Kentucky's social studies standards need more work

Headlines from the summer of 2020 show cities burning from riots and looting, statues and the reputations of American heroes being defaced and torn down, and a ferociously intolerant ideology in full operation within the ranks of the media, academia, and politics. These events are not emerging spontaneously and are only tangentially motivated by specific incidents like the death of George Floyd. Instead, they are part of a larger, long-term effort to overthrow the core values and institutions of the United States. And part of that effort has been a concerted war on America's history, a systematic attempt to inaccurately portray America and its founding as irredeemably and uniquely hateful, racist, and broken.

Over the last two months I've been writing about how Americans must resist this war on history, especially as it is being waged in our P-12 schools (see related links below). We must take a much greater role in understanding what is being taught about America's past and assuring that our students understand the rich complexity of our national story - both the good and the bad of our past - and develop the capacity to both appreciate the goodness of America and to critique her flaws in ways that lead us toward an ever-fuller realization of our founding principles.

We must not be afraid to set a goal that our education system should produce patriots. That doesn't mean creating unthinking, xenophobic automatons, of course, which is what the enemies of patriotic education will tell you. It means citizens who can productively criticize their country because they love her and the ideals she stands for.

As a Kentucky educator, of course my greatest interest is how history - and the social studies in general - are being taught here in the Commonwealth. And one of the first places we need to look is in Kentucky's academic standards for social studies. While the latest version of the standards, adopted in 2019, is a vast improvement from what came before, I have come to believe that they are woefully inadequate in terms of the specific knowledge, skills, and dispositions we should expect of our graduates. And as I will point out in a follow up post, some of the supporting materials around the standards are extremely problematic and promote a terribly inadequate understanding of America's past.

As I wrote previously, this topic is deeply personal to me as a former social studies teacher with a Master's degree in history. During my tenure on the Kentucky Board of Education from 2016-2019 I served as chair of the Curriculum, Instruction, and Assessment Committee and was responsible for helping shepherd the latest standards to their ultimate approval.

I am generally pleased that the standards are organized into grade-specific bands. This shows that teachers, especially in grades K-8, are not off the hook for teaching social studies even though the topic may not be assessed every year. The level of detail in the standards, compared to what preceded them, is much improved. And there's even some rich language in the introduction about the kind of person we want students to become as a result of their learning:

Democracy’s survival depends upon the generational transmission of the political vision of liberty and equality that makes and unites Americans. The preservation of this American vision is dependent upon the willingness and ability of its citizens to collaboratively and deliberately address problems, defend their own rights and the rights of others and balance personal interests with the general welfare of society. It also depends on a loyalty to the political institutions the founders created. Devotion to human dignity and freedom, equal rights, justice, the rule of law, tolerance of diversity, mutual assistance, personal and civic responsibility, self-restraint and self-respect must be learned and practiced. The preparation of young people for participation in America’s democratic society is vital. The progress of communities and the state, nation and world rests upon the preparation of young people to collaboratively balance personal interest with the public good.

The standards themselves, though improved, do not provide a great deal of detail, however, about what students are supposed to know and be able to do to achieve the goals described in the above paragraph. Consider the following kindergarten standard (K.C.RR.1): "Identify roles and responsibilities of self and others at home, in school, and in neighborhood settings." What exactly would those roles and responsibilities be?

Similarly, the next standard (K.C.RR.2) says, "Identify symbols and events that represent American patriotism." Which symbols and events? How is a teacher to know what to teach here?

Thankfully, the standards come with a set of "Disciplinary Clarifications" that provide examples. These Disciplinary Clarifications were in development and in draft form for grades K-8 at the time of the standards' approval by KBE. The high school clarifications just emerged in December 2019.

The Discipilinary Clarifications are somewhat helpful - up to a point. So for the first standard we find, "The roles and responsibilities of being a responsible citizen in the school, home and neighborhood may include, but are not limited to, being helpful to and respectful of others and volunteering for and carrying out tasks beneficial to the community, such as helping a classmate with a difficult math problem, putting away the dishes at home or volunteering to clean up a local park."

Likewise, the Disciplinary Clarifications say that, "The symbols and events that represent American patriotism may include, but are not limited to, the National Flag, National Holidays, the Pledge of Allegiance, the National Anthem and any history or stories surrounding significant monuments found in a child’s local community."

But here's the problem with Disciplinary Clarifications. They come with the caveat that these clarifications are “possible suggestions; they are not the only pathways and are not comprehensive to obtain mastery of the standards.”

