No more Texas history classes? Proposed social studies standards worry some educators

As the Texas State Board of Education works to retool the state’s guidelines for what and when students learn about history, civics and geography, some school officials in the Fort Worth area say they’re worried that the proposed standards the board is considering are unworkable.

The board is in the middle of the first major rewrite of the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills, or TEKS, for social studies in more than a decade. The standards dictate what Texas students are expected to know at each grade level.

The biggest changes in the proposed standards include a shift to a more chronological presentation of history in elementary and middle school and the elimination of stand-alone Texas history classes in fourth and seventh grades. State history would instead be included alongside other concepts across several grade levels.

The board held its first public hearing about the proposed changes on Aug. 1, with a second meeting scheduled later this month. The board plans to hold a final vote to adopt the proposals in November. The drafts are available online.

But social studies curriculum directors at some districts in Tarrant County say they’re worried that Texas history could become watered down under the proposed standards. They also say the proposed standards include concepts at the early grades that young children won’t be able to understand.

“There are a lot of things that we’re asking students to understand or be able to do that go far beyond what their conceptual understanding is for the world in general,” said Darsi Bickley, the social studies curriculum coordinator for the Northwest Independent School District.

Curriculum director is concerned about proposed standards

Bickley pointed to a section in the kindergarten standards that would require that students be able to explain what rights the 13 colonies demanded from Great Britain in the years leading up to the American Revolution. But kindergartners struggle to understand that Texas is a part of the United States, which is a part of North America, Bickley said. Most won’t be able to explain what Great Britain is and what the 13 colonies were, let alone how they related to each other, she said.

Likewise, the proposed standards require that kindergartners be able to explain that power in the federal government is shared among three branches. It might be possible to get a 5-year-old to memorize the names of the executive, legislative and judicial branches, Bickley said, but they won’t understand what those words mean.

The standards also require that kindergartners be able to identify different types of money used in countries around the world. But in an increasingly cashless society, most kindergartners rarely come into contact with paper money or coins, Bickley said.

“Getting them to understand currency in other parts of the world doesn’t even make sense when they can’t understand their own currency,” she said.

Kindergarten standards include high-level concepts

Another concern, Bickley said, is that elementary teachers might not be equipped to cover the material included in the new standards. Under the new standards, third-graders are supposed to learn world history from 20,000 BC to 600 BC. But elementary school teachers are generalists, not content area specialists, meaning most wouldn’t have deep knowledge in world history, she said.

The test the future teachers take to become certified to teach at the elementary level doesn’t include any world history, Bickley said. So colleges of education would have to revamp the way they prepare their students to teach at the elementary level, she said.

Although Bickley said her greatest concerns with the new standards are in the early grades, she also worries the standards for the upper grades would leave students with gaps in their knowledge. Current state standards require that schools offer stand-alone Texas history courses. The proposed standards would eliminate those courses and instead have students learn Texas history across several grades.

Bickley said she worries that students won’t get the full benefit of Texas history instruction if the state’s history is lumped together with U.S. history in a single class. Further, a shortage of teachers has districts in the Fort Worth area looking across state lines to recruit new educators. Teachers coming from out of state won’t have a background in Texas history, and may be inclined to give the state’s history short shrift and instead focus on U.S. history, she said.

“We’re… creating a situation where Texas history could truly not be taught to our students,” she said. “And that’s a big deal to a lot of Texans.”

If the board adopts the new standards, it would also be costly for most school districts, Bickley said. Since concepts would be covered at different grade levels, most districts in the state would have to buy new social studies textbooks and other materials, Bickley said. For example, Northwest ISD has materials for sixth-graders that cover world cultures, she said. Those materials would immediately become obsolete under the new standards, she said, because the new standards include world cultures at the first-grade level.

“You can’t give first-graders materials that you use with sixth-graders,” Bickley said. “That just doesn’t work.”

Speakers voice concerns to State Board of Education

During a State Board of Education meeting Aug. 1, dozens of speakers voiced their concerns about the new standards. Some accused the board of trying to strip out references to America’s Christian heritage. Others claimed that the proposed standards included critical race theory, an academic framework that looks at persistent inequalities in American society and seeks to explain how systemic racism contributes to those trends. State and local educational leaders have insisted that critical race theory is not taught in Texas classrooms.

Several speakers at the meeting said they were worried about the elimination of stand-alone Texas history courses. Many called for the board to approve an Asian American Studies course, similar to the ones it’s already approved to highlight the contributions of Mexican Americans and African Americans.

Ernie Moran, a Spanish teacher and soccer coach at Western Hills High School in the Fort Worth Independent School District, urged board members to adopt a statewide social studies curriculum that that doesn’t erase the history of discrimination in the state. Students of all backgrounds need a curriculum that includes the voices and experiences of indigenous communities, people of color, LGBTQ people and Texans from other marginalized communities — “students like the ones I have in my classroom,” he said.

