Political Science Educator: volume 27, issue 1
Reflections
Michael Christopher Sardo, [1]
This academic year, I taught AP United States Government and Politics (APUSG) to about sixty high school juniors and seniors. My students are among the nearly three hundred thousand high school students who took the APUSG exam, one of the most popular AP exams (College Board 2022b). While we might celebrate these numbers as an advance in civics education, College Board’s course and exam structure should worry political scientists in its limited engagement with core political science concepts and depoliticized conception of US government and politics. If 2022 is representative, every year around one hundred fifty thousand students earn a passing score for potential college credit (College Board 2022b). My concern is that APUSG and its associated exam have become the default national civics curriculum, while leaving students at best unprepared for upper-level political science courses, and at worst, if the exam satisfies their social science requirements, with a narrow and limited conception of politics and governments as they enter the world of adult citizenship.
According to College Board’s Course and Exam Description (CED), APUSG provides “a college-level, nonpartisan introduction to key political concepts, ideas, institutions, interactions, roles, and behaviors that characterize the constitutional system and political culture of the United States” (College Board 2020, 7). The CED provides a detailed course framework, breaking down five units—on Constitutional foundations, formal institutions, public opinion, political behavior, and civil rights and liberties—into nearly one hundred pages of daily lesson plans with specific topics, learning objectives, pedagogical suggestions, and supplementary sources to prepare students for the AP exam’s 55 multiple-choice and four free-response questions.
While this undoubtedly mirrors many college-level introductory political science courses, a closer look at the CED is revealing. The concepts “collective action” and “polarization” only appear in the titles of optional supplemental readings (College Board 2020, 60, 120). “Rational Choice” is mentioned once and only in the context of voting behavior (College Board 2020, 115). “Power” is frequently mentioned but only in abstract constitutional terms like the “separation of powers” (College Board 2020, 46). These are not only core disciplinary concepts, but they are crucial both for helping students analytically study US government and politics—seeking to explain and not just identify political behavior or institutional dynamics—and for empowering students to critically interrogate US government and politics. A rich understanding of collective action problems, polarization, and power can help students understand why certain pieces of legislation don’t get passed, or even introduced, or why the two-party system functions the way it does. The course is similarly narrow in other ways. Neither racial and ethnic politics nor immigration are explicit topics of study, and while there are dedicated topics on social movements, they focus almost exclusively on the African-American Civil Rights Movement and women’s rights movements (College Board 2020, 89-92). State and local governments are only mentioned in the context of federalism with no specific attention paid to their structure, powers, or behaviors.
The College Board does, however, mandate two sets of required documents: nine “Required Foundational Documents”[2] (RFD) and fifteen Supreme Court cases.[3] While College Board has undoubtedly chosen important texts, this selection is strikingly narrow in scope and authorship. Eight of the nine documents are from the 18th century and all focus on the nature of the Constitution or the grand principles of US government. All are written by men and only one is written by a person of color. There are no documents from the 19th century, despite the importance of the Civil War and Reconstruction in the development of the US’s constitutional order. While any list of RFDs will be somewhat arbitrary, by focusing on the founding period almost exclusively—King’s “Letter” providing the sole exception—College Board is constructing an image of US government and politics that emphasizes constitutionalism and relates all aspects of politics back to 19th century debates.
The AP exam’s fourth free-response question makes this explicit, requiring students to respond to a prompt with an argument supported with evidence from one or more of the listed RFDs (College Board 2020, 169). These prompts focus on broad normative questions about the role or structure of the federal government, often connected to contemporary issues. On recent exams, students were asked to evaluate competing strategies for civil rights movements using Federalist 78, The First Amendment, and King’s “Letter” (College Board 2022a, 6) and identify whether environmental policy should be a federal or state issue using Brutus I, Federalist 10, and the Preamble of the Constitution (College Board 2021, 6). These prompts implicitly suggest that the answers to contemporary political questions should be found in the United States’ founding documents and debates. These prompts shape the way students think about government and politics. Students are trained to treat the writings of the founding period as a canon of almost sacred texts, within which lie the answers to all political disputes. Thus, the selection of the RFDs when paired with these questions is not simply arbitrary, but provides College Board’s imprimatur to a particularly conservative and narrow understanding of US government and politics, This image may be non-partisan, but it is not ideologically neutral.
