(Headline USA) Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis floated cutting ties with the College Board this week over the organization’s attempts to push radical critical race theory in an Advanced Placement course on black history.
DeSantis clashed with the College Board last month over the proposed course, which included an entire section on the leftist Black Lives Matter movement, queer theory, and reparations for black citizens. The class as outlined violated Florida’s “Stop WOKE Act,” DeSantis said.
The College Board agreed to modify the class to address some of the concerns raised by DeSantis, but then released a statement this week doubling down on its original proposal.
“The College Board condemns this uninformed caricature of African American Studies and the harm it does to scholars and students,” the organization said in a statement. “This new AP course can be historic — what makes history are the lived experiences of millions of African Americans, and the long work of scholars who have built this field. We hope our future efforts will unmistakably and unequivocally honor their work.”
DeSantis slammed the College Board for pushing “neo-Marxism,” and suggested Florida’s students would be much better off without its influence.
“This College Board, nobody elected them to anything,” DeSantis said this week. “They are just kind of there and they provide a service, and so you can either utilize those services or not. There are probably some other vendors who may be able to do that job as good or maybe even a lot better.”
The governor vowed Florida would focus on “education, not indoctrination.”
“The College Board was the one that, in a black studies course, put queer theory in, not us,” he added. “They did that. They were the ones that put in intersectionality, they put in other types of neo-Marxism into the proposed syllabus.”
