Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, and Smith: The College Board Adds a New Founding Father

Most people know that this summer the United States celebrated the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Fewer people know that 2026 also marks the 250th anniversary of Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Thanks to a recent announcement by the College Board, hundreds of thousands of high school students will now associate these two events.

On May 28, Advanced Placement (AP) US Government and Politics teachers received an email indicating that four new documents would be added to its list of “required foundational documents” in order to “strengthen alignment with college-level courses:” Federalist no. 39, The Emancipation Proclamation, the Gettysburg Address, and “core principles from the writings of Adam Smith.”

As someone with a doctorate in political science who has been teaching AP United States Government and Politics for the past 4 years, this list is surprising. Of the four, only Federalist 39 is specifically about the institutional structure and functioning of the US government, making an argument about how the Constitution adheres to republican principles by creating a system of government that is “neither a national nor a federal Constitution, but a composition of both.” However, the text itself is quite belabored and a close reading of it is not necessary to establish the point. The two documents authored by Lincoln are important historical developments, but do not truly engage in questions of political science. The Emancipation Proclamation is superseded by the 13th Amendment, and the Gettysburg Address, while articulating a lofty idealization of democratic self-government, is a piece of political rhetoric, not law.

Yet it is the inclusion of “core principles from the writings of Adam Smith” that is the most vexing. For starters, Smith was a Scottish philosopher and economist at the University of Glasgow, whose most influential book, Wealth of Nations, was published before the Declaration of Independence was drafted. While, as Glory Liu has shown in her Adam Smith’s America: How a Scottish Philosopher Became an Icon of American Capitalism published by Princeton University Press in 2022, Smith’s writings were read, studied, and praised by the Founders, and then incorporated into American political culture throughout the succeeding 250 years, there are many other Enlightenment and classical philosophers who were deeply influential to the founding of the United States, from Aristotle and Cicero to John Locke and Montesquieu. Yet only Smith receives this canonical status.

According to the College Board’s communication, these texts have been added to strengthen alignment with college-level courses, which I imagine would come as a shock to most political scientists. None are included in classic collections of “foundational” readings assigned in most undergraduate courses, such as Principles and Politics of American Politics edited by Samuel Kernell and Steven S. Smith and published by Sage/CQ Press or Readings in American Politics, edited by Ken Kollman and published by Norton. The Lanahan Readings in the American Polity, edited by Ann Serow and Everett C. Ladd and published by Lanahan Publishers, includes Federalist 39 but none of these other selections. Nor do any of the sample American Government and Politics syllabi published by the American Political Science Association contain any of these four texts. While this is not an exhaustive study of undergraduate political science instruction, these examples invite skepticism about the College Board’s alleged purpose of greater alignment.

Perhaps the “alignment” the College Board is concerned with is an ideological remaking of civics instruction in the United States. Sam Ulmschneider suggests on Bluesky that it is to align with recent legislation in Ohio—S.B. 1, “Advance Ohio Education Act”—that requires all higher education institutions in that state to develop a course, required for all undergraduates, on “American civic literacy” that includes “a study of the American economic system and capitalism” and requires students to read:

(1) The entire Constitution of the United States; (2) The entire Declaration of Independence; (3) A minimum of five essays in their entirety from the Federalist Papers. The essays shall be selected by the department chair. (4) The entire Emancipation Proclamation; (5) The entire Gettysburg Address; (6) The entire Letter from Birmingham Jail written by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr; (7) The writings of Adam Smith, including a study of the principles written in The Wealth of Nations. (Sec. 3345.382.B–C).

That this law has an explicitly ideological purpose—including the prohibition of “Any orientation or training course regarding diversity, equity, and inclusion” (Sec 3345.0217.B.1(a)) and defines “climate policies, electoral politics, foreign policy, diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, immigration policy, marriage, or abortion” as “Controversial belief[s] and polic[ies]” that require additional scrutiny (Sec 3345.0217.A)—is deeply troubling, or at least should be given that the College Board explicitly defines AP US Government and Politics as “nonpartisan” in its Course and Exam Description. 

This Ohio legislation is part of a broader trend. Recent legislation in Idaho similarly revamps civics education. SB 1336, signed into law by Idaho Governor Brad Little in April of 2026, identifies 5 “cardinal virtues” that every Idaho student shall “exemplify:” “prudence, justice, fortitude, moderation, and patriotism” (33-1602.2a). It goes on to list a series of “key historical documents” that students must “understand the content, history, meaning, significance, and effect” of, which include all of the Federalist—with no. 39 singled out for specific attention—the Emancipation Proclamation, and the Gettysburg Address (33-1602.2c, 8c). While Adam Smith is not mentioned in the law, all curricula in Idaho must instruct students that “communism” is “antithetical to the fundamental principles of America’s republican form of government” (33-1602.7).

