David Coleman, the father of Common Core, is now miraculously president of the College Board. The College Board is responsible for is the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) and high school Advanced Placement (AP) classes. As you may recall, the SAT will be dumbed down starting in 2016 to align with Common Core. Now it gets worse, the College Board recently announced the AP US History (APUSH) class and test will be changed starting this school year.
The new APUSH class will, “expand on the history of the Americas from 1491 to 1607, and from 1980 to the present.”
“The new Framework inculcates a consistently negative view of the nation’s past.”
Larry Krieger is a former AP teacher who has received numerous awards from the College Board.
http://thefederalist.com/2014/06/04/why-college-board-is-revising-u-s-history/
In his article, http://heartland.org/policy-documents/analysis-college-board-ap-us-history-framework Mr. Krieger states:
* “As we have documented, the Framework systematically ignores key leaders such as Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Andrew Jackson. Unit 5 continues this shameful pattern of omission by reducing Abraham Lincoln’s career to two brief fragments. The Framework apparently believes that the only things students need to know about Lincoln is that he was elected president in 1860 and issued the Emancipation Proclamation three years later. For reasons that are not explained, the College Board Framework omits the Lincoln-Douglas debates, the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, and his Reconstruction Plan.”
* “The Framework actually devotes as much attention and classroom time to pre-Columbian native populations as it does to the Civil War. The Framework’s superficial and uninspired coverage of the Civil War is an affront to the over 600,000 Americans who died in an epic struggle that historian Eric Foner calls ‘the central moment in American history.'”
* “The College Board’s decision to delete Theodore Roosevelt is outrageous, inexplicable, and unacceptable.”
* “The Framework concludes Unit 7 with a hopelessly inadequate four-sentence section on World War II. World War II literally appears out of nowhere. The Framework provides no discussion of the rise of fascist aggression in Japan and Europe. As a result, students are not expected to learn about the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, the Munich Conference, the Nazi-Soviet Pact, th e Lend-Lease Act, or Hitler’s atrocities against Jews and other groups.”
* “The Framework authors devote the following sentence to the wars in Korea and Vietnam: ‘The United States sought to “contain” Soviet-dominated communism through a variety of measures including military engagements in Korea and Vietnam’. The decision to combine the Korean War and the Vietnam War into a single sentence is historically untenable and pedagogically confusing.”
* “The Framework briefly turns its attention to what it calls, ‘the attacks on September 11, 2001.’ The Framework never attributes these attacks to Al Qaeda, an Islamic terrorist organization led by Osama bin Laden. We are then told that following the September 11 attacks, ‘U.S. decision-makers launched foreign policy and military efforts against terrorism and lengthy, controversial conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq.” This sweeping statement continues the Framework’s pattern of ignoring the valor and sacrifices of Ameri can servicemen and women.”
* “This bias can be clearly seen in how the Framework concludes Unit 9 and thus the course. Instead of ending with the historic election of the nation’s first African-American president or with a section on America’s role in creating the computer revolution and the Internet, the Framework ends with this statement: ‘Demographic changes intensified debates about gender roles, family structures, and racial and national identity. The Framework then grants teachers the flexibility to discuss the ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell debate.'”
But it gets worse, because the College Board states: “On the revised [AP] exam, all questions are derived from the courses stated learning objectives.” In other words, if teachers want their students to pass the test, they will teach College Boards new (one sided) version of American History.
http://apcentral.collegeboard.com/apc/members/exam/exam_information/224882.html