The state’s board of education this week voted unanimously to approve new standards of learning for history and social sciences, a task it’s legally required to perform every seven years. An initial draft of the standards, started under former governor Ralph Northam (D), arrived in August after years of development. But instead of moving it into a public comment period, then-superintendent Jillian Balow surprised citizens by embarking on an extensive revision that critics complained was both too rushed to allow for thoughtful feedback and too closed off from the public.
The standards the board voted through on Thursday represent an updated third draft. They are, essentially, a compromise. The six-hour working session preceding their approval made that much clear: Members decided whether to refer to Columbus Day also as Indigenous’ Peoples Day; whether to restore the mention of the word “fascism” to a discussion of World War II; whether to include people such as Abigail Adams and Crispus Attucks among revolutionary-era leaders.
The result is probably the best a bipartisan body could do to please as many constituents as possible, and upset the fewest, while still creating a decent product. Mistakes have been fixed, missing terms have been restored, and in many areas real progress over previous years’ standards has been made. Slavery is now listed as the cause of the Civil War; another change features the period after Reconstruction during which a biracial party called the Readjusters operated. Yet it’s alarming that every decision to include a particular personage or event, every choice of word, turned into a political balancing game.
Opponents of the standards seemed impossible to please in the months of controversy that preceded this week’s vote, for example, pointing out omissions of material that hadn’t actually been left out. This was probably inevitable: State leaders’ choice to depart from the usual professionally led process was guaranteed to turn the standard-writing process into an ideological battle — especially following a campaign in which, as a candidate, Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) riled up the base by promising to “ban” critical race theory.
Indeed, it was fitting that the most serious source of discord among board members this week was not the standards themselves but a preface of “guiding principles” that contained a line instructing teachers to engage students in “age-appropriate ways that do not imply students today are culpable for past events.” Anne Holton, appointed to the board by former governor Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat, stressed that this language was reminiscent of model laws around the country capitalizing on the anti-CRT craze to discourage teachers from teaching Black history.
While Virginia’s board of education seems to have wrestled the process back under control, risks remain across the country. See, for instance, the conservative Civics Alliance’s focus on identifying states whose social studies standards will soon undergo revision so that supporters can “rally against the political and bureaucratic machine,” as the group has said about Rhode Island’s impending rewrite.
Yet when it comes to crafting assessment criteria and curriculums, the bureaucratic machine is likelier to do a good job than dueling political activists: Students can only learn so much in so little time, but when any exclusion of a particular person or event prompts outcry, the incentive is to cram in more and more material. This can result in a hodgepodge of names and dates rather than a coherent, conceptual vision. Or, on the flip side, it can result in standards that say not too much but too little. South Dakota, the Fordham Institute points out in a report grading states’ standards, requires eighth graders to learn “how government decisions impact people, places, and history,” a standard so vague as to be meaningless.
Too much focus on precisely what’s in and precisely what’s out of state educational standards also can distract from other essential discussions: about academic rigor, about the degree of complexity students at each grade level can handle, about how much to emphasize memorization versus inquiry.
Social studies will always implicate ideological questions. Historians are involved in an ever-evolving conversation about this country’s past — not just what happened, but why it happened and why it matters. Figuring out how to make that conversation accessible to a rising generation is a difficult task that demands input from a wide variety of groups, including the public. But treating this process as a political tug-of-war in which the winner is the party that manages to get the most names, or events, or units included or excluded guarantees that, in the long run, students will lose.
