Donnie Wilkerson, Kentucky’s history teacher of the year in 2011, has not been reluctant to point out problems with the development of Kentucky’s new social studies standards ever since the problems began way back in 2014.Now, he updates his comments at the public hearing for the regulation that will formally adopt the proposed revision with examples of how his rich social studies presentations today for his fifth-grade students will be trashed by Kentucky’s proposed social studies standards revision.

Donnie first discusses how rich his current instructional program really is. He then discusses how the proposed changes to elementary school social studies will eliminate a huge amount of important material for elementary school students and finally explains that this is driven by unproved fad education notions about how social studies is best taught.

Clearly, the new proposal needs to go back to the shop for a lot more work, including adding back in many missing historical personages like Abe Lincoln, Martin Luther King, and a host of others.

I have also chimed in with some of my concerns, which you can read by clicking here.

But, give a listen to teacher Wilkerson’s comments and see how his really cool classes in history are about to get turned on their ear if intelligent people don’t act.

By the way, while the public comment period on the regulation has now closed, you can always contact state board of education members to urge them to pull these not-ready-for-prime-time standards back and do more work on them.

Individual board member e-mail addresses are found here.

Also, the regulation that adopts the new standards still has to go before several legislative committees. Those legislators will need to make it clear that Kentucky doesn’t want formal mention of people like Abe Lincoln, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Benjamin Franklin and a host of others to be dropped from our social studies standards.

Actually, I don’t think any legislator would want to have to go home to his or her constituents and explain how that happened. Do you?