Exemplars & Common Pitfalls

Alabama

• Alabama’s decision to require two two-year courses on American history—including a full course in high school, when students have achieved considerable sophistication—shows an unusual and admirable commitment to American history education. Taken together, these standards give teachers and students substantial tools with which to build solid history education,

California

• Like many states, California treats the U.S. history curriculum as a once-through sequence split over three grades. The capacity for historical understanding changes dramatically between fifth and eleventh grades. The early grades should not be treated as intellectually equivalent to high school, yet early American history is taught only in fifth grade. Despite limited recapitulation in the later grades, much of the substance of pre–1789 U.S. history is still taught only when children are too young to consider it with genuine sophistication.

Washington, DC

• The D.C. standards are presented in a straightforward format: Each grade/course is organized in subdivisions, beneath which appear “broad concepts,” followed by grade-specific content expectations. Sample classroom exercises are offered for selected content items. The curriculum is not divided into typical social studies strands; rather, historical material is presented chronologically and analytical categories pertinent to each content item are noted parenthetically (these include geography, economics, politics and government, religious thought and ideas, social impact, military action, and intellectual thought).

South Carolina

• The South Carolina Academic Standards provide grade-specific outlines for grades K–8, and for four high school courses: global studies, United States history and the Constitution, economics, and United States government. Each grade or course is provided with a numbered series of thematic/chronological “standards,” each of which is followed by specific “indicators,” or content expectations. Four “strands”—history, geography, political science/government, and economics—are invoked, but content is not broken up among them. Instead, relevant strands are noted parenthetically at the end of each indicator. Sample classroom exercises are also offered for selected indicators.

Arkansas

• The “conflict and consensus” sub-theme jumps from European/Native American interaction, colonial settlement and leaders, and the impact of slavery, before suddenly moving to the American Revolution. The “movement” section then skips back to the early colonies before abruptly leapfrogging to nineteenth-century expansion. The same pattern holds for the other sub-themes, and also for the sixth-grade U.S. history course—which opens with Reconstruction, moves to twentieth-century technology, then to the Great Depression, back to the women’s suffrage movement, then on to the Allied/Axis powers, late twentieth century technology, and the space program. After all of this, the next sub-theme jumps back to the Battle of the Little Bighorn, the Spanish American War, and so forth.

Colorado

• Colorado’s K–12 Academic Standards for social studies are divided into four strands—history, geography, economics, and civics—that are common to all grades. Within each strand, the state provides grade-level expectations for individual grades from K–8, and for high school (grades 9–12) as a block. Each such expectation consists of a thematic heading—labeled “concepts and skills students master”—laying out broad conceptual themes to be covered. For example, one eighth-grade history grade-level expectation directs students to “formulate appropriate hypotheses about United States history based on a variety of historical sources and perspectives.” The state then provides a series of “evidence outcomes” for each concepts and skills heading. These are thematic summary statements of knowledge that students must master as well as “21st century skills and readiness competencies.” The latter are comprised of “inquiry questions” (more specific queries about the content), “relevance and application” points (drawing parallels between the content and current issues) and, in the history strand, “nature of history” points (regarding the nature of historical study).

Alabama

• The standards cover (among other things) the Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary period with commendable specificity. For instance, students are to consider “efforts to mobilize support for the American Revolution by the Minutemen, Committees of Correspondence, First Continental Congress, Sons of Liberty, boycotts, and the Second Continental Congress.”

Indiana

• Many state standards rush through the last few decades of U.S. history, but Indiana encompasses Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and social programs, U.S.-Soviet relations (to the 1980s), the Vietnam War, Watergate, the Iran hostage crisis, the Iran-Contra scandal, the Clinton impeachment, the disputed 2000 election, the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and both Gulf Wars. Even such details as the air traffic controllers’ strike and the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Act are included.

Hawaii

• A particularly clear and specific standard from Hawaii lists “natural rights, government by the consent of the governed, and ‘all men are created equal’” for the key ideas of the Declaration of Independence.

Many states include standards that are so vague as to be instructionally meaningless, such as:

Delaware

• Students in grades six through eight are to “examine historical materials relating to a particular region, society, or theme; analyze change over time, and make logical inferences concerning cause and effect.”

Connecticut

• Students must “explain how specific individuals and their ideas and beliefs influenced U.S. history.”

Idaho

• Students are directed to “discuss the causes and effects of various conflicts in American history.”

Less egregious but still alarmingly thin examples include:

Minnesota

• Detail in the Minnesota standards often remains skimpy. For example, the state provides two bare examples—“Pequot War, French and Indian War”—to explain “the differences and tensions between the English colonies and American Indian tribes.”

