SC Effectively Bans AP African American Studies

Is it Kafka, or is it the South Carolina Department of Education?

What happened?

Here’s the simple version (because it’s going to get really, really, unnecessarily complicated).

The South Carolina Department of Education announced yesterday (in a memo it humorously entitled “A Clarification on Course Offerings”) that state public schools would not be able to offer the AP African American Studies course (and, for completely unexplained reasons, AP Pre-Calculus) as an AP course, effectively killing it in most districts.

This is, of course, bad for the following people:

• Students who planned to take the course

• Teachers who had been assigned to teach the course

• The large teams of counselors, administrators, and teachers who might have already created next year’s student schedules before finding this out

• People who believe parents and students, rather the state, should decide which elective courses students take

• People who believe state agencies should be truly transparent about why they do things and what they are doing (more about this below)

• Anyone who believes African American Studies might be a particularly important course of study in a state which has a claim to being the most impacted by the complex history of race (its first non-indigenous settlers, not incidentally, having been African slaves, a fact I never learned in any K-12 course in South Carolina)

And it’s beneficial to:

• Ellen Weaver, I guess?

• The Freedom Caucus, probably

• Racists Anti-“woke” activists

Stock photo from the College Board’s AP African American Studies homepage.

Now I said it was going to get complicated.

How complicated?

So complicated that as I was reading Kafka’s The Castle¹, I kept laughing out loud at how similar the South Carolina Department of Education’s actions and statements were to those of the officials who control the surreal and mysterious bureaucracy looming over the fate of that book’s protagonist.

Perhaps Superintendent of Education Ellen Weaver— like the lover of literature she professes to be—was simply trying to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Kafka’s death.

About that statement.

Click here to read the statement in full.

It seems extremely plausible that no one was ever going to get any kind of statement from the Department until the Post and Courier ran an article about it from reporter Valerie Nava on Sunday. And it seems clear that the only reason Nava, or anyone else, was aware that the Department had chosen not to provide a registration code for the course was that a South Carolina teacher reached out to the reporter to let her know. Nava followed up with the Department repeatedly for clarification on its actions, and received no further comment beyond, essentially, “we didn’t make a course code for the class”.

Immediately, there were strong reactions in the education community and beyond, something I assume Weaver/ the Department were trying to avoid by using bureaucratic inertia instead of formal actions to kill the course.

But following the article, a statement from teacher advocacy group SC for Ed (I’m a board member), and presumably many calls from parents and teachers, the Department released a statement on Tuesday that essentially shifted blame to all of our dumb lying eyes for thinking they had banned the course— which was, by the way controversial, and, hey, also did you know the new social studies standards haven’t come out yet?

Nothing to see here!

So let’s take the statement piece by piece to try to understand what’s going on.
(And just for fun, let’s also take a look at passages from The Castle to see how little has changed in the world of opaque bureaucracy in the century since Kafka died while writing it.)

First paragraph of the Department’s statement:

Last week, the South Carolina Department of Education (SCDE) notified district staff via email that the course code previously assigned to the African American Studies AP Pilot would not be valid for the 2024-25 school year. The SCDE created this course code two years ago at the request of districts that wanted to participate in the pilot of this course. The pilot has now concluded, and the SCDE has not added any new AP courses to its roster for the 2024-25 school year. This includes both the African American Studies course and the Pre-Calculus course.

This part of the statement essentially reflects what little the Department had already shared with Post and Courier: that is, essentially, We (passively) didn’t create a course code that would allow the class to be offered… This sort of just happened, please don’t keep asking us about it. Which is, of course, a roundabout way of saying they actively decided to make it more difficult to continue taking a course a small number of students throughout the state had already taken. Course codes are not generated through some kind of mysterious organic process.

Of course, as we’ll see below, the statement’s writer(s)² also can’t resist trying to tangentially win some points from people who theoretically want them to ban the course.

Passage from The Castle:

And now I’m going to talk about a special feature of our official apparatus… When a matter has been deliberated on at great length, it can happen, even before deliberations have ended, that suddenly, like lightning, in some unforeseeable place, which cannot be located later on, a directive is issued that usually justly but nonetheless arbitrarily, brings the matter to a close (68).

Second paragraph from the Department’s statement:

In the years since this pilot began, there has been significant controversy surrounding the course concerning issues directly addressed by South Carolina's General Assembly in a budget proviso as well as in pending permanent legislation.

This is, of course, the part that was telegraphed in February, when a spokesman for Weaver quoted by the Washington Post as saying she was “fully committed to ensuring South Carolina students are taught accurate history while rejecting divisive political theories that are clearly prohibited by state law and have no place in our schools.”

