A committee in the Oklahoma legislature voted to outlaw public schools from using state funds to offer Advanced Placement history courses on Tuesday, arguing that the coursework for AP U.S. History is unpatriotic.
Creating a replacement test would cost $3.8 million dollars, but Republican state Rep. Dan Fisher argued that it’s necessary because the AP coursework teaches “what is bad about America.”
The bill—passed along partisan lines in a House legislative committee – will head to the larger state House for a vote. While the bill only targets the U.S. history course, it could have implications for all the state’s Advanced Placement courses.
In the wake of conservative states’ rebellion against the Obama administration-pushed Common Core educational standard, the bill marks the latest state effort to buck nationalized education standards and the latest attempt for lawmakers to rewrite history coursework to be more to their liking.
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AP courses and their corresponding tests are devised and administered by the College Board, a private, national organization that also administers standardized tests like the SAT. The courses allow students to undergo challenging coursework that can result in college credit and helps students bolster their college applications. Public schools aren’t required to offer them and they aren’t required for students. Other conservatives tied the AP coursework to the Common Core, which the state repealed late last year. During discussion of the bill, Republican state Rep. Sally Kern argued that the AP courses should have lost their funding under the bill that repealed Common Core, because it granted all control of the state’s schools to the state and only the state. She said she’s asked the Attorney General to weigh in. A spokesman for the College Board told a local paper the Republican critiques of the College Board and its AP classes were “mythology and not true.”
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