Well, it took me a while, but I finally tracked down AP United States History: Course and Exam Description Including the Curriculum Framework Effective Fall 2014, the new standards according to which high-school students hoping to receive "advanced placement" credit when they attend university will be tested. I’ve read thousands of words about the new standards these last few weeks—denunciations, defenses, counter-denunciations, etc., etc., ad taedium—but almost nothing that quoted the standards themselves.*
Anyway, ugh. This PDF is 134 pages long, four times the length of the document it replaces. It is one of the most turgid, boring things I have ever read. Where earlier versions gave a short list of themes ("Culture," "Religion"), an outline of American history ("The French and Indian War," "Compromise of 1877"), and a few sample questions for students taking the AP history exam, we now have a list of "Key Concepts." On every page it is made clear that these concepts, which have wonderfully vivid names (ID, WXT, PEO, POL, WOL, etc.) are what teachers are being asked to impart. Names, dates, facts, documents—the ordinary material of history—are merely instrumental. This sort of question is out the window:
Under the Articles of Confederation the United States central government had no power to
(a) levy taxes
(b) make treaties
(c) declare war
(d) request troops from states
(e) amend the Articles
Instead, students will now be asked to "Analyze how emerging conceptions of national identity and democratic ideals shaped value systems, gender roles, and cultural movements in the late 18th century and the 19th century". Thank god those charged with teaching these "concepts" and "issues" will "have flexibility to use examples"!
The most generous interpretation of the new standards is that they are hopelessly naive, presuming that students who do not yet know anything about history might themselves write it—the same way that middle-school English teachers pretend that students who have not heard of iambic pentameter can and should be writing verse of their own rather than memorizing poems by rote. Really, though, the problem here is with the AP system itself. AP courses are premised on a vulgar, credentialist view of education, one in which certain discrete "skills"—e.g., critical thinking—are identified, acquired, and traded as if they were hard currency in exchange for college credits. When these skills are not nebulous, they are inconsequential: the "nuance" prized by the College Board, for example, sounds suspiciously like the ability to say "On the one hand, x; on the other hand, not x."
But who am I to stand in the way of History? At least graduates of these courses will be exquisitely nuanced critical thinkers, capable of analyzing key concepts and questions of gender, race, and class. Too bad they'll also be utterly ignorant.
*One exception is the wonderful open letter to the College Board, the non-profit corporation that issues the standards, signed by Robert P. George, Harvey Mansfield, Patrick Deneen, Robert Merry, and Wilfred McClay among others: the signatories criticize the new standards for their emphasis on "abstractions" at the expense of "acquisition of extensive factual knowledge" and for "scrub[bing] away all traces of what used to be the chief glory of historical writing—vivid and compelling narrative—and reduc[ing] history to an bloodless interplay of abstract and impersonal forces."