Time running out to comment on revisions to Kentucky's Academic Standards for Social Studies

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The Kentucky Department of Education is running a public review of proposed changes to the state’s highly problematic social studies standards – sort of.

The review is required by provisions in Senate Bill 1 from the 2022 Regular Legislative Session that require at least 24 documents to be added to the Kentucky Academic Standards for Social Studies (KAS-SS) for middle and high schools.

A set of committees, a Review Committee and three Advisory Panels, has been working on this task for several months, and during September the Kentucky Department of Education’s contractor, AIR, Inc. has been running a web site to collect public comment.

But, as the National Association of Scholars’ (NAS) new letter points out, there are a lot of problems with the proposals.

In general, the NAS says:

We conclude that the Kentucky Department of Education has responded inadequately to the legislative mandate, that it should include a far greater range of primary sources in the KAS-SS, and that it should engage in far greater revisions of the KAS-SS to fulfill the spirit of the legislative mandate.

Massive disappointment with Kentucky’s vacuous 2019 edition of the social studies standards is nothing new at the Bluegrass Institute. A little after a year after this document was released, we published PRESERVING HISTORY, Problems with Kentucky’s Social Studies Standards, Must be Redone. It outlines a number of outrages, not the least being that Abraham Lincoln is never mentioned by name in this vacuous, vague and unsuitable document.

Now, even after some band aid treatment by the education community, the NAS points out that resulting document is still going to be highly unsuitable.

There is still time for the public to respond to the mess being proposed.

 However, if you try to use the web site there are some serious cautions to understand.

First, not all changes are properly listed. You will see a number of individual web pages for specific numbered standards being changed, but in the case of the high school standards, ALL of the changes under the “Clarification Statement” sections are actually material being added to the standards document, not just the parts in red typeface.

Even more misleading, not all the changes are shown in the individual web pages. The only way to look at what is really being proposed is to go all the way to the web page at the 75% complete point on the slider at the top of the web page and select the option to look at the Grade 9-12 PDF document.

By the way, this same, 75% done web page is the only place I see that allows you to enter freeform comments. However, entries might be length limited.

Also be advised, when you open this PDF document with the high school grades’ standards, it shows everything in black typeface. There are no strike throughs, no bold typeface to show proposed changes. So, it isn’t possible to easily see what is getting changed.

In fact, ALL of the high school Clarification Statements are new additions to the standards, but you can’t tell that from anything I have seen from the KDE. Other changes for areas other than Clarification Statements are also present in some cases, but there is no way to tell that in the PDF, either.

If you don’t feel like wading through the messy and at least somewhat misleading web site, you can also pen a letter to Mr. Todd Allen, the Chief Legal Counsel at the Kentucky Department of Education to be passed on to the Social Studies Standards Review Committee and Social Studies Standards Advisory Panels. Letters probably will reach those teams if submitted by September 30th. The E-mail is: todd.allen@education.ky.gov.

So, do look at what the NAS has to say about the standards even after the revisions are applied. Clearly, the document will remain vague and unsuitable. A much better option for our students would be to start over using the NAS American Birthright: The Civics Alliance’s Model K-12 Social Studies Standards as a template. In fact, our kids and schools really deserve to have that approach, not a continuation of vague and unworkable mush.