Florida: August 2014 Advanced Placement Test Omits the Founding Fathers

The Florida Department of Education offers free Advanced Placement (AP) courses to students via the Florida Virtual School. All of Florida’s sixty-seven school districts, private and charter schools offer AP classes. Florida’s AP students take the College Board test to obtain college credits for courses taken in topics such as American History.

According to the Orlando Sentinel’s Leslie Postal, “Florida continues to be a national leader in the percentage of its high school students who tackle — and pass — Advanced Placement courses, according to a report released Tuesday. The state ranked fifth in the nation for the percentage of 2013 graduates who had passed at least one AP exam, meaning they showed mastery of college-level material, the College Board’s ‘10th Annual Report to the Nation‘ showed.” Click here to read Postal’s the full article.

This may be very bad news for those of us who learned about the Founding Fathers and America’s struggle for freedom in 1776. Florida’s students will be taking a entirely new AP College Board exam.

The College Board, led by David Coleman, the “architect” of Common Core is rolling out the new AP United States History (APUSH) course and exam next in August 2014.

So what is the College Board pushing exactly? John Aman in his column U.S. History takes a drastic left turn this fall: AP course ‘rewrites America’s past, cuts out Founding Fathers’, reports:

High-school history teachers nationwide will give their top students a dark retelling of U.S. history this fall, courtesy of the College Board, a nonprofit college readiness firm led by Common Core architect David Coleman.

The College Board – which administers AP (advanced placement) courses and tests – is rolling out a revised curriculum framework for AP U.S. history, offering the 450,000 students who take AP U.S. history classes a hero-free account of America’s deeply stained past.

Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, calls the new AP U.S. history framework “a briefing document on progressive and leftist views of the American past,” one which “weaves together a vaguely Marxist or at least materialist reading of the key events with the whole litany of identity group grievances.”

Read more.

In the video below Marijane Smitherman a mother testifies against APUSH at the Texas State Board of Education meeting on July 18th, 2014.

Gene Edward Veith writes:

“Public schools trying to bolster their academic quality are turning to what they publicize as “AP and IB courses.” “AP” refers to Advanced Placement, toughened-up classes that can earn college credit. But “IB” is a different animal. “International Baccalaureate” courses follow a globalist, relativistic curriculum that many taxpayers would object to.

The International Baccalaureate Organization (IBO) is headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, the brainchild of British educator A.C.D. “Alec” Peterson, who wanted to develop a standardized global curriculum. Its purpose, in the words of the IBO website, is “developing citizens of the world.”

[ … ]

Currently, nearly 2,000 schools in 124 countries-with some half million students-are using the IBO curriculum. This includes 500 schools in the United States, each of which pays the Geneva organization between $5,000 and $9,000 per year. For that, IBO will provide the curriculum, give teachers special training, and even do some of the grading.

[ … ]

The IBO goal is the formation of students “who understand that other people, with their differences, can also be right.” Not just that other people can be right, but that people with differences can “also” be right. At the heart of the IB approach is a view that no actual culture holds truth.

The keystone course for the International Baccalaureate diploma is “Theory of Knowledge.” Not “theories,” but “theory.” While it is fine for high-school students to study epistemology, this is a course in postmodernist epistemology. This theory employs a “hermeneutic of suspicion” that undermines the very possibility of accepting any kind of objective truth.

Veith concludes, “It does take a certain kind of braininess to convince oneself that it is true that there is no truth, and it is no wonder that major universities-the patrons of postmodernist theory-are impressed with all of the young relativists clutching their IB diplomas. But this philosophy does not produce a good education; rather, it produces a mindset in which good education is impossible.”

Florida has fully embraced the AP and IB programs. No one has questioned if either provides students with a “good education” or if these programs are making a good education impossible. When education becomes an exercise in relativism then our state and nation are at risk.

RELATED ARTICLE: This State Could Be Next to Buck Common Core

---