“Students want to be taken seriously as thinkers. And we should do that.”

Annie Abrams, author of Shortchanged, connects the dots between book bans, standardized testing, and the corporatization of American schools.

While book bans and restrictions on libraries have dramatically impacted the number and quality of books available to American students in recent years, those aren’t the only threats to student reading in 2025. Instead, they are part of a stew of factors coming together to sweep books out of classrooms and off of library shelves. There are also budget issues—districts under financial strain often let go of full-time librarians. There’s a cultural turn against the liberal arts and towards a view of education as job-training. Finally, there’s an ever-growing emphasis on driving instruction with data, often gathered from standardized tests that devalue skills that develop when students read deeply, slowly, and thoughtfully.

If you want to see how dire things are getting, look at the Houston area, where students in suburbs like Katy are losing access to books due to censorship, while nearby Spring Branch ISD is laying off its librarians to address its budget deficit, and libraries in Houston ISD are being repurposed as spaces for extra test drilling as the district goes all in on improving its standardized test scores.

No one can discuss the various ingredients of this unholy stew better than Annie Abrams, author of Shortchanged: How Advanced Placement Cheats Students. Abrams, who is also a high school English teacher in New York City, has long been a critic of the increasingly corporate nature of American schools. Shortchanged is an immensely readable exploration of both the history of the College Board’s development of Advanced Placement (AP) courses and the implications of the growing influence of AP in our high schools. But it is more than just a critique of the College Board; it’s a full-throated defense of public schools and the role that liberal arts should play in them.

When we spoke in February, I had three goals for our conversation. First, I wanted to introduce her book to my audience, because it’s a must-read for any educator, administrator, or parent. But I also wanted to discuss the broader observations Abrams has been making since the publication of Shortchanged—observations that touch on the importance of reading challenging books, the need for critics from the left and center to speak up for the value of reading books in their entirety in English classes (an apparently dying custom), and the dangers of the increasing corporatization, centralization, and standardization of our education system. Finally, I wanted to talk to Abrams teacher to teacher. We teach the same course, have similar concerns about educational trends, and share a love for the writing of Ralph Ellison. As I told Abrams before our conversation started, I actually begin each school year with a quote from Shortchanged written on the whiteboard of my classroom: “It’s a misuse of everyone’s time if tests are the only context that give high school writing meaning.”

I’ve reproduced our conversation below, edited for clarity and length.

Anger & Clarity: Let me start by giving you the opportunity to introduce your book to my audience. Your book is Shortchanged: How Advanced Placement Cheats Students. Why do you say that Advanced Placement cheats students?

Annie Abrams: I want to say off the bat that I believe in broadening access to high-quality liberal arts education, and for a lot of people, that’s what the AP brand represents. Part of my argument is that that’s no longer what the AP brand represents. Over the past 20 years, and especially over the past five, the Advanced Placement program has turned into a testing regime more than anything else. And the way that this affects especially the humanities, I think, precludes possibilities for a meaningful liberal arts education in high school.

The other part of it is that it’s college, right? It counts for college credit. The College Board has lobbied for and won policies where state university systems guarantee credit for passing exam scores, which means that the College Board is defining what counts as credit for universities and that means that corporate authority has overtaken academic authority, and that worries me. So it’s about high schools and about colleges, what’s going on across K-16.

I’ve recommended your book to a couple of teachers and parents, and they meet it with a kind of surprise. Because AP, even for teachers, is seen as the gold standard. It’s thought of as this great thing that’s bringing college-level education to advanced students who are ready for it.

Right.

Can you explain how Advanced Placement has changed?

The short version of the story is that when education policy started to incentivize testing, one model for successful testing appeared to be the growth of Advanced Placement. Because everyone associated it with this elite, high-quality thing, the idea was that if you could replicate that experience everywhere, then you would also replicate all of the things attendant to the brand everywhere: the quality, the prestige.

So I argue that instead what’s happened is that because the College Board is a business, and it’s motivated to sell as many tests as possible, and states are motivated to save money on higher education, what we get, instead of the proliferation of high quality liberal arts programs, is something much narrower. Teaching to the test.

And the tests themselves are much flatter. Even if you look at exams from twenty or thirty years ago, they’re different now. The rubrics have changed. Here’s an example: the AP English writing rubrics used to be holistic, less than ten years ago. Now there are check-boxes for elements of an essay. And you don’t even have to really write a complete essay to check all the boxes. And think that surprises a lot of parents. It surprised my students this year when they saw the AP Language rubric. And I think it surprises a lot parents, too, who remember something different.

