Amid the usual back-to-school preparations this month, yet another College Board AP course was caught in the crossfire of Florida’s ongoing culture war.
This time, it’s AP Psychology that’s pitting school districts and the College Board against the state, with college-bound students caught in the middle. Thanks to a vague law and even vaguer directions from Florida’s education department, some school district leaders remain unsure if the course is even legal to teach. It’s a situation that highlights how difficult — and confusing — it has become for schools to navigate the state’s increasingly restrictive education policies.
The drama began in May, when the Florida Department of Education sent a letter asking the College Board, an organization that administers coursework and exams for college access, to audit and make potential changes to its AP Psychology course, which includes teachings on sexual orientation and gender identity. According to the letter, the course now needed to comply with the new House Bill 1096, otherwise known as the “Don’t Say Period” law, which states that high school lessons on gender identity and sexual orientation must be “age appropriate.”
Unlike its actions in the recent controversy over AP African American Studies in Florida, the College Board didn’t cave to the state’s request. In a stern statement, the organization announced that it would neither modify the course, which it has offered in Florida for 30 years, nor consider college credits for students from schools that watered down the curriculum. According to the College Board, it began receiving messages from teachers “heartbroken that they are being forced to drop AP and instead teach alternatives that have been deemed legal because the courses exclude these topics.” (About 30,000 students statewide had registered for the course, according to the College Board.)
Florida, the College Board declared, had “effectively banned AP…
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