Arkansas

• Students are asked merely to “Explain the political viewpoints of Patriots and Loyalists during the Revolutionary period” [fifth grade]).

Finally, some states pose broad and generic questions, but provide no specifics that outline what a student must know to answer them. For example:

Colorado

• “To what extent did individuals and their ideas contribute to the foundation of the United States government?”

California

• The introductory material in fifth grade encourages a balanced approach, noting the perspectives of different groups in colonial America (Europeans, Native Americans, Africans, etc.) without being tendentious or presentistic—that is, without judging the past through the lens of today’s values, standards, and norms. The English colonies are even explicitly identified as the essential core in the development of the United States—which is somewhat unusual these days.

The framework properly emphasizes the significance of American liberty rather than slavery, explaining that the inherent contradiction created new challenges to slavery during the Revolutionary period and after.

Multiple States

• In multiple states, the World War II home front is reduced to the experiences of women, African Americans, and interned Japanese Americans * students would hardly guess that all Americans participated in and were personally affected by the war effort. Political bias is, indeed, less strident in many cases than it was in 2003. Yet bias by selective emphasis is still bias.

Many states also prod students to fault the revolutionary generation for denying full equality to women and blacks — without explaining that in the context of the late eighteenth century, the idea of government based even on the votes of white, property owning males was itself radical and untested.

Far too many states promote the entirely mythic historical importance of the Iroquois League in American constitutionalism.

Arizona

• The Arizona standards promote the idea of the historical importance of the Iroquois League, but fail to mention the crucial experimentation that took place in the state constitutions between 1776 and 1781. When students are asked to analyze the experiences and perspectives of various groups in the Revolutionary era, the list of choices is extremely skewed—of the five groups, four are clearly intended as marginalized victims: African Americans, women, Native Americans, and indentured servants. The only other group mentioned is “property owners”—whom students are plainly meant to judge negatively in comparison.

North Dakota

• North Dakota offers this slanted, chronologically muddled, and historically nonsensical selection of famous Americans in the early grades: “George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Susan B. Anthony, Abraham Lincoln, Harriet Tubman, Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, César Chávez, [and] Sacagawea.”

Arizona

In discussing pre-contact cultures of the Americas, the Arizona standards present an idealized portrait of “the achievements and features (e.g., mathematics, astronomy, architecture)” of the Mayan, Aztec, and Inca civilizations. Surely, students should also learn about the existence of aggression, war, slavery, and human sacrifice in these cultures. Even as late as sixth grade, the standards merely add “government, social structure, [and] arts and crafts” to the earlier list of Mesoamerican achievements. Some of the more graphic details are probably inappropriate at the earliest grades, but leaving them out entirely is dishonest and misleading.

Connecticut

Second graders are asked to “explain the contributions of historical figures.” The diversity-driven examples include: “George Washington, Harriet Tubman, Sacagawea, Squanto, Abraham Lincoln, César Chávez, Martin Luther King, Jr., [and] Rosa Parks.” Third graders are to “explain the significance of events surrounding historical figures”— and the suggested examples consist of the same list of random names.

—The best standards in the nation are free from errors of distortion, omission, or outright error.

Connecticut

• In eighth grade, the U.S. history strand now receives nine grade-level expectations. For instance, students are again to describe “conflicts that have been resolved through compromise.” The bizarre example highlights “compromises over slavery”—a textbook example of a conflict that was not resolved through compromise, as the Civil War would seem to indicate.

Indiana

• There are occasional errors in the fifth-grade outline: John Adams’s election is incorrectly dated to 1798; John Singer Sargent is listed as a colonial artist, when John Singleton Copley is surely meant.

Arizona

• The high school section on the American Revolution likewise promotes the entirely mythic historical importance of the Iroquois League in American constitutionalism, yet fails to mention the crucial experimentation that took place in the state constitutions between 1776 and 1781.

New Mexico

• Students are to discuss “the economic and political reasons for the American Revolution,” yet the only example given is “attempts to regulate colonial trade through passage of Tea Act, Stamp Act and Intolerable Acts.” Even this example lacks specifics, and the acts are cited out of chronological order. Most importantly, though, the statement itself is wrong: The issue was taxation without consent, not trade regulation (which the colonies accepted until the eve of independence).
• After passing references to the Declaration of Independence and Articles of Confederation, major debates of the Constitutional Convention are mentioned, but the only example given is “the federalist papers [sic]” which were written after the convention to promote ratification.

Utah

• The state lists “Constitution ratification compromises” as the “3/5 Compromise, Great Compromise, [and the] Bill of Rights”—yet only the last of these emerged from the ratification debates; the first two compromises were reached at the Constitutional Convention in 1787.