Advanced Placement US History and Senate Resolution 80: What's All The Fuss About?

 

 

By Brad Weiser, Pike County High School AP US History

 

I have been a Social Studies teacher for eighteen years and seventeen of those I have taught United States History.  In those years I have taught the regular class, the gifted/honors class, as well as the Advanced Placement class for five of those seventeen years. Recently an education bill was introduced in the Georgia Senate concerning AP US History (APUSH).

First let me describe my basic goals for APUSH.  These students must learn at a depth far superior to what you and I did in our US History class.  The basic facts are necessary, but those are just preliminary to what the AP course contains.  It is about taking those facts and asking questions to get to the reasons behind why events happened.  Then students must be able to take similar situations in modern America and apply the lessons learned from earlier in our history.  In order to do this, we have to look at many aspects and points of view on the important events and issues…the good, bad, and the ugly as it were. 

One of the arguments made against the new AP curriculum by certain Georgia legislators is that it doesn’t adequately cover the founding documents such as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.  Although the names of the documents may not appear as often as proponents of Res. 80 would like, that in no way means those documents are not taught and referred to repeatedly as the class moves through the course.  No AP student would be successful in the class without a good understanding of those (and many other) documents from our history.

In no way does the College Board (the organization over all AP classes) deemphasize the founding documents.  What it does is allow instructors to use a variety of sources to help our students learn various concepts in the curriculum. The ability to pick source material is what allows Georgia teachers to use events from Georgia history to enhance student understanding.  For example, the APUSH curriculum has a unit on Civil Rights, but it does not say specifically to refer to Martin Luther King Jr. With that said there is no way I, or any other teacher in Georgia, could teach the Civil Rights Movement without our students being exposed to the teachings and actions of Dr. King.

Any other concerns about the specifics within the AP curriculum not matching with Georgia standards must be viewed in light of all Georgia students taking Georgia History in 8^th grade.  All of the specific events, people, and concepts as they pertain to Georgia are addressed in that class as well.

I have seen many things come and go in education in my career.  I have seen many instances of the Georgia General Assembly getting involved in education reform.  While I am sure many in Atlanta have good intentions, I cannot think of a specific example of anything that has come down from the state capital, be it instruction based, curriculum based, or student based, that has been a great success.  In my humble opinion there are 100 things that need to be reformed or eliminated in education, but the APUSH course is not one of them.