Bright high schoolers seeking a jumpstart on college credits are instead getting lectures on progressive activism courtesy of an enormous, unaccountable taxpayer-funded monopoly called the College Board. Masquerading as a nonprofit and professing its commitment to academic rigor and political neutrality via Advanced Placement (AP) courses, this billion-dollar organization uses its immense power over the curriculum to embrace race-based ideologies while censoring history, according to a new Goldwater Institute report.
To make matters worse, state laws prop up the AP program’s dominance with direct subsidies, tax credits, and other financial assistance, making it exceedingly difficult for superior competitors to emerge, Goldwater’s new report finds. And importantly, despite the preferential treatment the AP program receives in state law, states retain almost no authority over the academic integrity of its exams. The College Board completely controls the AP curriculum and exams, insulating the program from reform by state legislatures and state education agencies.
So it is perhaps no surprise that states like Florida have begun exploring opportunities for expanded student opportunity outside the AP program.
The report finds:
- Although classified as a nonprofit, the College Board is a gigantic corporation that in 2022 reported over $1 billion in revenue and paid its CEO a compensation package of over $2 million—nearly 30 times the median high school teacher’s salary.
- While unelected and unaccountable to state lawmakers, the College Board’s AP program acts as a taxpayer-funded monopoly that dictates the curriculum for millions of American schoolchildren—even those who don’t take AP courses and exams—while superseding the requirements of state standards.
- The chairman of the College Board’s governing board has declared “anti-racism” as his “driving ethos,” declared as a district superintendent that all employees “must share” the goals of an “equity lens,” and oversaw the College Board issuing a letter of opposition to the Supreme Court’s decision to end race-based discrimination in college admissions.
- The College Board’s AP course frameworks —most notably AP U.S. History and AP African American Studies—have embraced ideologically driven, leftist views of their subjects while minimizing the emphasis on more traditional aspects of history.
- Despite claims of institutional neutrality, the College Board now uses “Course Audits” to censor and reject schools’ use of acclaimed anchor texts such as Wilfred McClay’s Land of Hope in U.S. History.
- State legislatures are actively propping up the AP program’s dominance over what students are taught: 18 states have laws that require public colleges to accept passing AP exam scores for college credit.
- More than half of states—26—provide financial support for the College Board via a subsidy, tax credit, or other financial assistance for AP exam fees.
The report recommends commonsense reforms that will end the favoritism toward the AP program and allow superior alternatives to its politicized courses to emerge. These provisions include:
- Adopting a policy of neutrality and/or innovation in establishing new inter-state alternative college-level course examination programs for students to access.
- Guaranteeing that funds allocated via state programs and education savings accounts (ESAs) may be used for any college-level entrance exam fee, not just AP exams.
- Eliminating AP course syllabus secrecy and instead requiring transparency of public school syllabi, which are currently demanded of schools by the College Board and “audited” by the organization for acceptability.
- Across the country, states are empowering parents to take control of their children’s education by promoting school choice. Now, states should adopt similar policies for college-level courses and exams by ending the government-endorsed monopoly of the AP program in this sector. These reforms will combat the ideologically slanted AP program and restore educational rigor.
You can read the full policy report here.
Timothy K. Minella is a Senior Fellow at the Goldwater Institute’s Van Sittert Center for Constitutional Advocacy.
