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 belie…