Judging from the sheer amount of whining going on later in this Newsweek article, this decision by The College Board (the company that does the AP tests) sounds like a reasonably big deal: “The company behind Advanced Placement courses for U.S. high school students will release a revision to the standards for AP U.S. history on Thursday morning, after significant pushback from conservatives who claimed the redesigned course framework, released last year, painted American history in too negative a light.” All in all, the people who do the AP tests probably shouldn’t have picked this particular decade to emphasize collective national guilt over heroic American historical figures and treat ‘American exceptionalism’ as an unfortunate social disease, given that the people who would be most upset about it are already up in arms over Common Core. You end up with pushback from the people who dislike your take on American history, and some of the aforementioned Common Core protesters (the ones who can connect the dots). Continue reading AP US History back to admitting that America is, in fact, exceptional.