Moran, who is also the father of three students in the district, said students need social studies instruction that is free from censorship and whitewashing.

“Our students deserve it,” Moran said. “They deserve honest, accurate, quality social studies curriculum that reflects the backgrounds and experiences of all students and Texans.”

Working group revised proposals after SBOE meeting

Meghan Dougherty, president of the Texas Social Studies Supervisors Association, said the proposed standards would represent a major shift away from the way social studies is taught at the elementary level now. Dougherty, who participated in the working group that drafted the standards, said the sequence of instruction in the new standards is entirely different from the current standards.

One of the key differences, Dougherty said, is that the proposed standards are designed to be more user-friendly for teachers. As the standards are currently written, related concepts may be scattered in several places, she said. So a teacher preparing for a unit on the American Revolution might need to search through the entire document to piece together all the concepts they need to cover, she said. The working group tried to streamline the proposed standards so that all those concepts could be found in a single place, she said.

Dougherty said the group intentionally included higher-level content at earlier grade levels in the proposed standards. Dougherty said it’s a common complaint that social studies isn’t taught well at the elementary level, and she thinks that’s at least in part because, as they’re currently structured, the standards are lacking in rigor at the early grades.

“The way that it’s currently written is fairly vague and, I don’t know, fluffy, for lack of a better word,” she said.

That being said, Dougherty, who works as a social studies instructional coach in Round Rock ISD, said the working group made some revisions to the proposed standards after the last State Board of Education meeting. The working group went through the standards to make sure content was age appropriate and made some revisions to make sure Texas history was firmly embedded in the middle school years, she said.

HEB curriculum director worried about Texas history

Marci Smith Deal, the social studies curriculum coordinator for the Hurst-Euless-Bedford Independent School District, said she’s also concerned about the elimination of the stand-alone Texas history courses. Presenting state history as a single class inherently shines a spotlight on it, she said. It also means teachers work from a specific curriculum written by professionals. When Texas history is blended with other subjects in a larger course of study, the opportunity for it to get lost increases dramatically, she said.

Deal said she’s also concerned about the lack of a spiral curriculum in the new standards. Advanced by American psychologist Jerome Bruner in the 1960s, the concept of spiraling curriculum means that students revisit the same skills and concepts at various points through their school careers, with the complexity of each concept building. The idea is that each concept is reinforced each time students encounter it, and new learning has a relationship with earlier learning. But under the proposed standards, teachers would present world history in a more chronological fashion, which Deal said she worries will lead to students learning “random bits of history, random content and random skills but not in a cohesive manner.”

UNT professor sees good and bad in proposed TEKS

Amanda Vickery, a professor of social studies education in the College of Education at the University of North Texas, said she saw some features in the proposed standards that she liked, and others that caused her concern. She’s noticed that the proposed standards make more of an attempt to include the voices and histories of diverse communities. For example, the proposed standards would have students learn not only about the immigration station at Ellis Island, but also about the one at Angel Island, a processing center in San Francisco Bay where hundreds of thousands of Asian immigrants entered the country between 1910 and 1940.

Vickery also pointed to a section in the second-grade standards that says that students will learn that “We the People” includes all people. The standards also say that students should be able to identify how the struggles of the past continue today, and what changes need to be made for a better future. That language is promising, Vickery said, because it looks like a shift away from social studies instruction that presents an overly rosy picture of the country and toward instruction that acknowledges problems that persist today.

But the proposed standards also include other shifts that could be more problematic, Vickery said. In the past, social studies at the kindergarten level began with talking about the students themselves and how they fit into their school community, their city and their state. As children got older, teachers would expand those horizons, moving into concepts at the national and international level, she said.

The proposed kindergarten standards include units walking students through their communities, Texas, the United States and the world. But they also include higher-level content like explaining how Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and Alexander Hamilton contributed to the founding of America, and how Sam Houston and Anson Jones contributed to the founding of Texas.

That content could be challenging for young students, Vickery said. Time is an abstract concept for 5-year-olds, she said, and they often struggle to understand how events fit in a historical context.

“When we talk about when things happened with the Pilgrims or the Civil War, I’ve had kindergartners ask me, ‘Was that when you were little?’” she said.

Vickery said she also worries about how the chronological nature of the proposed standards would affect what students learn. For example, the fourth-grade standards cover 500 BC to 900 AD. Theoretically, students will have covered the centuries leading up to that point in previous grades. But any student moving in from a state that doesn’t teach social studies until fourth grade, as many don’t, wouldn’t encounter that material again until high school.

Vickery said she also knows of districts in North Texas where principals tell teachers not to focus on social studies at the lower grades, because students aren’t tested in it until later on. Those students could also lose out on lessons about early human history, she said.

Vickery said she’s interested to see if the board approves the proposed standards in their current form.

“I think it’s a huge change,” she said. “And I think it’s going to take a while to get used to them.”