Social Studies Standards again, Oh, My!

In his weekly e-mail to district and school personnel Kentucky Commissioner of Education Stephen Pruitt made it clear that while the state’s social studies standards won’t change for the 2016-17 school year, he and his staff are still working on what he refers to as “Social Studies Standards for the Next Generation.” He also says these standards will be “forward-thinking.”

That doesn’t make me very comfortable.

The “history” of recent attempts to revise Kentucky’s social studies standards is not good.

The Kentucky Department of Education tried to float some “forward thinking” social studies standards back in 2014. The 2014 proposal was so outrageously bad that Kentucky’s history teacher of the year for 2011, Donnie Wilkerson, took personal time off to address the Kentucky Board of Education at its October 7, 2014 meeting about the many problems. While tearing apart the process used to develop the proposal, Wilkerson additionally pointed out that the proposal was “devoid” of history content.

And, so it was. Shortly after Wilkerson testified, I looked at some of the subjects in our current social studies standards that disappeared completely in the proposed revision. Here is my very incomplete listing of a few shocking examples.

Dropped Concepts and Specifics in New Social Studies Standards

Imagine that. There would be no statewide assurance that Kentucky’s children would ever again learn anything about any war the nation has ever fought! Even the American Revolution got the revisionist axe!

Can you imagine social studies standards for Kentucky that never mention our state’s constitution, either?

To be very sure, the proposal really was a “turkey,” as I pointed out at Thanksgiving in 2014 when I realized that “patriotism” and “pilgrim” were also totally missing terms in the document.

What makes this sad is that there are much better social studies standards out there. Massachusetts has some worth considering, and we could adopt them to Kentucky’s needs without a whole lot of effort.

In any event, curious about what is now being planned, I just took a look at the department’s Proposed Social Studies for the Next Generation web page. Links to the former, very bad proposal are gone. In fact, there isn’t any proposal at all listed on the page, not even the old, very deficient one. So, who knows what is being considered?

Still, the same folks who pushed the mess in 2014 are still working on this at the department, so pay attention as this goes forward.

By the way, this very bad proposal lives on where you can read it in the Kentucky Board of Education’s meeting materials for the October 7, 2014 meeting.

There is no telling what the current proposal looks like, since it isn’t online at the department’s web site. Let’s hope what we get looks a lot like what Massachusetts uses. If we wind up with anything even remotely close to the nonsense that was proposed in 2014………