Centrists and conservatives should go to battle against the College Board, because the purveyor of Advanced Placement courses and SAT exams has effectively declared war on us.

The College Board’s monopoly must be broken.

As Stanley Kurtz reported in a Feb. 13 piece in the National Review, the College Board last week issued a remarkably snide statement attacking the state of Florida for its refusal so far to accept a new AP course in African American Studies. Florida had objected to proposed course content that is overwhelmingly Marxist and favorable to racial essentialism and radical black separatism . The College Board then appeared to back off at least a little , moving to course content that, at least on the surface, was less overtly radical.

Then, however, the Left erupted against the College Board’s tentative nod to centrism and to right reason, which led the College Board to start talking tough against Florida. The statement accused Florida officials of “a PR stunt” and said, “We have made the mistake of treating FDOE with the courtesy we always accord to an education agency, but they have instead exploited this courtesy for their political agenda.”

And so on. The entire tone is exactly what one would expect from a supposedly apolitical organization that has been unduly politicized and is now determined to pursue its agenda as its mask slips. This is the second time the College Board has gone down this road. A national backlash against its leftist 2014 revisions to the AP U.S. History course caused it to retreat somewhat from more obvious leftist propaganda while still maintaining an underlying bias against bedrock American principles such as cultural assimilation of new arrivals.

A look at the College Board’s website and key personnel shows all the typical “progressive” biases of modern academia, with an obsession for “equity” — which, of course, in leftist parlance today means an ideological insistence on engineering equal outcomes, not opportunities, across all “identity” or “affinity” groups.

Whatever one thinks of the AP courses and tests — or, for that matter, of colleges using or refusing to use the SAT as part of their admissions processes — the reality is that they are the only game in town. The College Board currently presents parents and policymakers with an all-or-nothing choice.

As Forbes reported in 2020, the College Board essentially is a “ billion-dollar testing monopoly ." While the numbers probably have shifted a little since then, the magazine reported that the College Board, which is (only) technically a nonprofit organization, has “$100 million in untaxed surplus. It has $400 million invested with hedge funds and private equity, and its chief executive, McKinsey-trained David Coleman, pulls down compensation of almost $2 million a year.”

For years, Kurtz’s National Review coverage of these issues has contained sentences, usually buried in the bowels of the longer articles, suggesting the need for “an alternative college-placement testing service that would restore curricular choice to states and local school districts.” Kurtz has a great point, although creating a competitor for the monopoly would be far easier said than done.

He is right about the first necessary step, however: “If other red states reject [the AP African American Studies] course, the College Board’s status as a de facto unelected national school board may begin to give way.”

This is why the battle led by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is so important. It is why other state and local officials across the land should follow suit. The College Board has become just another left-wing indoctrination outfit. Policymakers should abandon it, and good educators should start creating less ideological options.