BROOKE: And I’m Brooke Gladstone. This week dozens of teachers in Colorado called in sick to protest Jefferson County’s conservative school board. The reason: The board is battling the College Board’s new Advanced Placement US history test, taken by hundreds of thousands of  high school students each year, to improve their college-bound profiles. Conservatives in Colorado and elsewhere are alarmed by what the  Republican National Committee called  a “radically revisionist view of American history that emphasizes negative aspects of our nation's history.” This week Ben Carson, pediatric neurosurgeon and potential GOP presidential candidate, offered his take on the new AP US History test...  

 

CARSON: I think most people when they finish that course they’d be ready to go sign up for ISIS. I mean, this is what we’re doing to the young people in our nation.

 

BROOKE: This dispute over a history course has exploded into the education battle of 2014, Liana Heitin has been covering the conflict for Education Week. She says the first thing we need to do, is get our vocabulary straight.

 

HEITIN: They don’t call it a curriculum, they call it a framework because I guess a curriculum is thought to be a little bit more specific about what teachers should be teaching. Acatully you don't even have to take the course to take the exam. But if you don't take the course and you don't use that use that framework you might have a disadvantage when you do get to the exam.

 

BROOKE: So what was the old AP US History curriculum like and what's it like now?

 

HEITIN: The old framework was five pages. THat's was it. It was more like a list than anything else. The major topic would be be: 'the crisis of the union' and under that it might say pro and anti-slavery arguments and conflicts and that's about it.

 

BROOKE: How long is the framework now?

 

HEITIN: The new framework is about 80 pages long.

 

BROOKE: What's the impact of going from a five page list-like curriculum to a 80-page more specific one? Does that call for more memorization?

 

HEITIN: Interestingly, it actually calls for less. Teachers would look at the list and think, "I have to cover everything here." It was a very mile-wide inch deep kind of course. Students felt like they had to memorize everything they were just given so many facts and timelines. So the idea in changing the course was to make it a bit more deep. So...they had fewer topics to study but they were supposed to study them more deeply.

 

BROOKE: What about the claim that it besmirched our past? For instance by suggesting that the justification for the doctrine of Manifest Destiny was derived, in part, from a belief white supremacy. This position endorsed by the way by the notoriously leftist historians at the Oxford History of the US -- but nevertheless conservative have objected to linking Manifest Destiny to a belief in White Supremecy. Is this just a kind of re-hash of the classic battle between conservatism and academia.

 

HEITIN: Yeah, and there is a lot of politics going on behind this because in Jefferson County in November 2013 -- three conservative candidates won and now they are a majority on the school board. So they are definitely clashing with the supposedly more liberal academics.

 

BROOKE: The college board has been working quietly on re-designs of the AP US History test as well as other AP tests for about 6 years. In August, a few weeks before school year began. This issue exploded. Beyond Jefferson County in August the Republican National Committee weighed in. How and why?

 

HEITIN: The Republican National Committee weighed in and took a vote of no confidence in this framework. Saying it's overly negative it's unpatriotic. All these sorts of things.

 

BROOKE: If this has been pretty much finished for 2 years. Why was it that the Republican National Committee jumped in if it were going to jump in at all.

 

HEITIN: Yeah. It's hard to talk about this without talking about the Common Core state standards.

 

BROOKE: And by Common Core you mean?

 

HEITIN: A set of standards that 46 states and the District of Columbia originally agreed to adopt. Meaning every student in the state would be taught the same standards which are really just benchmarks for what students should know and be able to do by the end of the school year. When the College Board rewrote the AP US HIstory framework -- the College Board says, like, these were written to reflect the Common Core state standards so that students are learning kinds of ways. Previosuly states each wrote their own standards and some states are still using standards that were written internally in the state. President Obama put some incentives in place for states adopt the Common Core state standards. Including, states would have a better shot at getting a Race to the Top grant or a waiver from the No Child Left Behind requirements, but nobody was forced to do this.

 

BROOKE: Colorado hasn't and Texas hasn't.

 

HEITIN: Texas hasn't. Colorado had. Texas is one of the four states that hasn't adopted and they're actually the only state that specifically wrote into state law that they could never adopt the Common Core state standards. Interestingly last week the State Board of education on Texas voted to not use this same AP US History framework that we're talking about. They said it was too negative. They said it was revisionist.

 

BROOKE: The Texas school board wrote that materials used to teach history should quote: "Promote citizenship, patriotism, essentials and benefits of the free enterprise system, respect for authority, instructional materials should present positive aspects of the United States and its heritage.

 

HEITIN: Yes. It's the same thing that's brewing up in Jefferson County is what we saw last week actually happen in the entire state of Texas.

 

BROOKE: Is it that it's a proxy fight over the culture wars between democrats and republicans or conservatives and academia? Is some sort of opportunity to create a division and alliances before an election? Is this about the children?

 

HEITIN: We're see a confluence of very complicated education issues. Including you know standards, and teacher evaluation and the idea of these national tests that really effects students futures. These tests are really important for not only college acceptance but students can get credits based on how well they do on these exams. So, all over the country teachers and students and people in higher ed and everyone is sort of thinking about these issues. And they are causing controversy.

BROOKE: Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

 

HEITIN: Ultimately, I think tension in education is good. Because they're working towards the greater goal of giving students the greatest education possible. Sure tension is always a good thing. And I think the idea of reviewing a framework that was written by a small group of academics and historians and educators is not a bad thing. Nearly half a million students are going to be taking that AP US History exam so, I think, it's always good to take it back to the source material and I'm not a historian myself so I'm not the best person to look through and say this is the best way to teach this. These are the best concepts but we do have historians doing that. And I'm glad to see that.

 

BROOKE: Thank you very much.

 

HEITIN: Thank you, Brooke.

BROOKE: Liana Heiten is a reporter covering curriculum and instruction for Education Week.