz prompted him to write: 

APAAS clearly proselytizes for a socialist transformation of the United States, although its socialism is heavily inflected by attention to race and ethnicity. … 

The topic descriptions sound neutral, but the readings almost uniformly consist of neo-Marxist agitation – pleas for a socialist transformation of America, inspired by African Americans and infused with their cultural style. APAAS’s “debates,” such as they are, explore precisely what sort of leftist radical you should be. 

Kurtz exposes a level of neo-Marxist propagandizing in the draft curricula achieving a level of repugnancy akin to the most radical scribblings of Howard Zinn, all taught uncritically as clear and established fact. 

These courses are not intended for post-secondary, graduate, or post-graduate students, but instead are pushed into the K-12 ranks where the hyper-racialized assertions are more likely to receive unquestioned acceptance. 

Although many states and jurisdictions have adopted laws against teaching Critical Race Theory, the APAAS course work sidesteps these prohibitions through semantic games – studiously avoiding using the term while unabashedly teaching little else.  

This cynical approach suffuses the entirety of the APAAS draft by assuming the general public is too dim to realize the curriculum is CRT, but also not really caring if they do. 

Kurtz elaborates: 

The College Board’s monopoly over Advanced Placement testing gives it the ability to act as an unelected national school board, effectively nullifying state and local control over course content by imposing what amounts to a national curriculum. Creating a series of AP ethnic- and gender-studies courses would be a clever way of introducing leftist identity politics to the very states currently resisting such curricula. Something like this has alreadyhappened with the College Board’s AP U.S. History, AP European History, and AP World History courses. AP African American Studies, however, takes leftist indoctrination to a whole new level. 

Five writers contributed to the APAAS draft framework, one of whom is an avowed Marxist proselytizer who is deeply offended by historians who “rarely target capitalism for condemnation and destruction.” The other contributors may be more circumspect in stating their aims, but all are equally aligned against the underlying values and mores of Western civilization, especially as expressed in the United States. 

The College Board has, since 2003, actively participated in establishing Confucius Institutes at K-12 schools in America, and assisted the Chinese government in influencing standards and controls in American teacher training programs. In effect, the College Board is granting its license to attach its name to curricula it neither produced nor, as alleged by some, even reviewed, all for a tidy fee. 

The College Board has thus become another tool in the demolition of American education, wielded by those who insist the United States was “mis-founded” under a charter of “negative liberties,” and is in dire need of fundamental transformation. 

The proposed APAAS draft is indeed educational, although not in quite the way the College Board intended.