Earlier this month, the College Board released the final framework for its new AP African American studies course. After years of insisting that critical race theory isn’t taught in public schools, the Left reacted in horror to the news that, after high-profile criticism from Gov. Ron DeSantis’s Florida, the course would no longer teach critical race theory.

The College Board could have just taken its lump. Instead, it insisted against all appearances that Florida had nothing to do with its revisions, swore that all the academic ideologues it name-checked in earlier drafts would still be made available and encouraged, and picked a very shrill fight with the state of Florida. Now, it looks like a disingenuous, partisan organization riding for a further fall.

No one objected to the first three-quarters of the original curricular framework. The problem was that the last quarter assigned a laundry list of far-left academic ideologues without any counterbalance. Florida flagged ideological concerns. The College Board removed the ideologues. Problem solved. Or so it seemed. Few believed College Board CEO David Coleman when he insisted that Florida had not influenced the revision process. But Florida took note when he told NPR that "sources that people were worried are gone are actually going to be magnified and made more available than ever," in supplemental materials.

The Florida Department of Education sent a letter asking for clarification and restated the history of its correspondence with the College Board, providing strong suggestive evidence that it had influenced the revisions. At 8 o’clock on Saturday night, the College Board clapped back by releasing an extremely shrill letter attacking the Florida Department of Education for "misinformation." It denied having "negotiated about the contents of the course with Florida or any other state," or receiving "any requests, suggestions, or feedback," even as it explained the requests and feedback it received from Florida. Florida had, for example, requested an explanation of how the course would not violate its anti-CRT law, inquired as to whether its treatment of the Black Panthers would be strictly historical or push their ideology, and pressed for an explanation on how the College Board defined "intersectionality."

The College Board then removed the week’s lesson on "intersectionality." This could not have been, as it said, in response to student feedback. After all, that part of the course had not yet been taught. But litigation aside, the core issue is that College Board has admitted that its revisions were cosmetic, that supplementary materials would continue to present the one-sided vision of far-left academic activists, and in the process it sided with those scholar-activists in a fashion more consistent with a partisan advocacy organization than a disinterested scholarly association.

This is not the last chapter in this saga. Whereas Florida and other red states could have accepted the revised standards on their face, that now seems all but impossible given Coleman’s admission that the revision was an exercise in Trojan Horse reconstruction.

The strange timing of the College Board’s snide missive suggests it may have been directly responsive to a Friday call from the National Black Justice League for Coleman’s resignation. While the Right doesn’t have a robust NGO complex in education, it does have the House of Representatives. The Education and Workforce Committee should call Coleman to testify and press him on how, exactly, stacking course resources predominantly with readings from critical race theorists and other far-left ideologues constitutes education rather than indoctrination. It’s hard to see how that would go well for Coleman. But it would be quite educational for American parents.

Beyond merely declining to offer AP African American studies, DeSantis also has a nuclear option at his disposal. Florida universities currently accept both the College Board’s SAT and its competitor, the ACT. It wouldn’t take more than the stroke of a legislative pen for Florida’s universities to go ACT-only. Florida could also put out a request for proposals for other firms to offer content-specific tests for college credit. Other red states could follow suit on both fronts.

It would perhaps be sad to see America’s political balkanization extend to standardized tests. But the College Board knew full well that it was playing with political fire. And it played badly. When formerly disinterested institutions decide to transform themselves into partisan actors, a political response is necessary and proper.

Max Eden is a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.