Florida’s idiotic and facially unconstitutional “Don’t Say Gay” laws have cancel-cultured Advanced Placement Psychology classes for high schools in the state because the course covers sexual orientation and gender identity, which literally dare not say their names in any classroom. The College Board, which provides the classes, announced Thursday that the Florida Department of Education had “effectively banned AP Psychology in the state” by telling school superintendents that the topics were verboten. The issue has been percolating since June, and the College Board won’t budge, because for fuckssake gay and trans people are real and have psyches, you rightwing dipshits.
The College Board said the state would allow the class “only if it excludes any mention of these essential topics.” That would water down the class, so nah, the College Board instead advised Florida school districts “not to offer AP Psychology until Florida reverses their decision and allows parents and students to choose to take the full course.”
[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 statement added that the American Psychology Association, the top professional organization in the head-shrinking field, made clear in June that if a course excludes the topics, then it would violate their guidelines too, and wouldn’t qualify for college credit either.
The Orlando Sentinel reports that the announcement has high schools and students around Florida scrambling to rearrange their schedules, with the school year set to begin August 10. Around 28,000 high school students in Florida took AP Psych last year before the “Don’t Say Gay” law was expanded this spring to cover all grades of school.
Spokespeople for the school districts in Orange County and Lake County confirmed that the AP classes had been axed and that they were looking for options to offer students college-level psych courses that won’t run afoul of the law, which, oops, would actually make them not really college level anymore because grownups who aren’t running for president study all aspects of human psychology, even the parts that rightwing authoritarians don’t consider acceptable.
Not surprisingly, state officials snottily insisted that the College Board was lying, and that a little censorship never hurt any academic discipline.
Cassie Palelis, an education department spokeswoman, said other “advanced course providers,” such as the International Baccalaureate program, had “no issue” with offering a college-level psychology course in Florida, and that the College Board should do the same.
“The Department didn’t ‘ban’ the course,” Palelis said in an email. “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 College Board’s statement noted that it was sorry, but it can’t do that, Dave.
This element of the framework is not new: gender and sexual orientation have been part of AP Psychology since the course launched 30 years ago. 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.”
As an alternative to the AP Psychology classes, we assume Florida officials are looking into offering videos from PragerU, as well as episodes of the old “Bob Newhart Show,” like the one where Mr. Carlin has a high school reunion coming up and asks Bob’s wife Emily to pretend to be his wife, so people won’t think he’s a failure, and hijinks ensue.
Episodes of the outstanding Comedy Central cartoon series “Dr Katz, Licensed Psychologist,” however, would probably be illegal because they just mention gay people like they’re human beings.
[Orlando Sentinel / College Board / Image generated by DreamStudio AI]
Yr Wonkette is funded entirely by reader donations. If you can, please subscribe, or if you prefer, you can make a one-time donation. How do you feel about making a one-time donation? I see our hour is about up.
Independent study on the paranoid psychological fixations of homophobes will also be banned, despite the obvious crying need for further study.
Next up for red states is banning the teaching of calculus because it covers integration!!