The other thing you talk about is the expansion, the way AP has grown to sort of “eat” all of high school education. I mean, my daughter is in 8^th grade, and we were picking her classes last week, and now AP Human Geography is a 9^th-grade course. What problems do you see with that?

There are people who write about college and what it is or has been or could be or should be. And the most elite version of college is these four cushioned years where you are away from your family or away from what you’ve known, where your horizons broaden, and you have time to read a lot and to think a lot. Right? That’s the most expensive version. Sort of this pastoral ideal. I don’t know that that’s really happening very many places these days anywhere, but that’s one version of what college is.

There’s also college for job training, which is a more practical sort of thing.

And in either of those cases, I don’t know that we need 14-year-olds to be doing it yet. That’s still childhood to me. Why should a 14-year-old be worried about accumulating college credit?

So protecting childhood is one thing. And then also, especially in states where there are more severe restrictions on what can go on in the classroom, there’s no academic freedom. So what it is it that that college credit represents really? I don’t know.

In the first couple of pages of Shortchanged, you talk about the typical high school student now who takes AP Literature and learns just enough about Ralph Ellison—and this broke my heart—to never have to read Ralph Ellison in college. And I think a lot of English teachers, especially, we remember AP as a sort of our launching point to our English major in college. And reading that helped me realize that’s not how many students today are seeing it.

It’s a box to check. Right? You get out of something.

I first read Ellison in my AP Lit course. I didn’t take the AP test because I was like, Oh I’m going to take English in college, who cares? I wasn’t even curious about how well I’d do; it just wasn’t part of it.

One point you make, in Shortchanged and on social media, is that the writing we do for the AP English tests is not at all what you would be expected to do in a college class. For my readers, can you explain the difference between what we do on the AP test and what happens in writing in any other situation?

Writing for the AP English exams, there are three essays, you have about 40 minutes for each one, and the rubrics look more or less the same for each of them. It's: is there a thesis? How much evidence and analysis is there? And then there's the sophistication point. So, strictly speaking, you don't need an introduction, you don't need a conclusion. You don't need transitions between or among ideas. Organization is nice if you can manage it, but that's not really what's what it's about.

The other thing is that the College Board, because of the nature of the business, is not in a position to tell students whether their argument is correct or not right. The stakes of saying something true or that you really believe, that doesn't enter into it.

This is what really disturbs me, honestly, about AP-style writing. Because the essays require some kind of argumentation, and the stakes are so high—thousands of dollars in tuition—what my students tell me is that they take the easier argument. It doesn't matter what they actually believe. They just write something. They regurgitate something.

That keeps me up at night.

I get that all the time on the synthesis essay. Students tell me well, I believed Position A, but the sources made it easier to support B, so I chose to write B. I guess there's a skill in that.

I guess. It's not one that I value.

My hope is that college is more like my experience in college, where professors understood papers as part of a conversation we were having, responded to them in that humanistic framework, and held me accountable for what I wrote.

And when I say held me accountable, I mean in terms of the most nitpicky, grammatical, annoying things, which made me a better writer. And then also: do you really believe this?

Okay, so how do you manage all this as a teacher? How do you keep the soul of your classroom in a testing regime?

The way it works in my classroom is that writing to the College Board is one of the forms of writing that my students do.

I have students differentiate. They write to me, they write to each other, they write to themselves, and then they write to the College Board. And I want them to recognize that it feels different, that it's for a different purpose,

One of the things we can do, because we've aligned English and History, instead of having the AP exam as the external goal, doing a Gilder Lehrman essay contest, so that there's this other thing out there that's more robust, more interesting, fuller.

That reminded me of another of my favorite quotes from your book, where you say, “In the age of AP, collaborating and innovating at school level is a liability, not an asset.”

And when I read that, I felt implicated, because what you're describing is how we [AP teachers] are sort of forced to teach a certain way and doing anything else is a risk.

When you talk about teaching students to aim for writing that goes outside of the AP exam, that is a risk, right? As teachers, we are evaluated on our AP scores. So, what do teachers feel when we recognize the incentives of the system like that?

It's a lot of pressure.

I will say, also from the outside, it might appear that AP is sort of an equalizing thing. But what really happens is that if you're in a place where you don't have to worry that much about how students are going to do on the exams, you have a little bit more freedom. And if the scores really matter, for funding or for teacher evaluation, that can add to the pressure to drill.

I'm in a place where I don't get a bonus. I'm tenured. The UFT is around. So I have a little bit more wiggle room, and I am keenly aware that that's not the case everywhere. So who gets drilling and who doesn't? This supposedly equalizing the framework actually doesn't do what it promises to do.

