Art Marmorstein: Education standards are the result of decades of revisions
Despite decades of revisions—and sometimes because of decades of revisions — South Dakota’s K-12 education standards are awful. They’re difficult to understand, filled with convoluted language, often developmentally inappropriate, and frequently on the wrong track altogether — just like the K-12 standards of most other states.
Somehow, the standards-revision process always seems to go awry. The state spends plenty of money to bring fine teachers and scholars to Pierre to work on the standards. There’s plenty of opportunity for both online and in-person input from interested members of the public. But the standards never seem to get any better.
I had hoped that, when the Federal Department of Education quit pushing things like No Child Left Behind and Common Core, states would finally get on the right track—and they may yet. But before that happens, there will have to be a radical rethinking of what standards should look like.
The South Dakota Department of Education’s proposed new social studies standards are a good example of the problem.
There’s much to like in the proposed standards. They’re demanding, thorough, and focused on the skills and knowledge essential to well-informed citizens.
Unfortunately, the proposed standards still partly reflect an educational philosophy anything but conducive to responsible citizenship. Like the last several attempts to reform social studies standards, the new standards retain the outcome-based format favored by bureaucrats and despised by many of those committed to high-quality education.
A major, usually valid, criticism of outcome-based education is that it takes a lowest-common-denominator approach, setting goals far too low for average students let alone their more gifted peers.
The new standards proposal tries to avoid this by establishing exceptionally high standards for all students. It calls for advanced skills at every grade level—and lots and lots of information. Rightly trying to counteract the de-emphasis of factual knowledge that’s been so prevalent in recent years, the new standards spell out specifically all the things students should know — or at least they try. The new standards are 130 pages long — three times as long as the 2015 state social studies standards.
But once one starts down that rabbit hole of listing all the things students are supposed to know and do, where do you stop? The 2015 standards included little on Native American history and culture with only vague references to Federal Indian policy and native/white conflicts: a problem. The new proposal is better, including mentions of figures like Crazy Horse, Tecumseh, and many more. But no mention of the Great Buffalo Hunt or the Minnesota Uprising? Well, you can’t include everything. And that’s just the point.
Now I have to admit that, as an ancient historian, I’m delighted to see so many of my favorite Roman figures specifically mentioned. We’ve got Cicero, Caesar, Marcus Aurelius, Hadrian, Justinian, and many more.
But that’s overkill. All that’s really needed is a set of standards that asks teachers to cover the rise of the Roman Republic, the Roman Revolution, Imperial Rome, and the fall of the Roman Empire. Adopting curriculum standards that provide an overall plan for what teachers should cover at each grade level while leaving teachers free to fill in the details for themselves (the old way of approaching standards) would be clearer and better.
Social studies education is a battlefield right now, with many on the left pushing a 1619-project-style denigration of America’s founding principles and many on the right pushing a 1776-project-style affirmation of traditional America. Left and right are fighting over the heritage of Western civilization idea as well. “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go,” chanted protestors at Stanford some years ago, and Western civilization is disappearing — in more than one sense.
The new social studies standards proposal does much to affirm traditional American and Western values — a needed corrective to an educational system that has drifted too much in the opposite direction. In terms of content, they’re a big improvement over the status quo.
But the changes aren’t quite thorough enough. Getting social studies education (and education in general) back on the right track requires jettisoning altogether the language and methods of the bureaucratic/corporate education complex including, especially, outcome-based education.
Art Marmorstein, Aberdeen, is a professor of history at Northern State University.
This article originally appeared on Aberdeen News: Education standards are the result of decades of revisions
