Florida bans AP psych, pointing to lessons on gender, sexuality

The College Board announced Thursday that Florida has banned Advanced Placement (AP) Psychology from its schools over lessons pertaining to gender identity and sexual orientation. 

The course was nixed after Florida passed a law earlier this year stating sexual orientation and gender identity could not be taught in K-12 schools. 

The AP Psychology curriculum asks students to “describe how sex and gender influence socialization and other aspects of development,” which the College Board noted has been in the class for 30 years. 

Florida asked the College Board to go over any classes it offers and omit lessons that conflict with its new law, but the company has refused.

“We have heard from teachers across Florida who are heartbroken that they are being forced to drop AP and instead teach alternatives that have been deemed legal because the courses exclude these topics,” the company said in its statement. 

The Florida Department of Education fired back at the College Board, accusing them of messing with their students’ education right before school begins. 

“Just one week before school starts, the College Board is attempting to force school districts to prevent students from taking the AP Psychology Course,” the department said. 

“The Department didn’t ‘ban’ the course. The course remains listed in Florida’s Course Code Directory for the 2023-24 school year. We encourage the College Board to stop playing games with Florida students and continue to offer the course and allow teachers to operate accordingly,” the department added. 

The College Board said Florida school districts were told they could teach AP Psychology if it excluded the lessons on sexual orientation and gender identity, but the company says it would no longer give credit for the course.

“As we shared in June, we cannot modify AP Psychology in response to regulations that would censor college-level standards for credit, placement, and career readiness. Our policy remains unchanged. Any course that censors required course content cannot be labeled ‘AP’ or ‘Advanced Placement,’ and the ‘AP Psychology’ designation cannot be utilized on student transcripts,” the College Board said. 

This is the latest escalation in the fight between College Board and Florida, which began back in January when Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) attacked the AP African American Studies course, which has since been rejected by the state.

The state said the AP African American Studies course lacked “educational value” and criticized lessons inside the class that taught about reparations and Black queer studies and used authors associated with critical race theory. 

“The College Board was the one that in a Black studies course, put queer theory in. Not us,” DeSantis previously said. “They were the ones that put in intersectionality, other types of neo-Marxism into the proposed syllabus, and this was the proposed course. So our Department of Education looked at that and said, ‘In Florida, we do education, not indoctrination,’ and so that runs afoul of our standards.”

DeSantis has laid much of his reputation in Florida on education issues, targeting K-12 schools and colleges for curricula and policies he says amount to “indoctrination.”

Along with banning certain topics in K-12 schools, public universities in Florida are also not allowed to teach “theories that systemic racism, sexism, oppression, and privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States and were created to maintain social, political and economic inequities” in their general education courses.

—Updated at 9:48 a.m. on Aug. 4.