I concur that there might be other content concepts that could describe mastery of that standard. I am reluctant to tell teachers, "This is the only way students can demonstrate mastery." But if these descriptions have no authority at all, then do we really have anything more substantial than the standard itself? What’s wrong with saying, "These are the minimum ways by which you can demonstrate mastery, or the requisite concepts to be mastered…but you might go above and beyond those?"

The standards also come with key vocabulary for each grade level. But again, the standards document says key vocabulary "may include, but is not limited to" the given list of words. Why not say "includes, but is not limited to"? This lack of clarity in the "clarifications" leaves teachers wondering what, in fact, they should teach.

When some of these objections were raised during the approval of the standards, I insisted that we must distinguish between standards, which are the minimum statewide expectations upon which students should be assessed, and curriculum, which is the locally-chosen collection of reading, instructional, and local assessment materials that would be used to deliver the standards.

And I still believe these curricular choices are vitally important for helping communities decide how they will approach each subject and flesh out what standards cannot, in themselves, provide. But under the current standards, virtually any curriculum would theoretically be appropriate, and this leaves students highly vulnerable to great variability - and even bias - on the part of local educators, and usually the individual classroom teacher.

Perhaps of equally great importance is how valid state-level assessments can be designed for a set of standards that is still too vague. If we are not clear what students are supposed to know and be able to do, how can we accurately assess whether they have done so?

The problems are greater at the high school level where the Disciplinary Clarifications, which aren't even a part of the same document as the standards, are even weaker in content specificity than those for grades K-8. They are simply too vague to comprehensively guide teachers toward what they are supposed to teach. Just as one example, the Korea and Vietnam conflicts are never mentioned in the high school standards. They appear only in the disciplinary clarifications and just as passing examples of conflicts between the U.S. and Soviet Union in the 20th century. This is unacceptable.

In general, Kentucky's academic standards need a great deal more specificity. My colleague Richard Innes, education policy analyst for the Bluegrass Institute (where I serve on the Board of Scholars) has relentlessly argued this point, noting just the following examples of obvious concepts, events, and people missing from the standards:

No war after World War II is listed,
All presidents other than Washington and Jefferson are unmentioned (Yes, even Kentucky’s own son, Abraham Lincoln, is never mentioned!),
MANY other important figures in history like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Thomas Edison, Andrew Carnegie, Benjamin Franklin – in fact ALL other historical figures except, strangely, Sam Adams and Daniel Boone – are omitted,
Communism is never mentioned,
The atom bomb and its important implications are never discussed,
Important, peaceful events like the Louisiana and the Alaska purchases are not mentioned.

To this very partial list I would add that the role of religion in American life, from its founding principles to its culture to its influence on social history and events, is virtually non-existent in the standards. The word "Christian," for example, appears only once in the entire 229-page standards document, and then only in Disciplinary Clarifications noting that "fights between Protestant and Catholic Christians caused wars" (Islam appears twice; to be fair, the word "religion" appears several times, mostly in standards about world history - but what religions are students supposed to know about?).

Other state standards - Massachusetts, for example - are far more expansive in articulating specific content that students should know, and would provide a model for how Kentucky could improve in this regard. The state legislature, which is ultimately responsible for approving the regulation that incorporates the standards by reference, should call for hearings and ask the Kentucky Department of Education to reopen the process for additional work.

Of course, creating lists of important events, concepts, and people to include in the standards will be very controversial. There will always be a battle over what gets included and what doesn't, and no one will ever be completely satisfied. But it is better to have such a discussion than to leave schools with social studies standards that do not provide sufficient guidance for what students should know and be able to do.

I think this is a primary reason why the panel of social studies teachers who developed the standards did not do so. I know some of the teachers who participated in this process. They are smart, hard-working educators. There is political diversity among them, and I don't believe there was ever a secret agenda at work in the standards development. Rather, I think they sidestepped the problematical challenge of specificity by avoiding it altogether, hoping (like I did) that a faithful delivery of the standards by teachers would incorporate all the rigorous content that I believe most Kentuckians want students to learn.

But the events of 2020 have dramatically demonstrated that we cannot leave social studies instruction to chance. Our students need to know who Abraham Lincoln was, and why he was a great American. I don't believe for a minute that most of the crafters of the Kentucky social studies standards wanted anything less. But I cannot say the same for the training materials that were developed by the Kentucky Department of Education for helping teachers understand and implement the standards. Those materials are severely problematic, and will be the topic of my next post.