Education Week - April 6, 2022 - 8

Louisiana's History Standards
Got a Closed-Door Rewrite.
What's In and What's Out
Amid a volatile debate
over how to teach
about America's past,
state officials altered
educators' proposed
standards
By Stephen Sawchuk
In an echo of what happened last year in South
Dakota, unnamed state officials in Louisiana have
rewritten an educator-drafted set of K-12 history
expectations after fielding politicized claims that
it embodied a negative view of America.
Louisiana's final set of guidelines, which its
state board of education approved unanimously
March 9, differs substantially both in content
and overall approach from what its own committee
of educators submitted last September.
The Pelican State's completed standards are
far more detailed and specific than the earlier
draft, especially in U.S. History and civics. And
while officials at the Louisiana education department
fleshed out content on slavery, civil
rights, and important Black luminaries, they
also removed the prior draft's many references
to " diverse groups, " -including its sole mention
of LGBTQ people.
Some of the original writers protest the completed
standards' different emphasis, which they
say focuses less on historical inquiry, a teaching
method that requires coverage of fewer topics in
more depth.
" Teachers had complained that even starting
after Reconstruction, it's hard to get through all
the material, and here they've added 200 years, "
said Lynn Walters-Rauenhorst, a teacher-educator
who worked on the high school standards.
" There was never a time where the department
came to us and said, 'We have concerns with
this. Can we wordsmith it?'
" I think it just speaks in general to the continued
attack on teachers and their professionalism, "
she said.
About the only thing everyone agrees on is
that the new set emphasizes American exceptionalism.
State Superintendent Cade Brumley,
in an interview, called the standards a " freedom
framework " that shows how Americans have
continued to perfect their country.
Some of these tensions-between specificity
and flexibility, patriotism and critique-are inherent
in the difficult challenge of writing K-12
history expectations. Plenty of room for disagreement
exists.
But the situation also reflects a seething political
maelstrom over what students should
learn about the country's past that has engulfed
several states' attempts to update their expectations.
The development in Louisiana is also,
potentially, a bigger symptom of how these disagreements
are affecting governance: The revision
of content standards behind closed doors
remains a rare phenomenon, but it's getting less
rare.
" In general, we've got this erosion of trust
and belief that the experts really are experts,
replaced with the idea that all experts are really
ideological hacks, " said Paul Manna, a professor
of political science at the College of William
and Mary, who studies public policymaking
in education. " There's just a loss of respect for
opinions based on research and evidence. "
A look at the changes
Last year, South Dakota's education department
significantly altered a draft of standards
teachers and experts had put together. And as in
that state, Louisiana officials haven't disclosed
who precisely made the revisions.
Here are some of the changes Louisiana
officials made to the September 2021 draft:
* It puts more emphasis on foundational
documents, like the Constitution, the Federalist
Papers, and the Declaration of Independence,
which are referenced in several grades.
* Third grade is now a continuation of the
2nd grade focus on U.S. foundations. The
earlier draft made 3rd grade the beginning of a
sequence on world history.
* The final standards strike the earlier draft's
references-about a dozen in all-to " diverse
individuals, " " diverse groups, " or " diverse
cultures. " And they omit the former draft's
single reference to LGBTQ people.
* The department eliminated a standard that
asked students to analyze a contemporary
problem, evaluate the expense and feasibility
of solutions, and construct an argument in
favor of one of them, apparently over concerns
about " action civics. "
* The standards preserve and even expand a
focus on slavery, referencing the topic more
than 30 times-far more than the earlier
draft-and contain specific expectations for
students to learn about the Middle Passage,
the dependence of the country's economics
on slavery, and the civil rights movement's key
developments.
* The high school history class begins with the
8 | EDUCATION WEEK | April 6, 2022 | www.edweek.org
traditional topic of the Jamestown settlement in
1607; the original draft envisioned beginning in
1898, giving teachers more time to dig into 20th
century content.
Brumley said many of the changes were made
in direct response to the public feedback on the
original draft, which was generally negative.
But it is not clear how representative that feedback
was of parents' opinions at large: Education
Week found that many of those comments
were cut and pasted from interest-group commentary-notably
a document put out by the farright
National Association of Scholars.
In any case, state officials used the Thomas B.
Fordham Institute's review of history standards
to identify other states deemed to have strong
expectations; they drew on those states' standards
to shape the final draft. (The right-leaning
nonprofit has tended to give higher marks to
standards that are specific and detailed, rather
than broad.)
" I think the standards we put forward are very
balanced, " Brumely said. " We made the decision
that we wanted to be very inclusive of content,
tell as much of the story of our country and
state's history as time would allow in a given academic
year. We corrected the course sequencing,
and we tried to add rigor, which I feel like we
did, and include multiple historical perspectives,
which I know we did. "
The standards' specificity also explains the
elimination of the adjective " diverse, " Brumley
said.
" Instead of using a broad word, [we wanted
to] be much more specific with the content experienced
by diverse individuals in the state of
Louisiana and in our country, " he said, noting
that he'd had " hundreds " of conversations with
parents and community members on this issue.
" I tried to capture and relay back to our team
some of the most important events and individuals
that people felt like should be captured. "
That did not, apparently, include LGBTQ
Americans. The removal of that standard, Brumley
said, was directly linked to the public comments:
" We saw a pattern of feedback of people
who did not feel that high school civics was the
place for discussions around sexual orientation. "
Some of the writers of the original drafts say
those changes traduce the very tenets the state
education board laid out for the process, which
included shifting to an approach that prioritizes
historical inquiry using primary sources.
The changes, Walters-Rauenhorst said, instead
seem to straight-jacket teachers.
An attempt to remove 'CRT,'
or just cynical politics?
The subtext to the situation in Louisiana-as in
other states-has been the national debate over
whether and how to teach about the history of
American racism, at what grade and age levels,
and its connection to public policy today.
When the original draft was made public last
year, commentators accused the writers of embedding
critical race theory into the standards, a
charge they vehemently denied. The feedback at
public meetings got so intense that the state department
had to change safety protocols, escorting
the educators back to their cars and reducing
the number of people allowed to comment at a
time.
(Critical race theory is an academic framework
that posits that racism can be embedded in laws,
structures, and policies. Critics of this idea have
since applied the term to a host of other diversity
initiatives and training.)
Brumley has demurred on whether he personally
believes the initial draft contained critical
race theory, but he has pointed to this public
feedback as one rationale for the changes.
For some of the writers, cynical politics-
not a commitment to excellence-explain the
Illustration by Laura Baker/Education Week (Images: Orensila and iStock/Getty)
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Education Week - April 6, 2022

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