Virginia is about to release its history standards but the state board of education has held them up for further review—by the Fordham Institute.
The Virginia Board of Education is delaying its public hearings on the state’s new history and social science standards by a month to address concerns with timing and a number of errors and content issues Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s administration said were in the proposal.
The board’s schedule called for the mandated public hearings to occur in August. The board agreed to give the staff time to make certain corrections in the document and begin the public hearing process starting in September, between the September and October meetings.
At a Wednesday board meeting in Richmond, Superintendent of Public Instruction Jillian Balow recommended against the board moving the draft standards forward for review, instead urging members to allow the proposal to undergo further development by Virginians and national experts prior to its acceptance.
The standards outline Virginia’s expectations for student learning in K-12 history and social science education and are assessed through the Standards of Learning tests. Virginia code requires the board to review the standards every seven years to update content and reflect current academic research.
“We’re on our way to having the best standards in the nation, and I don’t want any of us to settle for anything less,” said Balow.
Among Balow’s criticisms of the draft standards was their use of the word “succession” instead of “secession.” She also referenced the removal of the “Father of our Country” title for George Washington and “Father of the Constitution” title for James Madison, which the Department of Education has said was done in error.
Suparna Dutta and William Hansen, two of the newest board members, said they would not feel comfortable moving forward with the current proposal.
“I think we owe it to ourselves to take a pause for the five new members here, to be able to get our sea legs under us a little bit, and to have a better understanding,” Hansen said.
However, Board President Daniel Gecker said the department has had the document for seven months and that content and correction issues are the responsibility not of the board, but of department staff. He also said the entire board received the draft proposal simultaneously.
Sarah Johnson, a Chesterfield resident who spoke during the Wednesday meeting, said delaying the review process for the new standards is “unfair” to students and costly for taxpayers. She noted that the process has included input from a number of students and industry experts in education and history, and over 5,000 comments have been submitted.
“This begs the question, Who was the superintendent attempting to please?” Johnson said.
Zowee Aquino, policy and communications team lead at the nonprofit Hamkae Center, was one of several people who urged the board to move the draft standards forward.
“The proposed SOLs should proceed,” Aquino said. “Experts have weighed in and so many residents are ready to engage.”
In a surprise visit to the board meeting, the first to be held since the governor’s appointees assumed a majority on the body, Youngkin stressed the importance of the Board of Education in developing policies and improving student achievement, including through the revision of the standards for history and social science.
“I want us to teach all of our history in Virginia, the good and the bad,” Youngkin said.
The revisions are “an opportunity for us to set a standard for what it means to educate our children in all of the lessons — again, I’ll repeat, the good and the bad — but also the amazing progress that we’ve made in this country and yet the times we failed,” he said. “This is the moment for us to take a really, really serious look at how we are teaching this most important topic.”
Youngkin campaigned heavily on education issues, including critical race theory, a graduate-level framework that focuses on racial inequity and has not been found in Virginia curricula. His first executive order, issued on Inauguration Day,prohibited the use of “inherently divisive concepts,” including CRT, in K-12 education and ordered the state to raise academic standards.
On Wednesday, Mary Ann Burke, who described herself as a mother to three public school graduates, took aim at the governor’s executive order and urged the board to continue its review as scheduled.
“We maintain that all evidence-based history is not ‘divisive’ if it is true,” Burke said. “It is essential that Virginia students learn the complete and honest history, including the history of our African American citizens.”
The Board of Education launched the review process of the history and social science standards nearly two years ago. The board, along with a committee of curriculum leaders and higher education faculty members, met repeatedly to discuss the revision of the standards between October 2020 and June 2021.
Public input was collected simultaneously in the spring of 2021, followed by a number of virtual meetings with VDOE staff to reconcile the standards in February 2022. Over 5,000 comments and input from 200 committee members were included in the draft that came before the board Wednesday.
Prior to Wednesday’s meeting, public hearings and the final approval were expected in September and on Nov. 17, respectively.