This is the perfect place to broaden our conversation, because that's true in Texas, but not just with AP, but also with the STAAR test, our standardized testing, which is everything you're describing.

There are English classes where everybody is just expected to pass, and so they don't do STAAR drills. And then there are English classes in districts where the scores are low. And what do they do? They drill to the test.

We have both pointed on social media to what's happening in Houston ISD. Would you talk about how that connects to your to your thesis about the College Board, or to what you see as trends in education?

I'm interested to hear what you have to say about what I have to say about Houston. To my mind, what's going on in Houston is sort of Common Core taken to the extreme. And I just wrote a piece about it, actually. So I'm going to try it out on you:

When Common Core rolled out, there was a lot of noise about de-emphasizing literature, right? The informational text thing, the excerpts, a lot of people were really concerned. And [David] Coleman, the architect of the Common Core, promised that there was no de-emphasizing of literature.¹

But over the past 10 years, it has become clear that teaching literature doesn't really have anything to do with Common Core-aligned tests.

And those state tests, even if they're renamed, are still basically Common Core in most cases.

In Houston, what has happened is that [state appointed superintendent] Mike Miles turned the libraries into “team centers,” where he didn't dispose of the books, but that's no longer what the rooms are for. They’re for drilling to testable benchmarks, and so students who are either ahead of what's going on in class or behind go to what used to be the library to do more practice aligned with tests using AI-generated excerpts instead of reading books.² And in class, it's not necessary to teach a book. It actually slows you down if you get bogged down in Invisible Man when you're trying to teach to a test.

So there's that side of it, and then there's also the obscenity law side of it, where there are now overt bans on books.

My thesis basically is that because we let go of the idea of literary merit or cultural significance informing what and why we teach English, we're in a weaker position regarding the obscenity laws.

The idea was that you used to be able to defend a book even if it had some obscenity in it, if it was valuable overall. But now “overall” is struck. It's gone.

And I think part of the issue there is that we let go of the idea that there's some value in reading, for example, a whole Shakespeare play—apart from the test. And to my mind, it's part of the same fight.

On social media you recently said that Houston ISD’s de-emphasizing of books in favor of standardized testing “clarifies that books are, at best, extraneous to the project.”

To us that's a repellent and repulsive idea for education, but to an administrator who's getting yelled at for having “bad” books, it's like, well, if books aren't that important, we can still teach English without books.

And we've seen another response to the push to get “obscene” books out of schools, which has been to increase control, increase centralization, increased standardization.

It's frightening and ugly.

I think I think so too. Also, have you looked at the AP Literature curriculum recently?

I keep up with it.

There are nine units now, and if you carve up a school year into nine units, there’s not really time to read Invisible Man, right?

I guess what I’m thinking about these days is what if, apart from meritocracy and grading and testing, there’s value in reading a book with a class?

What if we start there and think about what the value of that thing is, without all the rest of it? I’m trying to make the case for that now.

It’s funny you bring up AP Literature, because sometimes I think that AP Lit feels like the one holdout among standardized tests. Because in Texas, no other standardized test requires you to read a novel.

Sometimes when I send emails to legislators about the effects of their laws, I say, “These are the books that were on the AP Lit exam last year that will be banned if this bill passes.” And I feel like that’s an effective case, but it also feels tenuous if they’re changing the curriculum, if they’re de-emphasizing novels.

But the mentality even that it needs to be justified by a test!

I know! I know!

And for a lot of people it does, right? It’s effective for parents, too, right? Like, “Oh, well, if it’s on the test …”

I’ve been having this wild experience this year, and it’s sort of new to me, honestly, where students are really into books. I mean, it has always been the case that a handful are sort of zealots. But this year, it’s wider spread. Students want to read books. There’s an appetite for it and we’re failing to meet it. I don’t know why.

What do you think accounts for that need? Is it something that you’ve just noticed in the last couple of years, or is it something that you think students have always wanted to do this and they’re just feeling that hunger now that they’re encountering fewer full books?

I think there’s something classic, evergreen about it. And then I wonder if this year I’m sort of watching the emergence of a counterculture. I’m not sure. I’m not ready to call it.

But I’m interested in the idea. There are some students who are genuinely skeptical of AI and testing and drilling essays and rote exercises. One of my students got a gilded copy of Emerson’s essays for her birthday after we read some in class. Another student came up to me and said, “I really like the Henry James book we read in class. Can you recommend something with a similar vibe for fun?”

And those are just two. I’m the advisor for the philosophy club this year where they just get together and talk about, like, the trolley problem for fun.

