This past summer, the College Board released another updated version of their AP United States History curriculum. This is the second consecutive year of changes to the framework, which underwent a huge makeover before the start of the last school year.

In August of 2014, the College Board, a non-profit organization which outlines national AP curriculum and administers AP exams, released a new version of the AP United States History curriculum. This new curriculum, which many critics called antithetical to American patriotism, sparked conversations nationwide. Many states, including Georgia, Texas, Oklahoma, and Colorado, opposed the changes.

Last September, Ben Carson, a pediatric neurosurgeon who is now running for president, said that “most people” who take this course would be “ready to sign up for ISIS.”

Immediately following the release of this new framework, the Republican National Committee issued a resolution that described the curriculum as “biased and inaccurate,” and called upon Congress to withhold federal funding from the College Board.

The College Board then released an official statement in mid September responding to this legislation, in which they declared that they would not retract the curriculum.

This was followed by a flood of criticism from the aforementioned states. On Wednesday, January 28, 2015, Senate Resolution 80, which mirrored the resolution from the Republican National Committee, was first read to the Georgia Senate. It called for the withdrawal of the new curriculum by the beginning of the 2015-2016 school year and proposed replacing it with either the previous model or another more appropriate course. The resolution claimed that if no revisions were made, the State Board of Education and the Georgia Department of Education would be forced to stop funding any activities, textbooks, or other materials for AP U.S. History and would push for the reduction or elimination of federal funding for the College Board.

The College Board responded, stating that the complaints about the framework “show a blatant disregard for the facts.” Members of the Advanced Placement United States History Curriculum Development and Assessment Committee released an open letter stating that the critiques on the 2014-2015 framework were a result of people misinterpreting the document. The new curriculum’s purpose, they stated, was to serve as an outline or guideline for teachers to interpret, and not as a rigid or inflexible curriculum as many saw it.

Students at Grady High School who took AP U.S. History during the 2014-2015 school year knew about the controversy surrounding their curriculum and didn’t agree with the critics. Senior Ally Fenn said that she knew there was a lot of hype about the changes but she didn’t find a problem with the curriculum.

“Mr. Pope explained the changes to our class, and didn’t treat it like a whole new makeover to the curriculum,” Fenn said. “He said he would continue to teach like he always had, and that’s what it seemed like he did.”

Roderick Pope, the AP U.S. History teacher, approved of the changes to the 2014-2015 curriculum. He said that the way the test was changed aligned with how he had always taught the class, which he believes is why his AP test scores went up so much.

“It just hit me in class the other day when I was going through the historical thinking skills…they’re trying to get the kids to think like historians,” Pope said.

Despite their earlier hesitance to change the curriculum, on July 30, 2015, the College Board released an updated version of the AP U.S. History course and exam description which, according to their website, “includes improvement to the language and structure of the course.”  They stated that after gathering feedback from people all across the country, including teachers, students, historians, and policymakers, they adjusted the framework accordingly. The modifications included streamlining the number of learning objectives from 50 to 19 and explicitly mentioning key individuals and documents (such as Martin Luther King Jr. and the Federalist papers). They also added AP U.S. History Instructional Approaches, which provide teachers with recommendations and examples for how to use the framework practically in the classroom, as well as an emphasis on “American Exceptionalism”, the concept that the United States is a free country based on liberty and democratic ideals. A College Board official stated that American Exceptionalism wasn’t on the 2014-2015 framework because they had “previously assumed it wasn’t something they needed to spell out as part of what would be taught in an American history course.”

“It’s very unusual for any educational organization to respond to serious criticism by actually listening to it. The usual response is to raise the drawbridge,” independent historian, Jeremy Stern, said. Stern was hired by the College Board as a consultant on the revisions.

Pope doesn’t see much of a difference between those curriculum changes and the changes to the 2015-2016 curriculum.

“[All the College Board did was] go back in and put the yankee doodle dandee back in the test to satisfy the people who felt that it was going to become an anti-American class,” Pope said.