The department said the standards could go into effect as early as 2024.
Chad Stewart, a policy analyst with the Virginia Education Association, said the group is “generally” pleased with the revisions and sees a “significant improvement” compared to previous standards.
Edward Ayers, a historian and former president of the University of Richmond, said the revised standards could move Virginia students beyond memorizing names and dates “to lead the nation in a sort of inquiry-based learning in social studies that we’ve long used in science and in business education.”
“There is, in fact, no more useful subject than understanding your own country,” Ayers said. “We have an obligation to teach that history with what we know, and fortunately, you folks are on the right track.”
Fordham/Ohio Dept. of Ed.-
The Hill reported that the largest teachers union in Ohio is on strike- Columbus.
Reportedly, Ohio is 6th in the nation in total number of students..
OMG……just call it the GOP Youth Groups Indoctrination Curriculum!
Done!
I suspect, the entire so-called curriculum is DONE,
ready to sell & ZILLION$ in the Bank!
FOXtv will be considered a reliable source!
PEARSON is ready!
Let the INDOCTRINATION-PROPAGANDA-MACHINES run 24/7.
SOS…..SAVE OUR STUDENTS!
frighteningly well said…
Fordham is the camel with its nose in the tent- ask Ohioans.
Fordham promotes privatization while, reportedly, 40.1% of Ohio’s charter schools are failing and only 1.5% of public schools are (Noah Webster Educational Foundation). And, most of the voucher money goes to one religious sect.
Virginians should read Richard Phelps’ chronology of Fordham at
Non-Partisan Education Review.
key words: most of of the voucher money goes to one religious sect
Omg…the foxes are in the hen house.
Youngkin is apparently another fascist RINO Republican.
ForWhoredham InstituteFixed.
Full name:
The Fordham Institute for Ensuring Large Contributions from Oligarchs to Pay the Generous Salaries of Officers of the Fordham Institute
Oooo, Fordham. Tell me again how masterful I am, how generous, how beloved and brilliant and right about things.
–The American Oligarch
If some Oligarch started paying big $$$ to folks who promoted doing nothing but watching Bugs Bunny films in Grades K-6, Fordham would become Loony Tuna Central. Hmmm. Come to think of it, it’s already kind loony tuna.
The hilarious thing is when they just make stuff up (and leave out all the important variables) and call it a white paper. Utterly meretricious, these people. their approach: Tell me, Mr. Oligarch, what conclusions you want, and I will write a “study” “proving” those.
Only the insiders get the joke
White paper ” is short for Whitewash paper
Or maybe it was Whiteout paper
Or Whiteman paper?
Or was it Walter White paper?
Or are they called white papers because there is nothing on them?
Whitelie paper?
Whitewhale paper?
Particularly fond of Walter White Papers and Whitey Bulger Papers.
But keeping it simple, Whitey Papers, works.
“White makes right” paper
Whiteybulger paper?
Great white Hope paper?
Ok, I’ll stop. I can’t remember the punchline.
Too many possibilities.
How about white man wash out with whale lies hope paper.
The term comes from color-coding of reports in Washington–white (unclassified, general public access) to orange (top secret, ultra-sensitive, access to anyone who looks into a closet at Mar-al-Lago).
Thanks for the blurb on the oranges of white papers.
Now it’s clear why Trump was attracted to the classified docs.
The oranges!!! Haaaaa!
Poet-
Love your take.
See Fordham Institute’s 377-pp “The State of State Standards for Civics and U.S. History in 2021,” published just over a year ago. The bios of the 5 authors look appropriate. I skipped right to their detailed review of my state’s [NJ’s] standards, which they deemed “mediocre.” Their main issue was that Civics is subsumed into US [& World] History courses, with mixed & somewhat problematic results. [Fordham recommends a series of History courses with a separate course on Civics]. They made their case well. Their comments on History framework were very good. They highlighted innovative & perceptive strands– noting where there was insufficient follow-through– & criticized overly vague, global goals with no guidance on how to accomplish.
