For three years, Governor Ron DeSantis has waged a campaign against Advanced Placement US History, arguing that its honest treatment of race and gender in America leans too far to the left. Now Florida has built its own alternative.

The new course, part of a suite called FACT, Florida Advanced Courses and Tests, will roll out as a pilot program this fall. It is designed to compete with AP US History, which reached more than half a million students nationally last year. But historians and educators say what Florida has built is not a rigorous alternative. It is a politically engineered version of American history designed to make students feel good about their country rather than understand it.

Here is what the new course does.

It argues the Constitution is an antislavery document. Mainstream historians see it as a compromise that protected slavery for decades and blocked abolitionist momentum by preventing Congress from banning the slave trade until 1808.

It portrays the founding fathers as fundamentally opposed to slavery. Annette Gordon-Reed, a Harvard historian and leading Jefferson scholar, says the framework "seems directed at explaining away their inaction," noting that Jefferson believed freed enslaved people should be expatriated, and that Washington waited until his death to free the people he enslaved.

It sidelines Indigenous history before European contact. In a state with a long history of Native presence and major wars, historians call this a dated and incomplete approach.

It emphasizes Protestant religious heritage and Western civilization roots while offering little diversity in its historical perspective.

And it recommends a single textbook, written explicitly to counter Howard Zinn's work on American abuses of power, by an author at a conservative Christian college who frames slavery and racial violence as departures from otherwise admirable American ideals.

Manisha Sinha, a historian at the University of Connecticut, calls this approach dated. Jonathan Zimmerman of the University of Pennsylvania says it presents dark chapters as "aberrations from an otherwise admirable story." These are not fringe critics. These are leading scholars of American history saying this course does not tell the truth.

Florida students deserve to understand their country fully, honestly, and completely. Not as a political project. Not as a patriotism exercise. As history.

Sign this petition to demand Florida maintain access to rigorous, historically accurate courses like AP US History, reject politically motivated rewrites of the American story, and ensure Florida students graduate with an honest understanding of the nation they are inheriting.