This image is consistent with the 15 required Supreme Court Cases. Again, while the list appears arbitrary—why Citizens United and not Buckley v. Valeo (1976); why Yoder and not Lemon v. Kurtzman (1971)—it advances a particular conception of judicial politics by narrowly focusing on certain types of rulings while also casting the Court as an agent of rights expansion. All of the cases involve high-level Constitutional questions, which reinforces the course’s Constitutional focus while also framing the judiciary’s sole purpose as ruling on constitutional questions. For example, why not include Chevron v. NRDC (1984) to emphasize the importance of bureaucratic rule-making and to show that the Court is often engaged in questions of statutory and not Constitutional law? Similarly, most of the required cases focus on the Bill of Rights, and almost all of them—with the exception of Schenck—involve the Court expanding or defending rights and liberties. However, this elides the role of the Court in restricting civil liberties, especially for minority groups, throughout its history, such as in Dred Scott v. Sanford (1857), Chae Chan Ping v. United States (1889), and Korematsu v. United States (1944). This frames the Court as focused solely on questions of Constitutional theory and protecting civil liberties, rather than as a political body. That there is no required list of Acts of Congress further idealizes the Court, placing it as the sole arbiter of Constitutional meaning.
This is reinforced by the AP exam. In addition to multiple-choice questions on specific cases, there is a dedicated SCOTUS free-response question, where students compare an unfamiliar case described in the prompt to one of the required cases, focusing on their shared constitutional question, the facts of the cases, and their political implications (College Board 2020, 169). By requiring students to explain how the Court came to similar or different holdings solely on the facts of the cases and the shared Constitutional issue, the exam implicitly frames the Court as apolitical. Tellingly, students are not encouraged to think about how political considerations such as the composition of the Court, different historical contexts, or changes in statutory or case law may have led to different rulings. Questions of power, institutions, self-interest, collective action, and historical change are confined to a single topic on “Legitimacy of the Judicial Branch” but are clearly secondary to these high-level abstractions (College Board 2020, 66).
The CED admits this focus. “Command of the Constitution lies at the center of this course,” College Board’s CEO writes; “the aims of this course framework are timeless, and its roots are deeply embedded in the American experiment and the intellectual traditions that animated our founding” (College Board 2020, 11) This ahistorical approach is particularly worrisome. For example, with no attention to historical and political change it is impossible to understand the significance of the Reconstruction or Progressive Era Amendments. Additionally, despite including topics on social movements, the CED’s course framework elides that the concepts, principles, institutions, laws, and precedents, presented to students as fixed and static are themselves continually subject to critique, contestation, and revision by both political agents and political scientists. In short, College Board’s vision of US government and politics is nearly devoid of politics.
Of course, the CED does not prohibit going beyond these required topics, RFDs, and Court cases. It maintains that the Unit Guides provide merely a “suggested sequence” that “respects new AP teachers’ time by providing one possible sequence they can adopt or modify rather than having to build from scratch” (College Board 2020, 25). Furthermore, in a recent statement, College Board contends that “AP frameworks are flexible by design so that teachers use their experience and creativity to expand and enhance the curricula. No two AP classes are alike” (Jaschik 2023). The CED should be interpreted as a guide for teachers to then modify and adapt to their needs not as a complete curriculum.
