The AHA expresses concern about the recently announced Florida Advanced Courses and Tests (FACT) US History course framework, which “imposes an overt ideological agenda on Florida public school students who seek to earn college credit before enrolling in higher education.” As a state-designed alternative to the Advanced Placement course in US History, the FACT framework has been justified by Florida officials with “inflammatory claims of widespread political indoctrination in classrooms that are unsupported by the broader reality of history education in Florida and across the United States,” resulting in a “partial, distorted, and educationally unsound account of our nation’s history” that “repeatedly presents contested ideological interpretations that are far outside of mainstream consensus as settled historical fact.”
To date, 9 organizations have signed on to this statement.
Approved by AHA Council, May 2026
The Florida Advanced Courses and Tests (FACT) US History course framework, published on May 4, 2026, imposes an overt ideological agenda on Florida public school students who seek to earn college credit before enrolling in higher education. By privileging political talking points over sound scholarship, the framework promotes outdated pedagogy and inaccurate history unworthy of Florida’s public schools.
Florida students and families care deeply about college access and affordability, as well as the quality of history instruction in public schools. This new course, however, emerges from a political project that prioritizes ideological objectives over educational ones. Created under House Bill 1537 (2023), the FACT initiative establishes state-designed alternatives to Advanced Placement courses. State officials have justified this effort, and particularly the new FACT US History course to be piloted in Fall 2026, with inflammatory claims of widespread political indoctrination in classrooms that are unsupported by the broader reality of history education in Florida and across the United States.
As is often the case when policymakers approach history education as a political project, the content and framing of this new course add up to a partial, distorted, and educationally unsound account of our nation’s history. Units focused on the colonial period, for instance, marginalize Native Americans (falsely dismissed as being “few in number”), blur critical distinctions between slavery and other labor systems, and erase the vital work of Black men and women in challenging racialized chattel slavery. The framework also omits or downplays pivotal events commonly taught in college-level US history courses, including Bacon’s Rebellion, King Philip’s War, the Pueblo Revolt, and Dunmore’s Proclamation, while elevating interpretive frameworks, such as “salutary neglect” and the failure of Reconstruction in 1877, that no longer carry significant weight in current scholarship. In lessons on the origins of our political system, the course framework repeatedly interprets founding documents through Biblical passages that no founder would have intended to serve as a model for the United States government.
Most alarmingly, the framework repeatedly presents contested ideological interpretations that are far outside of mainstream consensus as settled historical fact. The Florida State Department of Education would be hard pressed to find professional historians who agree with its backwards characterization of the Crusades as a defensive response to “Islamic military aggression,” the inflammatory dismissal of the Haitian Revolution as merely a “race war,” or the plainly false claim that the phrase “all men are created equal” reflected a broad consensus view among the founders that “no man had the right to enslave another against his consent.” Despite the tendentiousness of many such claims, “students will be required to memorize” material presented as “Key Facts” in order to complete the “final course exam.”
Political indoctrination through rote memorization will not provide a meaningful alternative to college history instruction. The FACT US History curriculum never even attempts to reach the benchmarks for undergraduate student learning that provide the basis for AP US history. The learning standards provided for each topic in the Florida curriculum focus almost exclusively on basic recall or selecting between two simple interpretations. College history courses, in contrast, prepare students to grapple with the kinds of open-ended questions they are far likelier to encounter in their careers after graduation. In history—as in real life—questions are rarely as simple as a choice between two extremes.
At its best, history education can cultivate analytical skills and habits of mind necessary for both understanding and navigating differences of perspective. Research conducted for the AHA’s American Lesson Plan (2024) found that history teachers, regardless of the party in power where they teach, are overwhelmingly focused on helping students understand the nation’s past and develop the knowledge and critical thinking skills necessary for informed civic engagement. Nearly all teachers surveyed (94%) identified providing foundational knowledge necessary for civic participation as a central goal of their courses. Maintaining a posture of political neutrality in their instruction, the vast majority of US history teachers (nearly 9 out of 10) prioritize exposing students to a wide range of perspectives and viewpoints, including those at odds with their own beliefs. Amidst extreme political polarization, these skills and habits of mind are more important than ever.
Parents and taxpayers deserve schools that educate students well, not schools that use classrooms to wage political battles. At a glance, the FACT US History framework may appear similar to AP US history. It covers many of the same key sources, events, and topics, but this similarity is superficial. From the broad strokes down to the core, the FACT US History course disregards decades of historical and teaching scholarship, ignores parts of the past that contradict predetermined conclusions, and undermines educational integrity for no greater purpose than serving a political fad.
Florida’s new FACT US History course framework privileges a single ideological interpretation while marginalizing evidence and scholarship that complicates that narrative. Florida students deserve history courses that help them analyze evidence, grapple with complexity, and prepare for success in college, civic life, and the workforce. When history instruction becomes subordinate to ideology, our young people—and our future—pay the price.
The following organizations have signed on to this statement:
American Federation of Teachers
American Society for Environmental History
Coordinating Council of Women in History
Florida Freedom To Read Project
Labor and Working Class History
National Council on Public History
Network of Concerned Historians
Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era
World History Association