AP classes were cool
Ron DeSantis was an AP student back in the glory days when it was all white males, before the you know what’s history and beyotch studies were taught in school. When America was great:
When Florida Governor Ron DeSantis floated the possibility of eliminating Advanced Placement classes from his state’s curriculum, he conveniently left out an important fact.
DeSantis was once the “AP US History student of the year,” according to his high school yearbook, pages of which were obtained by The Daily Beast.
Before turning on AP classes in his latest culture war skirmish, the governor not only benefited from the rigorous courses as a high schooler at Dunedin High School, he also praised the Sunshine State’s top three placement for students in AP courses in February 2020, calling the program “a gateway to achieving success in college, career and ultimately in life.”
Now DeSantis is trying to sell a populist pitch that APs aren’t worth the trouble, despite benefiting from the highly sought-after curriculum on his way to an Ivy League education.
The Florida governor’s provocation to the College Board—the company that handles the Advanced Placement curriculum, as well as the SAT exam—is the culmination of a series of interventions DeSantis has made in Florida’s public schools to suppress what his administration has called “woke indoctrination.” His blitz on education has also become a key plank of the impending DeSantis 2024 presidential campaign, with each new proclamation earning him praise on Fox News and across conservative media.
The Yale University and Harvard Law alumnus recently banned a new AP course on African-American studies, saying the interdisciplinary class violated Florida’s “Stop W.O.K.E. Act” by veering into “political” topics and trying to “shoehorn in Queer Theory.”
“This course on Black history, what’s one of the lessons about?” DeSantis said at a press conference in January blasting the new class. “Queer Theory. Now, who would say that’s an important part of Black history, Queer Theory? That is somebody pushing an agenda on our kids.”
DeSantis has since extended that line of reasoning to float scrapping AP courses altogether in Florida. While AP classes are not taught at every public school in the United States—around 88 percent of public high school students attend a school offering them—Florida would be the first state to outright ban the curriculum, which is designed to give students a head start on college.
Back in 1997, DeSantis received a commendation for doing just that.
“Ron ‘D’ DeSantis was awarded the AP American History Award in June of 1996, the Princeton Book Award along with athletic awards,” the 1997 yearbook obtained by The Daily Beast says, while further listing out a series of baseball achievements.
I’m beginning to think he’s much more genuinely like Trump than we might have thought. He’s an old “get off my lawn” curmudgeonly asshole. He took AP classes 25 years ago and they didn’t talk about Black history or queer theory or gender studies and that’s how it should be! All this modern wokism is destroying our culture. Bah humbug!
Everybody wants a generational chance. But what if the right wing younger generation is even more throwback than their predecessors?