The Arkansas department of Education cancelled a new Advanced Placement African-American history course on Friday, a few days before the fall semester, notifying teachers that it would not be recognized for full course credit for the 2023-2024 year.
An official from the department phoned high-school teachers to share the news, the Arkansas Times reported. The state will no longer cover the $90 testing cost for students who complete the course through teachers who still choose to offer it despite the decision. An email was sent Saturday to district curriculum administrators informing them the class was removed from the state’s roster of offerings.
Upon taking office in January, Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders banned critical race theory in K–12 public schools via executive order. The order directs the secretary of the state’s Department of Education to review rules, policies, and regulations that could “indoctrinate students with ideologies, such as CRT, that conflict with the principle of equal protection under the law or encourage students to discriminate against someone based on characteristics protected by federal or state law.”
The department confirmed that the administration believes the course, created by the College Board, potentially violates state law for certain material, although it did not specify further. The College Board’s AP African-American-studies course was conceived following the murder of George Floyd in 2020.
“The AP African American Studies pilot course is not a history course and is a pilot that is still undergoing major revisions. Arkansas law contains provisions regarding prohibited topics,” the department’s communications director Alexa Henning told Fox News in a statement.
Kids in Arkansas headed back to the school for the fall semester on Monday.
“Without clarity, we cannot approve a pilot that may unintentionally put a teacher at risk of violating Arkansas law. The state cannot give AP credit for a course that has not yet been finalized. Once the pilot is completed and AP releases the final course, ADE will review the final submission at that time,” Henning added.
Florida and the College Board got caught up in drama starting in January, when Governor Ron DeSantis declared that the AP African American Studies course fell afoul of new state laws against the teaching of critical race theory. The Florida department of education then rejected the organization’s request for state approval of the class, stating in a letter that “as presented, the content of this course is inexplicably contrary to Florida law and significantly lacks educational value.” DeSantis also signed legislation that would starve DEI bureaucracies in Florida of funding.
DeSantis teased in February that the state might “reevaluate” its relationship with the College Board over the tug-of-war on the course. On Florida’s urging, the College Board made revisions to the content, deleting many radical topics such as a unit on black queer studies, another on “Afrocentricity,” and a CRT-based unit calling colorblindness racist. However, the creators preserved other progressive material, reframing, for instance, a section on “intersectionality” as “Overlapping Dimensions of Black Life.”
Most recently, Democratic politicians, including Vice President Kamala Harris, accused Florida of asserting in its general African-American history standards that black people benefited from slavery. The standards, approved in July by the state board of education, includes 191 topics. Critics have zeroed in one in particular, which instructs students to examine “the various duties and trades performed by slaves (e.g. agriculture work, painting, carpentry tailoring, domestic service, blacksmithing, transportation).” Kids are encouraged to also think about “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”
However, a few members of the work group who developed the standards told National Review that the intention was to showcase the resiliency of the African-American people, not to endorse the institution of slavery. Following Harris’ condemnation of the curricula, DeSantis invited her to sit down for a conversation in Florida to clarify what it says.