RNC Fights College Board's "Blame America First" US History Framework

Posted: 2014-08-19

12 August 2014 The Report Card

By Bill Korach www.thereportcard.org

In January of this year, The Report Card featured an exclusive series of articles by Larry Krieger on the College Board’s new Advanced Placement US History Framework (APUSH). Mr. Krieger, a highly respected AP instructor and published author warned that the new framework was a radical departure from previous approaches to American History. Mr. Krieger warned that that students would be forced to learn that the United States was not a land of opportunity but a place of racism, oppression and greed. It is no coincidence that the author of Common Core, David Coleman is now president of the College Board and directed the preparation of the APUSH. Republicans, seeing American education in decline, and US history redefined, reacted strongly to APUSH.

The Republican National Committee is calling for a fight against the College Board’s new framework for Advanced Placement U.S. History, claiming that it  “deliberately distorts and/or edits out important historical events.”

The new framework “reflects a radically revisionist view of American history that emphasizes negative aspects of our nation’s history while omitting or minimizing positive aspects,” said a resolution adopted by the RNC on Friday at its summer meeting in Chicago.

The resolution demands that the College Board delay for at least one year its plan to debut the framework in high schools this fall. It urges that a committee be convened to draft a new AP U.S. history framework that is “consistent both with the APUSH course’s traditional mission, with state history standards, and with the desires of U.S. parents and other citizens for their students to learn the true history of their country.” And it calls on Congress to “investigate this matter” and withhold any funding to the College Board until a suitable framework is produced.

Opponents to the framework are giving a particularly high profile to support they’ve gleaned from scholars. A highly critical analysis by Peter Wood, the president of the National Association of Scholars, who calls the framework “radical” and “a complete overhaul of the Advanced Placement course in U.S. History,” has also been widely circulated.

American Principles in Action posted this open letter to the College Board:

The new Framework inculcates a consistently negative view of American history by highlighting oppressors and exploiters while ignoring the dreamers and innovators who built our country. Instead of striving to build a “City upon a Hill,” as generations of students have been taught, the colonists are portrayed as bigots who developed “a rigid racial hierarchy” that was in turn derived from “a strong belief in British racial and cultural superiority.” The Framework ignores the rise of democratic institutions such as the House of Burgesses and New England town meetings.  It also omits the colonists’ growing commitment to religious freedom and the emergence of a pluralistic society that lacked an entrenched aristocracy.

The new Framework continues its theme of oppression and conflict by reinterpreting Manifest Destiny from a belief that America had a mission to spread democracy and new technologies across the continent to something that “was built on a belief in white racial superiority and a sense of American cultural superiority.”

The new Framework repeatedly ignores the heroism and sacrifices of America’s servicemen and women. For example, the Framework makes no mention of the sacrifices America’s Greatest Generation made to rescue much of the world from a long night of Nazi and Japanese tyranny. Instead, the Framework focuses solely on the negative aspects of America’s involvement in the war:  “the internment of Japanese Americans, challenges to civil liberties, debates over race and segregation, and the decision to drop the atomic bomb raised questions about American values.”

Framework apologists have argued that the document is not intended to provide a comprehensive list of people and topics. But the expansion of the Framework from five to 98 pages makes it even more significant and troubling that American heroes such as Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, Dwight Eisenhower, Jackie Robinson, Jonas Salk, Neil Armstrong, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., have been excluded. While the document does not have room for these heroes it does have space for Chief Little Turtle, the Students for a Democratic Society, and the Black Panthers.

College Board spokeswoman Carly Lindauer said that the new AP U.S. history framework, developed and “overwhelmingly supported by” college faculty and expert AP teachers, is “built to be flexible.”

http://education-curriculum-reform-government-schools.org/w/2014/08/rnc-fights-college-boards-blame-america-first-us-history-framework/

Share this article on:

Facebook

Google+

Twitter

Enter comments below:

Your Email:

Validation Code from Graphic:

(Comments subject to review before being published.)