Oak Park & River Forest High School Superintendent Greg Johnson announced Thursday OPRF will adopt in 2023/2024 an AP African American Studies curriculum just released by the College Board.
The news came at the district 200 board meeting Jan. 26, 2023.
The advanced placement curriculum, just released by the College Board, “will examine the breath of African American experiences through the direct encounters with rich and various sources drawn from the fields of literature, the arts and humanities, political science, geography, science, and more”, according to Johnson.
The College Board’s course framework describes four units:
1: Origins of the African Diaspora
2: Freedom, Enslavement, and Resistance
3: The Practice of Freedom
4: Movements and Debates
Unit 4 provides instruction on Black Queer Studies, Movements for Black Lives Matter, and The Reparations Movement. This is content cited by the Florida Education Department as basis to reject the curriculum without revision, according to NBC News.
Sixty High Schools, of roughly 23,600 public high schools nationally, chose to pilot the new AP curriculum.
Johnson indicated he believes hundreds will implement African American studies in year two and added, saying “we’re glad to be a part of it.”
In fall 2023 the school is set to introduce “Transformative Education Professional Development & Grading” which critics say amounts to weighting a course’s grade to account for ethnic characteristics rather than academic performance.
“Traditional grading practices perpetuate inequities and intensify the opportunity gap,” reads a slide in the PowerPoint deck outlining its rationale and goals.
It calls for what OPRF leaders describe as “competency-based grading, eliminating zeros from the grade book…encouraging and rewarding growth over time.”
Teachers are given guidelines on how to evaluate students’ “growth” while taking the political philosophies into consideration.
“Teachers and administrators at OPRFHS will continue the process necessary to make grading improvements that reflect our core beliefs,” the plan states, promising to “consistently integrate equitable assessment and grading practices into all academic and elective courses.”
Oak Park & River Forest High School has been slipping in comparison to peers nationwide.
Of OPRF sophomores who took the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) 38% failed, according to the Illinois State Board of Education. Black students had an OPRF failure rate of 77%, Hispanic students of 49%, Asian students of 27% and white students of 25%.
