This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
This is super weird. The College Board appears to be flat-out grandstanding; their interpretation of the Florida law, even assuming they are not being disingenuous for purely culture war reasons, is in absolutely no way binding on Florida residents. They're not a court, or a legislature. They are, if anything, arguably engaged in the unauthorized practice of law by giving legal advice to schoolteachers and administrators.
But then, apparently, some number of school districts have chosen to believe the College Board (or pretend to believe the College Board) over and above the advice of the Florida Department of Education. This is mind-boggling, like telling the President of the U.S. to fuck off because Google told you what the law really is. The district statement linked in the article says:
But the College Board is a private company that assigns AP credit entirely on the basis of a single exam. Eligibility to take the exam is not limited to students enrolled in "approved" AP classes! According to the registration page, "If you’re homeschooled or you go to a school that doesn’t administer AP Exams, you’ll need to arrange to take exams at a local school that does administer them." So long as some private school in Florida is approved by the College Board to administer the AP Psychology exam, there's nothing stopping students from pursuing that credit even if the College Board makes good on its threat, which it seems unlikely to do. And as I understand it, no AP class can cover all possible material anyway; the AP teachers I know are constantly working to guess what items will appear on the exam in which years, so as to better focus their lesson planning.
Basically, someone on the College Board appears to have decided to grandstand, and a whole bunch of gullible educators are now being used as props in an institutional campaign against Ron DeSantis, who doesn't even appear well-positioned to get the nomination at this point. I would be very interested in thoughts on how the College Board can be punished for this defection from the standard that educational advantages should not be denied to children based solely on the political identity of their state's governor.
EDIT:
Here is the relevant language from the letter the Florida people sent to the College Board in May:
So a government body says to a private company "hey, you're an important participant in our state's education program, but our new state law may have some influence on how that continues in the future. Can we get you to jump through some hoops so we can keep doing business with you?" And the private company responds, "[we] will not modify our courses."
It's really important to notice that wasn't the question! The letter raised the possibility of modification, but did not actually request it; what it requested was an audit ensuring compliance with state law, which is a perfectly normal request when dealing with private parties participating in public education. If I were running the College Board, my immediate response would be "Just conducted a content audit; seems to me that all the material in our course is age-appropriate for 9-12 graders. You might consider adding a permission/informed consent slip for parents to sign just in case, throw in some language about them agreeing that the material is age appropriate. Pleasure doing business!"
So yeah, this does look like it was a pretty one-sided attack from the College Board.
I’m not sure what to think about the inciting event.
There’s also a little context I’d missed. When Florida attacked AP African-American History,
This suggests that Florida has a prior history of pushing curriculum changes—and running premature victory laps—without reaching an agreement. In that light, Florida’s May letter was probably viewed as the start of another six-month squabble. The College Board could just be skipping ahead in the script.
Of course, Florida denied that. More details here claim that the College Board was being dishonest, and that FBOE was acting on leaked information.
Frustratingly, I can’t find the original February 7 letter.I would tend to agree that CB would have been better served by insisting they were already compliant. It probably wouldn’t have placated Florida. So I haven’t ruled out the possibility that this saved them some time.
Edit: letter is here.
So…they tried it. Florida said they were full of shit, various reviews were triggered, and they still had no agreement by February.
Come June, and Florida sends a similar warning about a different course. College Board decides to skip the pleasantries. And here we are.
It's barely-noticeably linked at the bottom of your second link.
But the very first point in its "recap" of communications is:
So this is a discussion that had been happening, apparently, for quite some time, with many emails to go through, and which the College Board decided to "take public" as, apparently, a negotiating tactic.
I am, for a variety of personal and professional reasons, not a fan of detached administrative interference in classroom content. But I am certainly more open to the regulation of public education by politically accountable figures, than by unaccountable NGOs like the College Board. It is apparently a somewhat recurring theme with the DeSantis administration that Florida lawmakers are not going to be pushed around by corporate-sponsored social agendas. I can understand why the College Board would prefer to not have its nationwide content influenced by the vagaries of one state's lawmaking. I can understand why Florida lawmakers would prefer not to have 25% of its annual expenditures going to teaching content over which it has no control.
But all of that only applies to the African-American Studies dispute. The psychology dispute seems more like an own goal by the College Board. There was nothing stopping them from just saying "yeah this all looks age-appropriate to us, please speak up if you disagree."
More options
Context Copy link
Important to note that classes start in about 25 calendar days, so it is important to the Florida schools (the College Board's clients) to figure out whether to offer the class now, rather than in December.
This is a minor point, but a quick Google search suggests that Jacksonville and Miami schools start next week, and Tallahassee, Tampa, and Orlando schools actually start tomorrow.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Quite a number of these sorts of CW issues, especially in Florida recently, seem to take the form of partisans from one side intentionally taking uncharitable readings of (admittedly often vague) laws enacted by the other side's lawmakers.
Legislature bans sexual content in elementary school libraries? Better make sure we clear out the most milquetoast books fitting that description and shout about how they're banning books. They aren't necessarily wrong about how the content limits are to be enforced (doubly so since they'd be the ones to blame if the content was found objectionable), but at the same time I think most reasonable people would agree that the collected works of Hugo finalist Chuck Tingle aren't appropriate for elementary school libraries.
Unfortunately I'm not aware of a better answer than more explicitly (heh) codifying exactly what is and is not allowed. But at the same time there is a reason for the "I know it when I see it" standard: it's not clear that sharp lines can be drawn at all.
This is the good old malicious compliance technique. You want to cut our budgets? We will find the program working with most sympathetic, most photogenic and most poor orphans and start cuts there, while crying "oh why you hate orphans so much!". You want to regulate our content? We find the most innocent content and maliciously misunderstand the rules to ban it, then go and complain to the local press. You want to inspect our programs? We'll ask you to sign off on every typo fix in every booklet, and then complain you're blocking us from fixing typoes because you hate education and want the students to be illiterate. And so on. It's a war, after all, even if just a culture war.
More options
Context Copy link
This is a particularly astute comparison given that extant "obscenity" laws are only constitutional (if at all) based on a "community standards" approach. I have a vague memory of a case where someone (in Utah maybe?) was charged with obscenity and beat the charge by showing evidence that people in the community watched more porn than they cared to publicly admit. Post-Ashcroft, obscenity laws are what remain to regulate stuff like computer-generated or hand-drawn pornography that people wish was illegal, but is in many contexts protected by the First Amendment.
The alternative to explicitly codifying everything down to the letter, is to have a homogeneous community culture (or, perhaps, to have such a radically heterogeneous culture that no single group's values ever meaningfully interfere with the others). What we have in the U.S. today is, I think, increasingly just two cultures, violently competing for the upper hand. Each of these cultures is cheerfully authoritarian, with little inclination toward compromise (and, maybe, less such inclination with each passing day). Without recognizable "community standards" to govern these things, indeed with substantial numbers of people being directly contrarian about the very existence of community standards, I'm not sure that even explicit codification will suffice as a solution.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link