TALLAHASSEE (SNN TV) – Governor Ron DeSantis’ administration is blocking a new advanced placement course on African American studies for high school students.
In a letter this month to the college board, the nonprofit organization that oversees AP coursework, the Florida Department of Education said the course is “inexplicably contrary to Florida law and significantly lacks educational value.”
While the letter did not specify what the agency found objectionable, a spokesman for Desantis said the course “leaves large, ambiguous gaps that can be filled with additional ideological material, which we will not allow.”
“Let me be clear: there’s no room in our classrooms for things like critical race theory, teaching kids to hate their country and to hate each other is not worth one red cent of taxpayer money,” DeSantis says.
The rejection of the course follows efforts by DeSantis to overhaul Florida’s educational curriculum to limit teaching about critical race theory, though there’s little evidence it’s taught in K-12 schools. But in 2021, the state enacted a law that banned teaching the concept, which explores the history of systemic racism in the United States and its continued impacts.
Last year, DeSantis also signed a bill restricting how schools can talk about race with students.
“I think what you see now with the rise of this woke ideology is an attempt to really delegitimize our history and to delegitimize our institutions,” DeSantis said.
As DeSantis weighs a potential 2024 presidential bid, his latest move signals a willingness by the rising GOP star to continue to engage in clashes over hot-button cultural issues, a strategy that has boosted his standing among conservatives.
An apparent syllabus for the class shared with CNN runs more than 80 pages and provides a course framework covering a wide range of topics from the empires of Sudan to the Haitian revolution to black feminism.
“I’ve been working with this for a couple of years,” says Lisa Hill, a co-chair of the African American studies AP course, “and we have been very careful to be inclusive. And it’s not just a history course, it includes literature and art and geography and political science, not politics.”
Lisa Hill is teaching the course now. She heads the history department chair at Hamden Hall Country Day School in Connecticut. She is baffled by the DeSantis administration’s criticism. When asked if the course is teaching critical race theory, Hill responded,
“Absolutely not. In fact that is one of the statements. This course is not a CRT course. From what I’m able to kind of garner is that there’s a conflation of an idea that this course is CRT but with an AP label, which is incorrect.”
The course is being offered as a pilot in 60 schools across the country during the 2022-23 school year. It was not immediately clear if Florida had any schools participating in the pilot program.
The Florida Department of Education also criticized any coursework that would study reparations, the argument to compensate black Americans for slavery.
In the statement, the Florida DOE says that would not include any “critical perspective or balancing opinion” in the lesson.
