The educational news from Florida these days is almost too dispiriting to read. I am making every effort to keep the state’s very name from becoming code for its headline-grabbing leadership and the continuous executive attack there on principles of diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging, and social justice to which I have tried to devote my life and work. I firmly believe that most academic leaders in the community of readers here subscribe wholeheartedly to these principles, too.
I am working hard to keep my focus on the educators, students, and communities in that state who find not just their principles and beliefs under attack but who are seeing a systematic purging, dismantling, and immolation of practices, curricula, and materials might support these principles and beliefs. From the Chronicle of Higher Education to my daily news blasts from the National Association of Secondary School Principals and Education Week, I read of the impact of retrograde policies of intolerance and intimidation on the lives and work of people in libraries, schools, and colleges. Fie!
This week’s centerpiece in this unwelcome feast of fear and sorrow is the news that the College Board has apparently acceded to criticisms tantamount to demands about its new curriculum in African American Studies. Critics whose views might have been seen and identified as extremist a few years ago have wanted this course to be cleansed of objectionable content. Apparently these fearful folks are concerned that validation of the experiences of BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and other peoples by the inclusion of factual and theoretical content is antithetical to the kind of learning they believe their governments should sanction. The College Board’s announcement was quite the way to celebrate the start of Black History Month.
To a degree the magnitude of this scandal in my own mind (and it was front-page on the sites of several major newspapers as I first drafted this, so others must be finding it as hard to deal with as I am) is also a reflection of the outsize influence of the College Board on the educational landscape of the United States. As a former teacher, department chair, school-based college counselor, and academic administrator, I have worked in the shadow of the College Board all my career. Oh, yeah, I was a student, too, and must have taken my first CB-written standardized test mid 1960s. The folks in Princeton call the tune, and students and educators must dance.
The sad fact is that numbers generated by the Board’s many tests and examinations have served as validation of any number of stereotypical and assumed “facts” about demographics and academic ability, “facts” that have bolstered theories about race that play out in just about every aspect of the experience of everyone. Yes, too often we white people, the general beneficiaries of the opportunities and privileges these “facts” support, live in willful ignorance of the power of one organization to shape society and confirm its inequities and iniquities.
Educators must stop and take the time to examine some of the work we do. It’s time for some serious critical reflection. Many of us saw a ray of hope when college admission programs began to go “test-optional” and “test-free” as Covid first ravaged the land, but the tests are creeping back. The anxieties of students and families over whether to skip testing never really abated, and now these worries are also rushing back. For twenty years schools have been questioning whether the Advanced Placement program serves the needs of their own students and aligns with their own missions and values, and a relative few have chosen to go their own ways in developing high-level courses for their most talented and ambitious students. Their students, let us point out, have found success in college admission, college work, and the world. Less happy has been the experience of students in schools so underfunded or simply so small as to be unable to offer much of anything in the way of advanced-level coursework.
But for students, teachers, and academic leaders in Florida, especially those attending or working in public education but really everyone, critical reflection and speaking out are fraught with professional peril. In a way that George Orwell would recognize, language and ideas have become verboten. Individuals with certain characteristics and/or experiences are being essentially “un-personed” in the educational system. Voters can change this, but only if enough of them should want to. All the rest of us can do is try to lift up those who are oppressed and suppressed.
Elsewhere we have to look hard at the places and institutions in whose services and authority we have invested so much, even when we have seen and even named the risks for generations. Have we done the right thing all along? Let’s look harder, and resist when it behooves our students, our colleagues, our communities, and our own ability to look into mirrors without wincing at whom we see.
Resistance is not futile when educators act in concert.