After more than a year of campaigning against the 2014 AP U.S. History standards released by the College Board, retired history teacher Larry Krieger is finally satisfied with the company’s revisions to the course framework, which he had deemed too negative.
“The overall presentation is more balanced and measured,” Krieger told TPM on Friday, adding that he felt the College Board “did indeed listen to the criticism and have addressed most of the major areas of concern.”
The company on Thursday released revisions to the standards which will take effect in 2015. The College Board says it accepted public feedback, which it used to update the standards. The new framework is “clearer and more historically precise, and less open to misinterpretation or perceptions of imbalance,” according to a statement from the College Board on Thursday.
Krieger said that Trevor Packer, who oversees the AP courses at College Board, called him on Wednesday to review the changes the company has made to the standards.
“I wrote a rather lengthy topic-by-topic analysis of the framework, and he pointed out that was an important document in their revision,” Kreiger told TPM about his conversation with Packer.
With his criticism of the exam, Krieger sparked a conservative movement against the 2014 version of the AP U.S. History standards. The Republican National Committee condemned the framework as a “radically revisionist view of American history that emphasizes negative aspects of our nation’s history while omitting or minimizing positive aspects.” And legislators and schools boards in numerous states followed suit in opposing the standards.
“The first document, I would say, was an aberration,” Krieger told TPM on Friday. “It went to far. I think they’re back in line.”
Other critics have been satiated by the new revisions as well. Peter Wood, the president of the National Association of Scholars, a group that criticized the standards, told the Washington Post that the 2015 revisions are “definitely better than 2014 in a number of ways.” And writers for National Review described the revisions as “scrupulously fair-minded.”
Krieger said that College Board addressed his concerns by adding the names of some Founding Fathers, mentioning the Holocaust, and revising the definition of Manifest Destiny.
He was also pleased that the revised version mentions the idea of “American exceptionalism” in a section on American national identity, which had been one of Krieger’s major qualms with the standards released for 2014. Krieger said he wished the standards included “strong examples” of “American exceptionalism,” such as John Winthrop’s “City Upon a Hill” sermon and Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America.”
“It’s not perfect, but then no document would be,” Krieger said.
“the idea of “American exceptionalism””
Another fucking disease.
Yes, I’ve decided to call things diseases today haha
That he’s satisfied tells you all you need to know about how history has been dummied down even more and distorted even farther to placate the christianist booboisie.
If only conservatives and evangelicals would be so considerate when they pursue their anti-intellectual pogroms.
Krieger, a well known Visigoth fanboy, was also very satisfied that, at his request, “the sack of Rome” as described in AP Western Civ. has been changed to “Alaric I Spends a fulfilling August of fun and frolic in the ‘Eternal City’”.
So…history is based on popularity.
Cool.