From Quorum Report: Round 2: SBOE conservatives take another swing at Advanced Placement course

Something to augment our look at education in Texas:

Resolution instructs College Board to rewrite its "anti-American revisionist history"

The culture wars at the State Board of Education seem to be starting anew after Board Member Ken Mercer placed a resolution on next week’s State Board of Education agenda calling on the College Board to rewrite its new Advanced Placement US History curriculum because negative anti-American bias out of step with recent standards set by the Texas state board.

The College Board, including a Texas US history teacher on the national writing team, addressed the State Board of Education at its July meeting, noting the many elements noted to be missing from the old and new curriculum were left up to the teachers to insert into their own lectures.

That did not please Mercer, who has been the most vocal opponent of the course.

“The elected Texas State Board of Education strongly admonishes the College board for failing to listen to numerous complaints of parents, educators and concerned citizens,” wrote Mercer in the resolution. “And be it further the Texas State Board of Education recommends that a committee be convened to draft an APUSH framework that is consistent both with the APUSH course’s traditional mission and with the shared purpose of (Career and College Readiness Standards), the (Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills) and the Texas Education Code, and with the desires of Texas parents and other citizens for students to learn the true history of their country.”

In his draft proclamation, Mercer notes 46,000 of the 500,000 students across the country who take the AP US History test are from Texas. That may be true, but the course enrollment numbers are even higher. Last year’s student count for AP US History was 68,034 students across the state. If you were to assume that every student who took the course was a junior, that would mean one out of every five students in Texas last year enrolled in the Advanced Placement US History course.

David Coleman, CEO of College Board, has denied the new curriculum minimizes the contributions of historic Americans. He has, in fact, done something College Board has never done: released the AP US History exam for review.

That’s approximately three times the number of students who take AP Spanish, AP Biology and AP Macroeconomics. Only AP English Language and Composition has higher enrollment numbers, according to the Texas Education Agency’s enrollment counts from the 2013-14 school year.