On Kentucky's proposed social studies standards

Today the Kentucky Board of Education heard first reading on a proposed revision to the state's social studies standards (access a pdf version of the standards at the end of this post). This was a long-overdue process, but has been accelerated under the mandates of Senate Bill 1 (2017) which requires a regular 6-year cycle of reviewing and, when necessary, updating the state's education standards. 

The draft social studies standards have generated some controversy, sometimes from education advocates with whom I typically share common ground, especially on this topic. In this case, there have been criticisms that the standards lack specificity and that numerous examples of individual historical figures (like George Washington and Martin Luther King, Jr.), events, or concepts have been omitted from the standards and therefore cannot be tested.

This is a special area of concern for me, not only because I chair KBE’s Curriculum, Instruction, and Assessment Committee, but because I have a long-standing personal and professional passion for this topic. My bachelor’s degree included a minor in history, I hold a Master’s degree in the same subject, I taught social studies as a K-12 teacher, and once served as an officer in the Kentucky Council for the Social Studies.

The quality of social studies curriculum and instruction has become a particular area of concern in recent years as I’ve watched elementary schools devote less and less attention to this subject (along with science and the arts as well). Following the work of E.D. Hirsch and others, I’ve come to believe that a lack of focus on content knowledge in the early grades is exacerbating achievement gaps and that by focusing more intentionally on domain-specific knowledge we will actually improve students’ long-term reading comprehension. (See links to several of my blog posts at the end of this message that express these concerns).

Accordingly, I have carefully watched the development of Kentucky’s draft social studies standards through the same lens of concern critics have brought to this matter: do the standards adequately reflect the depth and breadth of knowledge we want all Kentucky students to obtain as a minimum framework within the bounds of what is possible and appropriate for a set of state standards under Kentucky’s legal and regulatory structures?

I’ve been pleased, then, that over recent months I’ve seen the committee charged with developing the standards respond to several concerns I’ve raised about content. For example, the latest version of the standards includes a much more expansive discussion of both slavery and the Cold War era, both of which I felt were inadequately addressed in earlier versions. The department is also developing grade-specific standards overview documents for grades K-8 that will further elaborate curricular and content connections. I will continue to bring concerns about content specificity to the standards development committee and ask KDE staff working on this topic to offer some response and consider whether any additional changes to the standards are appropriate before the final reading on the standards is made in February.

Below I will offer an extended explanation for why I think the standards as written are a vast improvement over Kentucky’s current social studies standards (improving them in ways that very much reflect concerns about content), why they generally strike a good balance between between social studies skill and knowledge, and how they function as standards - not curriculum - and why that distinction is so vitally important. Adequately understanding what standards are, how teachers use them, and the role of state assessment in achieving our overall educational goals is vital to this discussion.

Standards are not the only thing that gets taught; and shouldn’t be; and can’t be under Kentucky law

The first important thing to note is that standards and curriculum are not the same thing. This is a distinction that educators themselves miss or sometimes gloss over. We do not expect, particularly in Kentucky, that everything students learn (or should learn) in school will be dictated via state standards.

Standards reflect a minimum framework for all students that will be measured on state assessments. Curriculum, on the other hand, includes the vast array of instructional materials, readings, activities, and local mechanisms of assessment, including the full body of content knowledge to be covered, all of which are, under Kentucky law, to be selected at the local level (I have made some recommendations to the department for the next reading on the social studies standards to make this distinction clearer).

I’ll readily admit that the difference is sometimes blurry. Standards certainly do inform and shape curriculum decisions, and the more expansive and detailed the standards the more impact they have on local decisions. But the point is that standards are not the sum total of what gets taught in schools, and shouldn’t be (and can’t be under Kentucky law). Robert Pondiscio of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, himself a strong champion of a knowledge-based curriculum, put it this way:

I would wager that when I.M. Pei was commissioned to design the Louvre Pyramid, his first move was not to reach for a copy of the Paris building codes for inspiration. It should be no different for teaching. First things first: What is it you want to teach? Which stories, poems, or novels are worth your students' precious time? What do you want students to know about art, science, history, and literature? Answer those questions, then reach for the standards and build your lessons and units "to code."

I would argue that in Kentucky we’ve developed something far more useful to teachers than the Paris building codes are to architects. And I would concede that because of testing worries, teachers in Kentucky have often relied far too heavily on the standards as the sum total of what they attempt to teach (except in social studies, for reasons I’ll discuss), but the way this usually works out is an over-reliance on commercially-developed textbooks. There is a vast need for schools to engage in much more thoughtful work around curriculum development, which includes the selection of specific content matter, but the truth is that schools already do this. As a social studies teacher, I have direct experience with how this works.