But significantly, neither statement provides evidence or justification for the claim that the course, as offered in South Carolina, was “controversial” to anyone. Florida officials, probably at the direction of Governor Ron DeSantis, did make a big stink about the course last year. Following that, the College Board implemented changes³ which at least seemed to directly address some of those concerns. Since only a handful of schools have offered the current version of the course, simply claiming there was “controversy” is a week argument.

The “budget proviso” referenced is (presumably) this one, a literal copy-and-paste of a Trump era Executive Order (now repealed) which didn’t have anything at all to do with academics, and was an explicit response to Chris Rufo’s demand that the government go to war on DEI initiatives that require government employees to undergo diversity training. The proviso bans a bunch of “tenets” (implicitly of whatever far-right activists wanted us to think “CRT” was at the time) that have nothing at all, on their surface, to do with the course.

The “pending legislation” is likely H. 3728, a bill that in the preferred form of the South Carolina Freedom Caucus would allow lawsuits against educators for teaching concepts or texts that don’t fit into their prescribed ideology.

But as the paragraph continues we move from a weak argument to an objectively bizarre and illogical one:

Additionally, the state's social studies standards are coming up for their routine cyclical review. As a result, the SCDE has not approved any new statewide social studies courses, instead focusing efforts to ensure future course offerings are aligned both with the soon-to-be-updated standards and state law.

This is the most Kafkaesque part of the whole passage, and while we’re throwing out literary references, it has a strong whiff of Catch-22, as well. What the Department is claiming, essentially, is that because the social studies standards haven’t come out yet, we can’t know if those standards would, theoretically, match up with AP African American Studies, and so therefore it was not approved as a social studies course.

But obviously, since the new versions of the standards do not yet exist, no course could be guaranteed to meet them. And it doesn’t explain why, for example AP European History still gets a course code, even though it would presumably fall under the same standards— to the extent that either course really falls under social studies standards.

(This is leaving aside the fact that AP courses typically do not fall under state standards, anyway; for example, I taught AP Language for many years for AP English credit. In order to get course approval from the College Board, I followed AP’s version of “standards” and was never asked to make sure the course complied with, for example the state English 3 standards.)

As I told the Post and Courier’s Nava yesterday, “To create a controversy where there really can't be one because we didn't offer the course (officially) yet, and then to pretend that controversy is the reason that you're canceling the course, to me, is logically backwards”.

Passage from The Castle:

“And one needs permission to spend the night here?” asked K., as though he wanted to persuade himself he hadn’t perhaps heard the previous statements in a dream.

“Permission is needed!” was the reply…

“Then I must go and get myself permission,” said K., yawning and pushing up from the blanket, as though he intended to get up.

“Yes, but from whom?” asked the young man.

“From the Count,” said K. “there doesn’t seem to be any alternative.”

“Get permission from the Count, now, at midnight?” cried the young man, stepping back a pace (2).

(The young man then demands that K. leave the village, because he needs permission to be there, but there is no way for him to obtain that permission, because, as he will find out, there is presumably never going to be any way for him to visit the castle, and as he later learns, all of the phones he could call within the castle are unplugged.)

Paragraph 3 of the Department’s statement:

There is nothing preventing districts from continuing to offer AP African American Studies as a locally-approved honors course should they choose to do so, in addition to continuing to offer other approved African American courses as districts have already done for a number of years.

Okay, I lied. This might actually be the most Kafkaesque part. What the Department is doing here is either playing a fairly subtle game of semantics (which wouldn’t be the first time— we have also gotten such Moms for Liberty Greatest Hits from Superintendent Weaver as It’s not a book ban because “These materials are still going to be available at many public libraries, on Amazon”) or misunderstanding the way the course registration process works in multiple ways:

1. Students have already registered for courses, and districts have already had to determine whether they could offer those courses. This might have happened as early as the beginning of the Spring semester.

2. In fact, students may have been planning their schedule next year around taking AP African American Studies for course credit. They may be enrolled in magnet or special-focus “school within a school” programs that planned to require a course that would be satisfied by this credit.

3. Offering a course as an AP course or an Honors course is not a distinction without a difference. According to the Department’s own guidelines, AP courses are in a group of courses which can count for an additional GPA point (on a 5.0) scale, while Honors courses can’t.

   

   Screenshot from the “South Carolina Uniform Grading Policy”. You can always count on official Department guidance for extra Kafkaesqueness.

In any case, there are several things “preventing Districts from doing so,” including the fact that the Department waited until after graduation to make this statement, when most district staff are either off for the summer or on their way to being off, and the fact that AP students and parents will likely balk at taking an AP course that the state has defined as explicitly not an AP course.

