Rick Hess on the College Board’s revision of AP U.S. history. An excerpt:

Fourth, although several specific charges are untrue, I have real concerns about the framework. I see remarkably little attention to America’s motivating ideals or to the resulting governing institutions. In the new framework, the only mention that the American Revolution might have had any historical significance is a clause mentioning that it had “reverberations in France, Haiti, and Latin America.” There is little or no discussion of the intermediary institutions that are so critical to American culture, society, and government. While the standards talk often about ethnic and gender identity, I don’t see any room for a discussion of whether there emerged any kind of distinct American “identity.” There’s little about economics that’s not about government efforts to combat injustice. Students are introduced to decade after decade of American depravity, but there’s nothing to offer context for 20th century U.S. international engagements. The old framework’s attention to World War II-era “fascism and militarism in Japan, Italy, and Germany” is gone. Discussion of U.S. involvement in World War II and the Cold War mentions our “dominant” role and “position of global leadership,” with nary a mention that we might’ve been on the side of the angels. On the other hand, the framework explicitly suggests that some of our actions in World War II, such as internment of Japanese Americans, debates over segregation, and dropping the atomic bomb, “raised questions about American values.”