How to Fix the Broken College Board
In February, Advanced Placement tests came under intense scrutiny when it was revealed that the organization that administers them, the College Board, had caved to political pressure from Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s administration and censored aspects of the long-awaited AP African American Studies course. The scandal exposed the inner workings of one of the most influential organizations in American education.
In her book Shortchanged: How Advanced Placement Cheats Students, high school English teacher and education scholar Annie Abrams explores the history and politics of America’s AP programs. Every school year, millions of high-school students enroll in these classes, geared to give them the chance to develop college-level skills in areas as diverse as biology, U.S. history, and Japanese. But because the courses count as credit at some colleges and universities, students who take them often skip out on actual entry-level classes in the subjects, which provide real grounding in analysis, synthesizing information, and effective communication. Further, Advanced Placement is both a brand and an educational model, which can muddy the waters when investigating its effectiveness. If AP isn’t working for many students, Abrams posits, looking at its history and politics can help us find better ways to prepare them for the wider world. Here, she discusses her new book with Harper’s Bazaar.
Where did the idea of Advanced Placement testing and credits come from? How did we get to where we are now?
The concept grew out of Cold War education reform. In the 1950s, the hope was to facilitate better coordination between schools and colleges while also streamlining the [educational] process. Administrators were concerned about making education efficient, so that students could specialize or go into the military more quickly. And then the other part of Advanced Placement was the maintenance of liberal education, even in the face of an increasingly scientific, specialized age.
Sounds like a lot like our own time. That seems like a key part of where the morass starts—this desire to maintain a focus on liberal arts. But the thing about the liberal arts is, many of those disciplines aren’t necessarily measurable through something like a standardized test. Can you talk about that tension that’s been there from the very start of the creation of these credits?
Standardization and quantification of learning goes way back before the 1950s. But in that moment, among at least some of the teachers and professors involved in Advanced Placement, there was a lot of idealism about facilitating communication through these numbers. And they put in, from what looked like to me, really sincere effort to try to figure out how to quantify, how to measure the quality of a student’s essay—to say, “What are the things we can agree upon, such that we can make them measurable?” But the problem with that approach is that it’s necessarily reductive, right? It streamlines. It constricts instead of expands.
There were the teachers and professors who said, “We can try. We can try to do this. But even they maintained a level of skepticism decades after they had developed this program.
Also, there were the teachers and professors, and then there’s the College Board, which was … some of them were involved with the College Board. Some of them weren’t. But the College Board’s reason for existence was testing.
And the College Board is not part of the U.S. Department of Education, correct? It’s a private entity. I think a lot of Americans don’t understand that. It sounds so official, like part of the government.
Part of the reason that I wrote this history is because the brand name is so powerful and a lot of people just assume that it’s this fixture. But why, right? It has a history. It’s made of people making choices. It’s not made of stone. The College Board is not a government organization, although federal and state funding subsidizes its activities. It’s technically a nonprofit.
This became really clear very recently, back in February, when the current administration in Florida attempted to impose its own opinions about what should constitute African American history on this new Advanced Placement course. Many scholars of African American history and parents and teachers have wanted this AP course for a very long time, and the College Board sort of capitulated and put it together after the 2020 protests. But then it also apparently caved to pressure from a single state government.
In a way, DeSantis and the Florida Department of Education exposed how AP works. The College Board says that the academic merit of the courses rests on the approval of committees of six educators. That’s what its website says. I should check if it still says that, but that’s what it said for a long time. Six educators: three teachers, three professors.
It became clear that academic decisions were being made by other people, too. And so the African American studies scandal revealed how the company’s approach distorts the meaning of academic work, constricts possibilities. Even with all of the reporting, with all of the questions, with all of the scrutiny, the company still has not been completely transparent about who is really making the choices about what students learn, how they learn it, why they learn it. And that’s true in African American studies, and it’s true across disciplines.
Another part of the puzzle is that schools and colleges—there are a lot of ways to think about the connections between them, the different functions each kind of institution serves. If you think about public schools as nodes for civic engagement, then the question of what students should be learning about this country’s history and culture, it seems to me we should be empowering communities to make those decisions, not empowering a $1.4 billion nonprofit.
In terms of why we can feel stuck here, the College Board really does identify problems and anxieties—admissions, tuition, challenging curriculum. These are all real problems. And sometimes, the logic goes, “Well, we have to do something and this is something, so we have to do this.”
What I’d like to see is a little bit more space and time to think about other possibilities. There are other schools doing other things. Private schools that have big budgets manage to create creative, flexible courses in the humanities. There are other ways even to think about the transition between school and college. There’s dual enrollment, the Bard High School sequence. There are some other options, but then we get into who should be accelerated and why. That’s another set of issues.
For me, my concern is silence around the brand. I think it has to be okay to say, “I don’t like this.”
Your book opens with this anecdote about a student trying to get a high score on the English literature AP test—Googling strategies and buzzwords and never actually learning how to write and formulate ideas or about the potential pleasures and uses of literature. And if they’ve gamed the test enough and pass, they go to college and potentially never have to encounter a piece of literature again. It seems like such a loss for students and a really misguided understanding of what the humanities can be.
Well, first of all, that anecdote was student-approved. I just want to put that out there.
You’re a writer, right? There are purposes for writing beyond the test, and my concern is that the test distorts those purposes. Reading for pleasure, having robust discussion, learning for its own sake, yes, and then also these other aims for reading and writing.
My concern is less with the applications of humanities training in corporate life and more with citizenship. To be able to discern propaganda from fact, to be able to think really carefully about narratives and who is constructing them and to what ends. And it’s important to me also to not be elitist about it. It doesn’t make you better than other people to know those things. It’s part of the puzzle.
What can parents, educators, and students do as they approach something like AP testing, to counter the anxieties and focus on the bigger issues?
In my own classroom when I was teaching, what I tried to do was balance test prep with a less cynical approach to the field—a reminder that the test is not everything. It’s a big world out there. There’s a lot to learn.
Education is a key part of self-governance. If you think about what a liberal arts seminar is, it’s people coming together to talk through complicated issues and feeling empowered to participate in a pretty weighty conversation with real stakes, and to be able to say, “Oh, I was wrong about my initial perception,” right? To avoid snap judgments, to get to know your own patterns of thought, how they differ from other people’s, how to communicate across that difference. That’s what liberal education is, and that’s what deliberative democracy requires.
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