Passage from The Castle:

“Well then,” said K., “the only possible conclusion is that everything is very unclear and insoluble except for my being thrown out.”

“Who would dare to throw you out, Surveyor,” said the chairman, “it’s precisely the lack of clarity in the preliminary questions that guarantees you the most courteous treatment, only it seems that you are too sensitive. Nobody is keeping you here, but that still doesn’t mean you’re being thrown out” (73).

Final paragraph from the Department statement:

The SCDE maintains its unwavering commitment to teaching the factual historical experience of African Americans to our students. We will continue to proactively seek ways to highlight the innumerable contributions black South Carolinians have made to our state, our nation, and the world through special projects like the annual South Carolina African American History Calendar and celebration, Superintendent Weaver’s student essay contest to commemorate the 60th anniversary of Dr. King’s iconic “I Have a Dream Speech,” and others.

Here’s the inevitable “we have plenty of Black friends, so we can’t be racist” part, and it’s so lazy that it is probably the only element that makes me truly angry. There’s a lot to parse, including the implication— never justified with facts or even a rationale— that AP African American Studies might not include “the factual historical experience of African Americans”.

Then there’s the important practical question of just who gets to decide what constitutes the “factual experience of African Americans”. (Can we learn, for example, about the very long history of explicitly racist policies carried out by Superintendent Weaver’s alma mater, Bob Jones University, including a ban on “interracial dating” that continued into Weaver’s own time there and by some accounts made it essentially an expellable offense for a Black student to sit in the same room with a White student of a different gender?)

But mostly, there’s the same old lazy reference to King’s “I Have a Dream Speech” (see: The 1776 Project Report for a glaring example that should have put this tired trope to rest) that suggests it’s the only part of the Civil Rights story any of us are allowed to discuss without creating the kind of “controversy” that will result in the state stepping in to effectively ban a course. (Please, would-be book banners and culture warriors, at least read “Letter From Birmingham Jail.”)

South Carolina is a state with a majority non-white public school student population. It is the state that started the Civil War, arguing explicitly that it did so to preserve the institution of slavery. It is a state in which not only is the history of African Americans, their struggles and triumphs, and the ugly story of Jim Crow, are not only important parts of our past, but important parts of our present.

And on a personal level, it strikes deeply that I live in a state where SC House Freedom Caucus Chair Adam Morgan can lecture my AP Seminar class about what amounts to an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory (“cultural Marxism”), but those same students can’t be trusted when they say they go something out of AP African American studies. (The same kids who sat in that room with him as he opined about the problematic philosophies of Marcuse and the “Frankfurt School” were in the first pilot of the course in South Carolina.)

What, if anything, can we do?

Certainly, we can try to elect better public officials, but in the more immediate future, I encourage South Carolinians to call or email the Department and ask for greater transparency on the decision-making here. I have not been impressed with the ability of Weaver’s team to prepare for inevitable controversy— for example, they seemed totally taken aback by the response to their book banning regulations this year— but if they do have a thought-out rationale for banning a course they telegraphed they would ban as far back as February 2023, they should offer it.

I also encourage attending the public State Board of Education meeting next Tuesday, contacting your state officials about the school censorship bill, and about Weaver’s pending Board of Education regulation which, to add a little more Kafka icing on the Kafka cake, is likely to take effect literally by accident, unless legislators move quickly to fix their own error.

View from Prague Castle, near Kafka’s home, 2017. (Photo by the author.)

I’m a former English teacher with a lot of side hustles. I am only able to continue this newsletter (and do interviews during the day, and buy books, and conduct research, and subscribe to other news sources) because of subscribers and folks who donate. If that’s you, thank you! If not, please consider helping pay for this work.

1. All quotes from Kafka, Franz. The Castle. Trans. Mark Harman. New York: Schocken, 1998.

2. The statement is attributed to Matthew Ferguson, former executive director of the SC Oversight Committee, which was once chaired by Weaver. For more of his thoughts on how teachers think and how education works, check out this mid-pandemic article where he opined that teachers don’t understand science. My point is that SC officials and other know-it-alls seem to have a go-to response to teacher (and parent concerns): you’re only upset because you don’t know what you’re talking about.

3. There isn’t really time or space here to get into my complex feelings about the College Board, as both a long-time critic and a long-time AP teacher and grader who does see a lot of value in parts of the courses. As I mentioned to the reporter yesterday, I think there is a case to be made that we have handed over too much power to a private “nonprofit” over making curricular decisions. But if that’s the case, picking on only the African American Studies course doesn’t address the issue.