This blog has always been more about raising questions than claiming to have answers. Here are some random questions I’m contemplating as we hit the end of February. None of them are keeping me up at night, and none are probably deserving of their own post. I hope they won’t come across as rants or the kind of airing of grievances you might hear from Frank Costanza during Festivus or at any Donald Trump rally.
Question 1: Does February need a rebranding?
We all know that March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb, and that April showers bring May flowers. What is February’s niche or tagline? It begins with Groundhog’s Day, where Punxsutawney Phil either sees his shadow or doesn’t, and we have six more weeks of winter regardless. The Super Bowl is played during February, Valentine’s Day happens during February, and February is Black History Month (which should last longer than a month). Despite all of these, the closest thing February has to a brand is “the shortest month that seems like the longest.” Can we do better than that? Perhaps the same marketing people who do ads for avocados or Geico can come up with a branding campaign for February.
Question 2: When does Early Action become late action?
We are at the end of February (“the shortest month that seems like the longest”), and I am aware of several colleges that have just released Early Action decisions, barely a month before regular decisions are due to be released. What gives? Clearly Early Action is designed for the benefit of the institution, allowing it to space out application reading and manage enrollment, but when is Early Action no longer early? And is “regular” admission soon to be a thing of the past? In the words of Yogi Berra, “It gets late early around here.”
Question 3: Why do brochures for summer programs include a list of colleges attended by “graduates”?
This is the time of year when my office receives a number of emails and brochures promoting summer program opportunities. I was looking at one last week for a program sponsored by the Center for Sustainable Urbanism. It’s a program in Italy called the Center for Introduction to Architecture Overseas (if you haven’t noticed, the acronym is CIAO), and having spent a month nine summers ago living in the small Tuscany city of Lucca, it caught my eye. My attention was drawn to one piece of the brochure, where it says “Program alums have been accepted to.”
Is listing the colleges attended by those who attend summer programs a form of false advertising? Is the message intended to be that attending a summer program like this will result in acceptance to college? Maybe I’m naive, but I think that colleges look at these kinds of summer programs as “It’s nice that your family can afford to send you to a program like this.” My students who have attended these kinds of pricey summer programs generally have a good experience, but I don’t think attending a summer enrichment program improves students’ college admissions chances. Can we get summer programs to market the quality of the experience and not the promise of college admission benefits? In the spirit of full disclosure, I recognize that schools, including mine, are also guilty of publishing college lists in marketing materials, and I’m not totally comfortable with that either, but a summer program advertising where its alumni have gone to college seems even less defensible.
Question 4: If there were an Advanced Placement multiple choice question regarding the back and forth between the College Board and the administration of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis over the proposed AP course in African American Studies, the issue would be best described as:
The College Board standing up to DeSantis
The College Board kissing up to DeSantis
Political theater related to DeSantis’s presidential ambitions
A pissing contest
All of the above
I have been following and trying to make sense of the issue, as well as trying to determine who is the good guy in all of this.
In case you have spent six months vacationing at the International Space Station or trying to shoot down Chinese weather balloons and unidentified flying objects, here’s a quick summary.
For a number of years the College Board has had plans on the drawing board for the new AP course. After the murder of George Floyd by police in the summer of 2020 and the resulting Black Lives Matter protests, plans ratcheted up to introduce the course, and this year there is a pilot of the course in 60 high schools around the country.
In January the Florida Department of Education rejected the AP course as violating state law related to the teaching in public schools of race-related issues and as lacking educational value. Gov. DeSantis, whose first job after college was teaching U.S. History at the Darlington School in Georgia, described the proposed syllabus as “woke.”
On February 1, the first day of Black History Month, the College Board announced a revised curriculum for the course, removing some of the topics that Florida and conservatives had objected to. The immediate conclusion from many of us was that the College Board was responding to the criticism leveled by the DeSantis administration, but the CB maintained that the changes had been in the works prior to the objections raised by Florida. That claim was called into question by a timeline released by Florida officials showing on-going negotiations between the state and the College Board over the course.
So what are we to make of this? Should we blame the College Board for engaging in dialogue with Florida, given that the Advanced Placement program is its largest single source of revenue and that Florida is the third highest state in terms of AP participation? At the same time, are Florida’s objections educational or political in nature?
Governor DeSantis is clearly gearing up for a Presidential run, and his schtick is using the culture wars as a campaign platform. As Republican politicians go, his style is more bully than bully pulpit. Just this morning I read about a proposed Florida law that would establish authoritarian control over higher education in a way that is unprecedented. He has already attempted to turn New College into Hillsdale South and punish Disney for supporting LGBT rights. First Mickey Mouse, now the College Board. Will he target apple pie (or at least Apple), motherhood, and the National Football League next?
As for the College Board, is the introduction of the African-American Studies course filling a void in AP offerings or a way to increase revenue in the wake of declining SAT numbers? As a white observer rather than an African-American Studies scholar, I think there is clearly a need for more education about race and its role in American history and culture. The debate should be about what the focus of such an AP course should be.
I wonder if the AP course should be African-American “history” rather than “studies.” In many academic disciplines there is a fine line between scholarship and activism. A few of the topics removed from the original draft look like doctoral level work rather than topics high school students need to be aware of. One such topic was Queer Studies. Is that essential to understanding the African-American experience? I’ll leave that to others to answer, but from a historical perspective it is relevant that Bayard Ruskin was forced to take a back seat as a leading voice in the civil rights movement because he was gay.
Many of the topics and readings removed from the updated course are secondary sources that students may now study as part of a project that will make up 20 percent of their AP score. The in-depth project may be a good idea, but as far as I know no other AP course has a similar project component. Is the project unique for this course or part of the future of many AP courses?
More questions than answers, and some of the answers are troubling. At least we know that March is about to come in like a lion, only to leave like a lamb.