A reader who identifies as “Democracy” left a comment here about DeSantis’ war against the College Board’s Advanced Placement (AP) courses. DeSantis manufactured a culture war issue, a familiar tactic for him, but don’t defend the AP exams: They are worthless, says he or she.

Democracy wrote:

While I certainly do not agree with — and am appalled by — the Florida dictate, I hate to see the College Board’s Advanced Placement (AP) program in the bannerhead of this issue because it makes it appear that the AP program is somehow being victimized, and it helps to propagate the AP brand.

It’s important to separate the wheat from the chaff here. The Florida requirement – state law – is part of a larger effort by conservatives (Republicans) across the country to, as USA Today put it, “restrict learning and materials about controversial topics.” Or, in other words, topics that conservatives hate to talk about: racism, misogyny, equality, sedition, tolerance, democracy, reproductive rights, climate change, sex…..

The original law required a cataloging of all books in “a school library media center.” The DeSantis-controlled Florida DOE interpreted that broadly to include classrooms. The Republican legislature amended the law to say that a school library media center is

“any collection of books, ebooks, periodicals, or videos maintained and accessible on the site of a school, including in classrooms.”

As The Sarasota Herald Tribune reported in April of this year,

“The law, governing instructional materials for classes from kindergarten to 12th grade, passed last year and holds school districts responsible for the content of all materials used in a classroom, made available in a school library or included on a reading list. It requires each book in a school library to be certified by a media specialist and for a list of these materials to be available on school websites. The law took effect in January.”

This is incredibly cumbersome, especially for elementary school teachers who have large troves of books for their students. And if it reeks of conservative religious state-imposed censorship, that’s probably because it is. As ABC News (and other media) reported, “Books targeted by conservative groups were overwhelmingly written by or about people of color and LGBTQ people, according to anti-censorship researchers.”

All of this is worrisome. It’s dangerous territory.

But that does not mean that AP is the victim. Nor should it imply that AP is actually educationally beneficial for most students. As I’ve noted here previously, more colleges and universities are either refusing to accept AP test scores for credit, or they are limiting credit awarded only for a score of 5 on an AP test. The reason is that they find most students awarded credit for AP courses are just generally not well-prepared.

Dartmouth no longer gives credit for AP test scores. It found that 90 percent of those who scored a 5 on the AP psychology test failed a Dartmouth Intro to Psych exam. A 2006 MIT faculty report noted “there is ‘a growing body of research’ that students who earn top AP scores and place out of institute introductory courses end up having ‘difficulty’ when taking the next course.” Two years prior, Harvard “conducted a study that found students who are allowed to skip introductory courses because they have passed a supposedly equivalent AP course do worse in subsequent courses than students who took the introductory courses at Harvard.”

In The ToolBox Revisited (2006) Clifford Adelman scolded those who had misrepresented his original ToolBox research by citing the importance of AP “in explaining bachelor’s degree completion. Adelman said, “To put it gently, this is a misreading.” Moreover, in statistically analyzing the factors contributing to the earning of a bachelor’s degree, Adelman found that Advanced Placement did not reach the “threshold level of significance.”

College Board executives often say that if high schools implement AP courses and encourage more students to take them, then (1) more students will be motivated to go to college and (2) high school graduation rates will increase. There are educators who parrot the College Board line. Researchers Kristin Klopfenstein and Kathleen Thomas “conclude that there is no evidence to back up these claims.”

Why do students take AP? Because they’ve been told to. Because they’re “trying to look good” to colleges in the “increasingly high-stakes college admission process,” and because, increasingly, “high schools give extra weight to AP courses when calculating grade-point averages, so it can boost a student’s class rank.” It’s a depraved stupid circle that has swept up parents, guidance counselors, administrators and school boards, teachers, and the general public – not to mention public education reporters – into the misbelief that “AP is better.” It isn’t.

One student who got caught up in the AP hype cycle –– taking 3 AP courses as a junior and 5 as a senior –– and only got credit for one AP course in college, reflected on his AP experience. He said nothing about “rigor” or “trying to be educated” or the quality of instruction, but remarked “if i didn’t take AP classes, it’s likely I wouldn’t have gotten accepted into the college I’m attending next year…If your high school offers them, you pretty much need to take them if you want to get into a competitive school.”

What do students actually learn from taking these “rigorous” AP courses and tests? For many, not much. One student remarked, after taking the World History AP test, “dear jesus… I had hoped to never see ‘DBQ’ ever again, after AP world history… so much hate… so much hate.”

And another added, “I was pretty fond of the DBQ’s, actually, because you didn’t really have to know anything about the subject, you could just make it all up after reading the documents.”

Another AP student related how the “high achievers” in his school approached AP tests: “The majority of high-achieving kids in my buddies' and my AP classes couldn’t have given less of a crap. They showed up for most of the classes, sure, and they did their best to keep up with the grades because they didn’t want their GPAs to drop, but when it came time to take the tests, they drew pictures on the AP Calc, answered just ‘C’ on the AP World History, and would finish sections of the AP Chem in, like, 5 minutes. I had one buddy who took an hour-and-a-half bathroom break during World History. The cops were almost called. They thought he was missing.”

And an AP reader (grader), related this about the types of essays he saw:

“I read AP exams in the past. Most memorable was an exam book with $5 taped to the page inside and the essay just said ‘please, have mercy.’ But I also got an angry breakup letter, a drawing of some astronauts, all kinds of random stuff. I can’t really remember it all… I read so many essays in such compressed time periods that it all blurs together when I try to remember.”

The Florida law is clearly not in the interests of kids and learning. But AP ain’t necessarily all that either.