The Classical Learning Test (CLT), founded by Jeremy Tate in 2015 as an alternative to college entrance exams like the SAT, has also recently launched the Classical Baccalaureate (CB), explicitly as an alternative to AP. Its American Government and Politics curricula, written by faculty from notably conservative institutions such as the University of Dallas, Hillsdale College, and Biola University, explicitly rejects a “normless or value-free vision of politics” and “reintroduce[s] moral judgment as a significant thread in the study of American politics.” In materials comparing the CB curricula to the AP curricula, the CLT emphasizes that its students will read Federalist no. 39 and the Gettysburg Address, which are absent in previous AP curricula. All of these efforts are consistent with efforts by the Trump administration to promote “patriotic education,” such as Executive Order 14190 issued in January 2025.

If the College Board is adjusting to promote alignment with these legislative changes, rather than changes in undergraduate political science pedagogy, this not only undermines trust in The College Board, but raises concerns about who is truly setting civics curricula: experts in American history and political science, or conservative lawmakers at the state level? It also marks a significant shift from the College Board’s previous positions, such as its defenses of AP Psychology and AP African American Studies against Florida legislation in 2023.  This is a worrying sign that the College Board, which administered nearly 5 million AP exams in 2025, is bowing to conservative political pressure rather than using its influence to defend academic freedom, teacher autonomy, and pedagogy based on the state of academic disciplines. At the very least, the College Board owes the teachers, students, families, schools and districts who participate in the AP program full transparency.

My ultimate point is not to adjudicate the correct account of what Smith’s “core concepts” truly are or what definitely constitutes the foundational texts of US government and politics, but to point to a broader challenge facing civics education: namely, that canonization is inherently political and does political work. Any list of “foundational texts” is going to be inherently incomplete, but the selection matters. To canonize particular texts as “foundational” to US government and politics, as College Board does, shapes the way that students and teachers frame, study, analyze, and understand American government and politics.

Given that US Government and Politics is one of the most popular AP exams, with nearly 400,000 students taking the exam in 2025—an estimated 10% of high school graduates, based on numbers from the National Center for Education Statistics—it has become the default civics curriculum in the United States, with publishers issuing specific textbooks tailored to the AP Course and Exam Description and teachers shaping their classes through College Board curated or approved resources. There are undoubtedly downstream effects as these forces shape how non-AP government and civics classes are taught. The result is a homogenizing curriculum that disempowers school districts and individual schools and instructors to select specific readings that illustrate core concepts and principles of political science and American politics, or to tailor their courses to the specific needs of their learning community.

This gives the College Board, or an individual state legislature with whom the College Board wishes to remain in good standing, tremendous power in shaping not only K–12 education, but the civic common sense of the country as a whole. Defining a text as foundational imbues it with a sense of almost unquestioned authority. Treating the commentary of the Federalist as foundational elevates a particular 18th-century theory of the Constitution to almost-holy writ, devaluing how the meaning, structure, and implications of the Constitution have changed through formal amendment, Supreme Court decisions, Congressional statute, the Civil War, and popular social movements, as scholars such as Jonathan Gienapp, Anthony Michael Kreis, Jill Lepore, and Aziz Rana have argued. Treating the Gettysburg Address as a canonical statement of the United States’ commitment to democracy occludes the Founders’ skepticism of democracy and how, according to the historian Gary Wills, that speech “remade America” and fundamentally shifted popular understandings of the nation’s founding. To treat the “invisible hand” and laissez-faire economics as equally foundational as the Declaration and Constitution is to elevate a particular economic philosophy to that of unquestioned dogma, obscuring how policy-makers, activists, and thinkers have wrestled with questions of political economy.

These changes, whether made unilaterally by the College Board or in an attempt to placate conservative lawmakers, should particularly trouble political scientists, as students who earn college credit from their score on the AP exam may never take another political science or social science course again, leaving the editorial choices of the College Board as their default understanding of political science. It behooves political scientists in particular, but the concerned public more generally, to be more watchful and involved in developments in K–12 curriculum, as stewards of American civic life. It is an opportunity for professional political scientists to engage in proactive collaboration with educators at the secondary level, rather than simply bemoan the civic knowledge or writing skills of incoming undergraduates.

Education is one of the crucial institutions of American democracy, where young citizens are socialized into the norms, values, and practices of democratic life. Questions of canonization and curricular development are no less political than the questions that occupied Madison, Hamilton, and Jay in The Federalist, Lincoln in “The Gettysburg Address,” and even Smith. It is well past time they are taken seriously as such.

Featured Image is Adam Smith and Alexander Hamilton.