However, such flexibility is nominal at best, especially given the course’s required source materials and the incentive structures faced by teachers and students. Teachers have limited time and expertise, and following the CED to the letter provides both ready-made lesson plans and easy access to College Board’s online AP classroom assignments that include both mini-lesson videos and practice questions for each topic. Given AP Classroom’s adoption across the disciplines, students have been normalized to expect that the actual class strictly follows AP Classroom (Abrams 2023, 105-121). Students, in an increasingly competitive college admissions environment, have also been socialized to prioritize their AP exam scores. I have been told by experienced AP teachers and exam readers that students would not be rewarded by using more technical political science concepts (such as path dependency, collective action problems, or principal-agent relationships) on free-response questions. In my classes, students would immediately ask if an assigned reading was one of the texts required for the AP exam. This behavior is reasonable; students are rationally responding to their incentives. However, it further suggests that the claimed flexibility is formal rather than substantive.
My point is not to demean the efforts of the scholars and educators who contributed to the CED, nor the thousands of APUSG teachers and hundreds of thousands of APUSG students. Instead, my goal is to point towards the limitations of APUSG as the de facto national civics curriculum. It is to suggest the importance of collaboration between scholars of US politics and the high school educators, which as Abrams (2023) notes, was the original model of the AP program. It is to finally to imagine an alternative possible APUSG curriculum that provides a general framework of learning objectives, but encourages and empowers teachers to select texts, Court precedents, scholarly sources, and other materials that speak to pressing contemporary debates and the needs of their specific student body and community. Rather than rehearsing the ratification debates and entrenching an image of an apolitical Court, APUSG courses could study the structures of their own state and local governments and identify opportunities for civic engagement, debate Court precedents that affect the lives of members of their particular communities, and read political and scholarly texts that better reflect the diversity of the nation and their own political worlds. Such an approach begins by trusting and empowering teachers, encouraging collaboration, and foregrounding the politics in US government and politics.
Footnotes
[1] The views and opinions express in this article are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the views of the author’s employer.
[2] The Declaration of Independence, The Articles of Confederation, The Constitution of the United States, Brutus 1, Federalist 10, 51, 70, and 78, and King’s “Letter From a Birmingham Jail” (College Board 2020, 30-31).
[3] Marbury v. Madison (1803), McCulloch v. Maryland (1818), Schenck v. United States (1919), Brown v. Board (1954), Baker v. Carr (1962), Engel v. Vitale (1962), Gideon v. Wainwright (1963), Tinker v. Des Moines (1969), New York Times Co. v. United States (1971), Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972), Roe v. Wade (1973), Shaw v. Reno (1993), United States v. Lopez (1995), McDonald v. Chicago (2010), and Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010) (College Board 2020, 32-33). Following the ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), College Board removed Roe from the list of required cases for the 2023 exam.
References
Abrams, Annie. 2023. Shortchanged: How Advanced Placement Cheats Students. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
College Board. 2020. AP U.S. Government and Politics: Course and Exam Description. New York: College Board. Retrieved June 13, 2023 (https://apcentral.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/ap-us-government-and-politics-course-and-exam-description.pdf).
College Board. 2021. “AP United States Government and Politics: Free-Response Questions Set 1.” Retrieved June 13, 2023 (https://apcentral.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/ap21-frq-us-gov-pol-set-1.pdf).
College Board. 2022a. “AP United States Government and Politics: Free-Response Questions Set 1.” Retrieved June 13, 2023. (https://apcentral.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/ap22-frq-us-gov-pol-set-1.pdf).
College Board. 2022b. “Student Score Distributions: AP Exams – May 2022.” October 3. Retrieved June 13, 2023. (https://apcentral.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/ap-score-distributions-by-subject-2022.pdf).
Jashick, Scott. 2023 “A Brutal Critique of AP Courses.” Inside Higher Ed. April 24. Retrieved June 13, 2023 (https://www.insidehighered.com/news/admissions/traditional-age/2023/04/24/brutal-critique-ap-courses
Michael Christopher Sardo completed a PhD in political theory at Northwestern University and currently teaches government and history at Tarbut V’Torah Community Day School in Irvine, CA. He has also published articles and chapters on political responsibility, climate justice, and the history of political thought.
Published since 2005, The Political Science Educator is the newsletter of the Political Science Education Section of the American Political Science Association. All issues of the The Political Science Educator can be viewed on APSA Connects Civic Education page.
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