Minnesota schools prepare to offer AP African American Studies as controversy swirls over course

Samia Osman has long believed her history classes were incomplete. The Hopkins High School sophomore wonders why lessons claim white men "discovered" the Americas and a white man "freed" slaves during the Civil War.

Instead of glossing over Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad, Osman wants to more fully explore Tubman's life. And she wants a deeper understanding of the ideologies of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X.

"I want to know what was happening in the background. I want to know more about what they hide from us," Osman said.

She'll soon be one of the first Hopkins High students to take a class that focuses almost exclusively on what she hoped her history lessons would cover. Hopkins is one of at least three Minnesota high schools that will offer Advanced Placement African American Studies come fall.

The College Board, the national organization that runs the AP program and administers the SATs, launched its pilot of the AP African American Studies course in 60 schools across the country. The program will expand to 200 more schools in the fall, including Hopkins and high schools in Edina and St. Paul.

The expansion comes in the midst of a national controversy over how race and history are taught in public schools.

Osman and her classmate Camryn McNeal — both of whom are Black — say the offering is a comfort to students who have only seen African Americans depicted in lessons as either slaves or oppressed activists fighting for civil rights legislation.

"You can't expect positivity from a minority that's only been taught about the way they've been oppressed," said McNeal, a junior.

Politics and the classroom

The College Board has come under fire since it rolled out the pilot, then again when officials announced a curriculum revision earlier this month.

Some Republican politicians scorned the AP offering as soon as its pilot went underway. Banning Florida schools from offering the class, Gov. Ron DeSantis accused the College Board of indoctrinating students and politicizing classrooms.

Democrats, students and some educators have accused the College Board of bending to the criticism, alleging the organization jettisoned works from authors such as bell hooks and Ta-Nehisi Coates — both of whom have written about Black Americans' modern struggles — from the core curriculum to quell conservative critics.

"They're really diluting the curriculum for some people to feel more comfortable and there's so many things wrong with that," said Cherise Ayers, principal at St. Paul's Central High School. "History is not always comfortable but that doesn't mean that we should not teach it."

Some Minnesota high schools already offer U.S. history classes that explore it through an African American perspective. The AP offering, some educators say, further legitimizes the area of study because it provides students another avenue to earn college credit in the subject.

The University of Minnesota proctors its Intro to African American Studies course at Central and other St. Paul schools. Students earn college credit at the university with a passing grade. The AP class, by comparison, prepares students for an exam — their college credit is dependent on how highly they score on the test.

Although she believes the College Board diluted the AP course's curriculum, Ayers wanted the class at Central High so St. Paul educators will have a seat at the table as the national organization finalizes the course. AP African American Studies will roll out to every school in the country at the start of the 2024-25 school year.

"The College Board — good, bad and ugly — is an educational institution that is revered in our country. And so when we have these institutions that are revered, we should demand they do better," she said.

College Board officials rejected recent criticism and said they always planned on revising the curriculum before expanding the program offering this fall. They take particular issue with claims the course is meant to indoctrinate students.

"AP students are never required to agree with a particular opinion or adopt a particular ideology, but they are expected to analyze different perspectives," said Trevor Packer, the College Board's senior vice president for AP programs, in a statement.

College Board officials also say many subjects they removed from the core curriculum are now among topics students may choose to explore for the capstone project they must complete to pass the class.

Some administrators said they were encouraged to appoint a Black educator to teach the course. But a spokesman for the College Board said the organization does not require that.

In Hopkins, Principal Crystal Ballard said she won't require one of the school's few Black teachers to take on the assignment if they don't want to.

Instead, her school's AP African American Studies class will host a series of Black guest speakers to help the coursework come to life.

"We're still fulfilling all of the College Board's requirements and we're making the lessons relevant for our scholars," she said.

National controversy mirrors local fights

The political skirmish over the pilot nationally mirrors similar scuffles in Minnesota over the state's revised social studies standards and its licensing requirements for new teachers.

Minnesota teachers have wide latitude in how they teach history as long as their lessons meet the state's academic standards. Current events regularly make their way into the classroom, Forest Lake Area High School teacher P.J. Wiggin said, because teachers anticipate students will have questions about them.

"When a Michael Brown situation happens in St. Louis or when George Floyd is murdered here, these things come up and figuring out ways to talk about them as a social studies teacher without trying to sway or indoctrinate students is the challenge," he said. "The students have questions. Sometimes they want us to tell them what to think and that's not our job."

Wiggin, who is also president of the Minnesota Council for the Social Studies, said politicians in St. Paul don't restrict how teachers in the North Star State approach the topic the way lawmakers do in places like Texas, Tennessee and Florida.

He's noticed that parents and community members in some districts have pushed back against approaches to teaching history like his, particularly during heated school board elections.

"There's a response to wanting U.S. history to be taught from an American exceptionalism perspective," Wiggin said, adding that students typically reject that framework. "They're willing to critically examine our history so that they can find out how we can do better."

Hopkins High sophomore Dallas Downey is one of those students. He wants to learn the ins and outs of the African American experience to get a jump start on his goal of majoring in journalism at a historically Black college or university.

"Even if I change my mind on the major," said Downey, who is Black and Indigenous, "I'll still know where I came from."