![]() “The usual response is to raise the drawbridge.”Īll the while, Packer kept the possibility of a standalone course on African American history in the back of his mind. “It’s very unusual for any educational organization to respond to serious criticism by actually listening to it,” Stern later said. They hired a number of their loudest complainants as consultants, including Jeremy Stern, an independent historian who’d railed against the first draft. And instead of doubling down, Packer and his team listened to the critiques. It was a view of America “through the lens of race, gender and class identity,” one Georgia state lawmaker said.īut the framework, Packer insists, was just that - a draft, with possible subjects and material that were to be edited and refined. It said European explorers were driven by “white superiority” and Ronald Reagan used “bellicose,” anti-Communist rhetoric. The framework expanded its focus on African American history, from slavery to the Chicago race riots to the Black Panthers. ![]() The National Republican Committee passed a resolution calling it “a radically revisionist view of American history.” Republican lawmakers in red states - from Oklahoma to North Carolina to Georgia - pushed to keep it out of their schools.Ĭritics maintained a long list of complaints. It provided a more expansive view of our country’s past than the one previously presented, including an emphasis on subjects like Japanese Americans during World War II and chattel slaves in colonial America. But the new curriculum unleashed a political uproar. In 2014, Packer led a revamp of the AP U.S. And at AP, we don’t do one-sided.”Īs novel as this year’s battle has been - the media coverage, the opposition from a presidential candidate, the lobbying and pressure from different political sides - Packer, to some extent, has trod this trail before. ![]() “One-sided treatment of ideas is dangerous. “Ideas themselves are not dangerous,” he said. The only way to approach a culture war, he told me, is to try to find what’s true and stick to it. But his well-coiffed dirty-blond hair, near his temples, now shows hints of white. Packer is in his 50s, and he maintains a youthful exuberance - a requisite for such a job. “In no way do I feel myself as having mastered this,” he told me during a recent interview, sitting in his natural habitat - the spartan offices of the College Board, located in the shadow of the new World Trade Center in lower Manhattan. Trying to make peace can be exhausting, he acknowledges, and he doesn’t pretend to know all the solutions. Nor could his master’s and bachelor’s at BYU, or his time as an AP student himself at Waterford School in Provo, or his upbringing as the son of a stay-at-home mother and a Latter-day Saint institute teacher father. High schoolers nationwide know him simply as “AP Trevor,” a nod to his Twitter handle that’s amassed nearly a hundred thousand followers.Īnd yet, all the experience running America’s largest secondary-school curriculum machine couldn’t have prepared him for this year. The Washington Post deemed him responsible for making AP “the most powerful educational tool in the country.” A scholar from a leading think tank credited him for “the rarest kind of success in public education” - expanding scale without sacrificing rigor. and on and on.Īnd then there was Packer, the soft-spoken man from Provo, Utah, stuck in the middle.Īs College Board’s senior vice president over Advanced Placement courses, Packer has spent two decades oiling and rearranging the gears that make AP run, expanding the program to reach most school districts in the U.S. Nearly everyone was left disappointed, in one way or another: students, who couldn’t take the course parents, who either felt their children’s education was being censured or being radicalized DeSantis & Co. DeSantis reveals why Florida rejected African American Studies AP courseĪ schism emerged between the Florida Department of Education and College Board.
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