![]() As of its latest Form 990, from 2020, it had net assets of nearly $1.4 billion, and Coleman was earning over $2.5 million. In 2020 Consumer Reports alerted readers to the organization’s violation of its own privacy policy: The College Board was caught selling student data to companies including Adobe, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Snapchat, and Yahoo. That testing has also led to other, shadier sources of revenue. And for the College Board, AP is a windfall: Last year more than two million students took, collectively, over four million exams. For families, it’s a chance at college credit that is obviously much cheaper than tuition. In some places, public-school teachers earn bonuses based on students’ passing exam scores. Over the past few decades, that has changed. Some of the teachers and professors who had worked to develop the program worried that the testing was secondary, unnecessary, or even detrimental, but they were largely unfazed by the organization’s authority: After all, they influenced the tests, not the other way around. “High on the list of professional benefits stands the tremendous cooperative attainment of college and secondary-school subject specialists who have been able to reassess, reorganize, and revitalize subject matter,” the principal and superintendent reported, before concluding: “Today’s schoolhouse has a greater measure of academic freedom and power than it has ever known.” The characteristic hubris of those affiliated with the College Board aside, the stated ideal was to enliven high school by making it more like college.įrom the start, the College Board relied on standardized exams as a means of both easing communication about the quality of students’ work and charging a fee for administration. In 1956 the College Board Review celebrated AP’s success at Newton High School, in Massachusetts. When funding for the meetings ran out a few years later, the College Board took over administration of what it would brand the Advanced Placement program. In the early 1950s the Ford Foundation’s Fund for the Advancement of Education sponsored meetings in which teachers and professors at elite institutions collaborated to accelerate development of democratic habits of mind in the students who they assumed would be the nation’s stewards. An open letter, signed by over a thousand faculty members in African American studies, called on the College Board to “assume a leadership role in fighting against widespread efforts by states to censor antiracist thought and expression.” Writing in Slate, Jon Boeckenstedt targeted David Coleman, the organization’s chief executive, personally: “Leadership comes with responsibilities that Coleman has clearly ignored or neglected.”Įven John McWhorter, who agreed with the new course’s substance, was “unconvinced, to say the least,” that the changes had been made for the College Board’s stated reasons.Īdvanced Placement arose in response to specific historical circumstances. They pissed in our face & said it was raining.” In these pages Holden Thorp accused the College Board of caginess. Yale’s David Blight told Vox, “It seems silly to take out the Black Lives Matter movement.” Northwestern’s Keeanga Yamahtta-Taylor tweeted: “Just days ago held a mtg with African American Studies professors swearing that neither Florida or any politics influenced their decision to gut their AP African American Studies course. “This is a train wreck,” said UCLA’s Cheryl Harris. The College Board had maintained for weeks that the changes were not the result of political pressure.Īn outcry swiftly ensued. The College Board had repeated contact with the Florida Department of Education before it overhauled the course by de-emphasizing materials by scholars like Kimberlé Crenshaw and terms like “systemic” and “womanism.” “We wanted this course to be adopted by 50 states, and we wanted as many students and teachers as possible to be able to experience it,” Jason Manoharan, vice president for AP program development, told The Washington Post. The past month’s events have thrown the coronation into disarray. Days before the organization revealed the course’s framework, a College Board letter called it “a historic document that deserves your attention.” “We hope it will broaden the invitation to Advanced Placement and inspire students with a fuller appreciation of the American story,” said Trevor Packer, senior vice president for AP and instruction, back in August. The College Board’s new AP course in African American studies was meant to be a crowning achievement for the organization.
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