Friday, March 29, 2024

New York Times: “Taking the Politics Out of American History…”

Photo credit: Terrapin Flyer via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Photo credit: Terrapin Flyer via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)

The New York Times ran a great piece today chronicling the grassroots movement against the new, politically slanted A.P U.S. History framework and cited the involvement of the American Principles Project and The Pulse 2016 contributor Jane Robbins from the very beginning of the fight.

The NYT‘s Cecilia Capuzzi Simon wrote:

Larry Krieger, a retired A.P. teacher in U.S. history and now an exam coach and textbook author (many on how to ace A.P. exams), led the charge against the 2014 framework with a single-spaced 18-page critique. “It was poorly written, poorly organized and poorly balanced,” Mr. Krieger says. Jane Robbins, a senior fellow at the American Principles Project, picked up on his ideas, arguing that the framework had been “scrubbed of American exceptionalism.”

“What we saw was a progressive outlook,” Ms. Robbins says. “It was a non-American, globalist perspective on a lot of issues. We were one country among many, and not a very good one at that. It was a depressing, slanted view of American history.”

Mr. Krieger and Ms. Robbins took their message around the country, persuading legislators in Texas, Georgia, Oklahoma and other states to try to change the course narrative or prohibit schools from teaching it. They even got the attention of the Republican National Committee, which demanded that the framework be delayed and rewritten, and that Congress withhold funding from the College Board.

[…]

Be sure to read the full piece here.

Jon Schweppe is Communications Director for the American Principles Project and can be followed on Twitter @JonSchweppe.

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