I guess you could cut all of what came before this and just start here: Students want to be taken seriously as thinkers, and we should do that. We should take them seriously and help them to take themselves seriously too, right? It's part of what gives them agency.

I love that. I want to attach this to censorship concerns. One reason I have been so offended by attempts to limit what students can read in class is that I think it means doing the opposite: not taking our students seriously. Not treating them as adults.

Can you make the case for reading dangerous, challenging books? I'm talking about things like Toni Morrison, or Invisible Man?

I have this proposed chapter on Hawthorne and The Scarlet Letter, which is on the chopping block [in some places]. It's this high school classic, and since the Cold War has been enshrined in the American canon, and now it's being shoved aside. And I'm thinking about this chapter about why we ever taught it, and why Hawthorne wrote it and invented a story about democracy that's worth retelling. And part of the story he tells is that you have to be able to think for yourself and confront difficult, challenging things with a sort of degree of calm.

I don't know. I'm not happy with the answer. I'm working on it, and maybe in six months, I'll get back to you.

I also am skittish about the idea of a canon. It doesn't thrill me to say, “Here's a list of 40 books. The end.” That's not what I want, but I do think it's important to make public arguments for specific books that are worth teaching. It's protective.

Something you've been exploring recently is the fact that some of the only people doing that are the “Classical Education” folks.

“Classical Ed” is a broad category, right? There's a lot going on under that name. And one thing that's going on under that name is a rejection of the College Board and of Advanced Placement and of some ed tech too, and an insistence on going back to books and to something more soulful.

So far I'm in agreement.

But then there's also a dimension of it where the canon is narrow, the ends are ideological and political and religious, in a way that prevents me from getting on board.

But I think that there are some things that the professors and teachers, who have successfully formed a coalition to talk about which books are worth reading, are doing correctly. They’re talking about books.

And I would like to see more of that across the spectrum. Because I don't think that old books belong to any particular political sect. This long cultural heritage, it's a tricky thing to talk about, to define it, and to say that it even exists. You get into the weeds a little bit. But I think we're also getting into some other weeds by avoiding it.

This is something that we've been batting around here in Texas. A lot of the most conservative folks, the ones who want to get rid of all screens in schools—maybe there are ways we can align with them. Maybe they can become allies in some sense. But it's, it's tricky for the reasons you've just enumerated. Where, and to what extent, and in which battles?

I don't know how much you've heard about the Bluebonnet Curriculum, which is a new curriculum that the State Board of Education, said that any school district can adopt, and there's a financial incentive for adopting.

Yes.

The big objection has been that it has Biblical themes in it. But lot of people on the far right are making a lot of the arguments that you might make, right? They’re saying the Bluebonnet curriculum is corporate, it's centralized, it requires excessive technology. It's based on excerpts rather than full texts.

So those are the people that are showing up at the State Board of Education—the same people who, last year, were yelling at school boards for having Toni Morrison. Now they're yelling at the State Board of Education for adopting this. It's a strange place.

It's very strange. I think it also, in some ways, goes back to the Common Core, right? The idea that the Common Core was a progressive initiative because the Tea Party despised it is absurd. Corporate control in public schools is not a progressive idea, but because the Tea Party opposed it so vehemently, it kind of got that reputation.

I think also part of what concerns me about classical education is there's the potential for a sort of chauvinism in it, and so it's not just what students are reading, it's how they're reading these things, right?

My approach, even to Ellison, whose novel I love, is not with reverence. It's something else.

I thought of one more question, because I think we share some things in common in that we're both English teachers and we're both active in sort of an activist space, and you're on social media, and I find your Bluesky feed incredibly nourishing and helpful. People always ask me, How do I have time? And I don't have an answer. So. How do you have time? How do you find time to write, to teach, read books, etc.?

I don't really have time.

Right. I mean, I’m the same boat. I couldn't imagine not making these arguments in public because they matter so much to me. But again, finding time to also read and write about other things and play with our daughters …

Yeah.

…it's a challenge.

It’s a challenge because you want to live the thing that's worth protecting, right? Nick Tampio is a political scientist who was a champion against Common Core, and he recently released an edition of Dewey's Democracy and Education. And in the introduction, he doesn't use these words, but his argument is just like, eat an apple with peanut butter. Take a nap. Save democracy. Because you have to live the thing.

1. Coleman is currently the president of the College Board.

2. When a reporter for Houston Public Media asked Miles what he would say to parents who might object to the fact that HISD’s English Language Arts curriculum no longer includes full books, Miles responded, “The full books can come after school. They can come before school. They can come on your own. We are helping kids learn how to read.”