AP and cultural bias

Around this time last year I wrote an entry detailing my dilemma about teaching half-truths, and having to give up the real value in history for basic content. Now, in a new school, and teaching AP(advanced placement) courses to students who are in no way prepared, I find myself hitting a similar wall. My new dilemma reminds me of my old district's attempt to get us to teach about jingoistic militarism from the Medal of Honor curriculum, which I also wrote about.

This time, I found myself in an AP Saturday institute, learning the ins and outs of the curriculum to be taught. It became very clear to me that the expectation was a watered down, worthless and uninspiring curriculum. It was rote memorization, learning test taking skills for the one AP test, and reactionary bias. I found myself sitting amongst a bunch of other well intentioned white teachers, discussing the validity of Andrew Jackson and his love of "democracy".

In reality, what all students need, and especially mine, is a history curriculum that promotes activism, assertiveness, and social awareness. I know for a fact, that the curriculum last year, which was heavy in social history and activism, gave my students the confidence to protest my principal, stand up to power, and catapult them into a life of social activism. That is what all social studies teachers strive for. With AP, the opposite seems to happen. The chart above should be alarming. The problem with AP is that it is supported, created, and perpetuated by those who go through the program. The curriculum, though unintentional, become self-serving.

For example, the suggested curriculum being pandered by the College Board requires US History to be covered from "Pre-Columbian Societies" for one week, to Jacksonian Democracy and "The Early Republic" for two weeks, and all the way to "The United States in the Post-Cold War World" for two weeks. Realistically, you cannot cover the depth of US History in such sweeping breadth. The curriculum is sanitized by its immense scope.

The curriculum is further sanitized by those who create and perpetuate the test questions and course syllabus'. An attached model syllabus from AP includes:

Jacksonian America (2 weeks)

In order to understand the development of evolution of democratic institutions in
the United States, the student will be able to:
A. Characterize the rise to political prominence of Andrew Jackson
B. Evaluate Jackson's domestic and foreign policies
C. Analyze the issues involved in the elections of 1836 and 1840
D. Explain the causes and results of reform movements in the United States during the early to mid-nineteenth century

While on the other hand:

Manifest Destiny and Sectionalism (1 week) (emphasis mine)
To recognize the importance of westward expansion and the looming issue of slavery in the United States, the student will be able to
A. Identify the causes and results of American settlers' moving west
B. Discuss the causes and results of the Mexican-American War
C. Analyze the issues involving slavery and potential disunion during the late 1840s and through the decade of the 1850s

As in life, all decisions come with an opportunity cost. When you choose one action, another possible scenario is never realized. To teach about Jackson, but neglect the trail of tears. To spend double the amount of time on the facade of emerging democracy (read: now includes white dudes without property) than on the most undemocratic institutions in our history, imperialism and slavery, where one in ten Americans was owned by another American is not only negligent, but is downright white-washing (pun intended). Is the data to the left at all surprising?

Students in AP not only have to deal with a fast paced, uninspiring curriculum, but at the end of the year the cultural bias of the curriculum is transferred into the test. The test has 80 multiple choice questions. For example:

Alexander Hamilton's economic program was designed primarily to
A. prepare the United States for war in the event Britain failed to vacate its posts in the Northwest
B. provide a platform for the fledgling Federalist Party's 1792 campaign
C. establish the financial stability and credit of the new government
D. ensure northern dominance over the southern states in order to abolish slavery
E. win broad political support for his own candidacy for the presidency in 1792.

I made bold all of the words and phrases that my students would not understand. Not only is the curriculum rather irrelevant in the lives of everyday Americans then, as now, but the nature of the question favors the business and economic minded well read students with high vocabulary. Guess where they go to school? The test is designed for students with privilege to get a discounted college education, while the opportunity cost for poorer students is high.

Last year, my students were unable to think independently or critically. By the end of the year they were the highest scorers on district tests and politically active. This year, I have this to start with this.

The AP test does this student no favors. Although unintentional, the AP test is culturally biased and does nothing to help out students who have not had the privilege of a stable home, middle class income, and other opportunities people like myself have been fortunate to have. To change this, we need to stop pandering poor curriculum choices for our students.

I am under pressure to make sure that the student who's work you see above gets a passing score in the AP test. It won't happen. When you read at a 6th grade reading level, write at a 5th grade level, and when the entire test is set up for a 12th+ level with culturally irrelevant information, how on earth can I lie to that student and say that they can do it. I'm a decent teacher, but I'm no messiah.

It is possible, reading standard histories, to forget half the population of the country. The explorers were men, the landholders and merchants men, the political leaders men, the military figures men. The very invisibility of women, the overlooking of women, is a sign of their submerged status.

If history is to be creative, to anticipate a possible future without denying the past, it should, I believe, emphasize new possibilities by disclosing those hidden episodes of the past when, even if in brief flashes, people showed their ability to resist, to join together, occasionally to win. I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the past's fugitive movements of compassion rather than in its solid centuries of warfare.
-Howard Zinn

That is what inspired my students last year. It inspires all students. Why destroy that? I am struggling again this year. How can I inspire and teach such a culturally repressive history?

To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.

What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places -- and there are so many -- where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.

And if we do act, in however small a way, we don't have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.

-Howard Zinn

That is what I need to teach, but I don't know if I can keep my job and do my job at the same time.