The uproar over the insertion of Common Core Standards into the U.S. education system has been heard from coast to coast. Many parents don’t like the new program and have expressed their dismay over what they have learned about it. The complaints are liable to grow even more intense now that the College Board’s history curriculum has been examined.
Before discussing the content of the new history guidelines, it’s important to know that the College Board produces material both for advanced placement (AP) courses and for the SAT exams taken by high school students on their way to college. High SAT scores have always been considered essential to be accepted by a favored college. So all who aspire for higher education are pawns in the game of whoever devises the AP courses and the tests created by the SAT compilers. But what if those hurdles for high schoolers are full of anti-American Marxism? Sadly, this is what has happened.
The single most important person behind creation of Common Core is Dr. David Coleman. Soon after he succeeded in getting Common Core adopted in most states, he won appointment as president of the College Board. He now oversees what the curricula will be for AP courses and what will be the SAT test questions. He has wasted no time in revising these materials.
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World Net Daily has reported the findings of President Peter Wood of the National Association of Scholars. Wood examined the new course material and describes the AP history curriculum as “a briefing document on progressive and leftist views of America’s past.” He labels what he has seen “a vaguely Marxist or at least materialist reading of the key events” in our nation’s past. Author Stanley Kurtz has accused the College Board of “pushing U.S. history as far to the left as it can get away with.”
Others recognize the new material as a sharp left-ward turn from what was previously supplied to high school AP history teachers. Larry Krieger has taught history for 35 years and has written many popular AP and SAT preparation books. He labels the new history curriculum “relentless left-wing indoctrination.” Attorney Jane Robbins worked with Krieger and found that 181 points made in the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills program are absent in the new College Board history course. Robbins believes that the deficiencies and historical inaccuracies in the new material will work their way down into all levels, not just the AP classes. Texas school board member Ken Mercer claims that “only America haters” will applaud the new materials.
Students subjected to this new program will learn little positive or nothing at all about America’s founders, the successful defeat of Japan and Germany in World War II, the building of a prosperous nation, and more. Instead, they will learn that the early Americans immigrants from Europe should be remembered as evildoers who brought disease and slavery to the newly discovered continent. In the new curriculum, real American heroes are ignored and questionable characters are glorified.
We’re grateful that World Net Daily’s John Aman has provided a hard look at the new Common Core course content. We hope that the uproar about Common Core and the new history curriculum will grow to a point where the federal government’s use of taxpayers’ money to bribe states into accepting the program will help many to see how dangerous federal involvement in the important field of education truly is. Maybe then, they will join with the growing number who believe federal involvement in education ought to be abolished.
John F. McManus is president of The John Birch Society and publisher of The New American. This column appeared originally at the insideJBS blog and is reprinted here with permission.
