AP History framework is organized around such abstractions as “identity.”
From an open letter to the College Board regarding the Advanced Placement (AP) curriculum framework issued last year for the U.S. history exam; the June 2 letter was signed by 55 scholars, including Leon R. Kass, Joyce Malcolm and Harvey Mansfield:
The new framework is organized around such abstractions as “identity,” “peopling,” “work, exchange, and technology,” and “human geography” while downplaying essential subjects, such as the sources, meaning, and development of America’s ideals and political institutions, notably the Constitution. Elections, wars, diplomacy, inventions, discoveries—all these formerly central subjects tend to dissolve into the vagaries of identity-group conflict. The new framework scrubs away all traces of what used to be the chief glory of historical writing—vivid and compelling narrative—and reduces history to an bloodless interplay of abstract and impersonal forces. Gone is the idea that history should provide a fund of compelling stories about exemplary people and events. No longer will students hear about America as a dynamic and exemplary nation, flawed in many respects, but whose citizens have striven through the years toward the more perfect realization of its professed ideals. The new version of the test will effectively marginalize important ways of teaching about the American past, and force American high schools to teach U.S. history from a perspective that self-consciously seeks to de-center American history and subordinate it to a global and heavily social-scientific perspective.
These are the three URL’s upon which the protest letter signed by 55 scholars against the College Board’s redesigned APUSH Framework can be found:
http://www.nas.org/images/documents/Historians_Statement.pdf
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2015/06/02/college_boards_reckless_spin_on_us_history.html
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/419192/55-scholars-protest-ap-us-history-changes-stanley-kurtz
http://www.wsj.com/articles/notable-quotable-the-ap-u-s-history-exam-1433285562