AP History Under Fire: Text of a letter to my state legislators

In case you haven't heard, the Oklahoma legislature is considering a bill--HB 1380--that would do away with AP History in Oklahoma. Reproduced below is the text of what I wrote to my legislators. If you live in Oklahoma, I encourage you to write your own letters (you can get help finding out who your legislators are here, although it doesn't give perfect results on the local level). Feel free to share this post or plagiarize the text freely (although you probably want to replace the personal anecdote if you do).


I am writing to urge you to oppose HB 1380, which would replace AP History in Oklahoma with a locally designed alternative. This bill would be bad for the state, and it would be bad for Oklahoma’s students.

AP courses have a long-standing national reputation for academic rigor. A newly-fashioned Oklahoma alternative would not enjoy that status. Successful performance on AP courses and tests enables students not only to prepare for college by undertaking courses of the sort that they will encounter at the college level, but gives these students the opportunity to earn college credit—thereby expanding the options and opportunities they will have for higher education. For example, in my own experience the college credit from my AP courses enabled me to take a semester off in my sophomore year to travel in India with my family and still graduate on time. This experience not only changed my academic trajectory but deepened my understanding of alternative worldviews and cultures in ways that have had a lasting impact on my life.

Part of the reason AP courses can confer college credit and hence provide these opportunities is because the curriculum and learning objectives laid out by the AP program reflect well what experts in the represented disciplines have recognized to be a sound college-level introduction to those disciplines. The motive for HB 1380 springs, on the contrary, from ideology—and in effect is advocating that a course structure which reflects the recommendations of experts in the field of American history be replaced by a course structure that reflects a specific ideological understanding of the American story. In other words, the motive is to render Oklahoma’s high school history classes less academically credible, less scholarly, but more effective at reinforcing a preferred worldview.

Even if many legislators do not see it in these terms, no one can reasonably expect colleges and universities to see it any other way. Hence, no one can reasonably expect colleges and universities to recognize the proposed Oklahoma alternative to AP History the way that they do the AP course. In short, were this legislation to pass, it would impose a handicap on all Oklahoma students pursuing college careers. The imposition of such handicaps is the opposite of what a state legislator should be doing. It shamefully prioritizes ideological agendas over the welfare of Oklahoma’s young people.

There is a dangerous tendency for those at the political and ideological extremes to confuse balance for bias. When one is prejudicially wedded to a particular worldview and narrative, the open and critical inquiry essential for sound academic scholarship can be misperceived as biased simply because it fails to prejudicially endorse the favored worldview and narrative over defensible alternatives. If we allow HB 1380 to pass unchallenged, my deepest worry is that it will strike a blow against sound academic scholarship in the state of Oklahoma.

Please do what you can to fight this bill.