This document likes VA’s standards well enough [“B+”] – re: their 2015 stds & minor modifications made in 2020, before the current re-write was started. Lots of specific detail on strengths, weaknesses, recommended modifications. VA should probably have brought Fordham Inst in at the beginning, rather than the end of their process. If they’ve done a lot of damage to their existing stds I’ll bet Fordham will send them back to the drawing board.
Most people on this blog love to hate on the Fordham Institute because of their push for Charter schools, but sometimes (on certain issues) Fordham gets it right. If one can drown out the yackity- yack from Petrilli and with Finn in retirement, Pondiscio makes some well thought out assumptions and ideas about education and curriculum.
There is a weird schizo thing going on at Fordham. On the one hand, they sensibly support the ideas of E.D. Hirsch, Jr., about the importance of knowledge-based instruction. On the other, they totally do not grok that those ideas are completely incompatible with accountability based on invalid tests of extraordinarily vague, almost entirely content free, skills-based “standards.” They appear to be clueless that Hirsch himself came majorly to regret his support for the skill-based Common Core, which he was initially seduced into giving a nod to when he was promised that they would lead to a great return to substantive texts. But, ofc, that’s not what happened, and Hirsh came to see this pretty quickly. What ended up mattering with regard to the Common [sic] Core [sic] was the vague, backward, puerile, skills-based “standards” themselves, not the call to read substantive texts, and in fact, substantive work got pushed out in favor of skill-based CC$$ test prep, which is PRECISELY the kind of thing that Hirsch spent his career railing against. And, ofc, Fordham loves vouchers and charter schools and other means for creating Christian nationalist fundamentalist madrassas.
Oops. Error, above, was instead of were.
Ginny, my long note on Fordham and curricula is in moderation, alas. Thanks for your comment.
Everything I write today is in moderation.
Obviously immoderate.
Moderation in the defense of mediocrity is not an option. But hey, I am preaching to the choir.
Should have seen me in the sixties. I was WAY “mod.” Nehru shirt, gypsy shirt with brocaded roses, bellbottoms, shoulder-length hair, bowler hat with a thick trim of white lace. Mandolin or dulcimer hanging from a strap around the neck. Yeah, baby.
Got it already Bob. Very interesting on Fordham Inst’s oxymoronic positions, thanks.
Often my comments go into moderation, too. The Fickle Finger of WordPress. Our beloved host must have to waste an hour daily pulling stuff out of moderation.
Yeah, I often think of that. What a waste of Diane’s precious time and superb mind!
Oxymoronic with emphasis on the moronic. It’s astonishing to me that the CC$$ weren’t laughed off the national stage the moment they appeared, but that didn’t happen because teachers and administrators had already been softened up by the equally moronic skill-based state “standards” that preceded them. However, and here’s the rub, when the CC$$ appeared, these were suddenly national, and accountability to them became everything. In the past, people had basically given lip service to the idiotic state “standards” and gone ahead and prepared substantive curricula. Hiliariously, every textbook program ever produced was “perfectly aligned” to every set of these state “standards,” according to documents that the educational publishers paid people to produce. So, it really didn’t matter that the state “standards” were so bad. They really didn’t have much SUBSTANTIVE effect on curricula and pedagogy. But when CC$$ appeared, another mindless list of vague, abstract skills, they became all important because suddenly it was a single national list, the list was what was being tested by standardized tests, and evaluations of teachers, administrators, and schools were tied to those test outcomes. So, the previous state standards and the CC$$ were equally stupid, but suddenly, the “standards” were very much in the driver’s seat, and they drove US pedagogy and curricula over a cliff. The fact is that before the CC$$, in the era of differing state “standards,” the “standards” were pretty much just given lip service to, despite all the time wasted on them. The exact same textbook would be sold in all fifty states and “perfectly correlated” to every set of standards of every state (and even to district-specific standards). Almost no one understands the real history here. It’s not pretty. It’s more than a little farcical. And in the end, it’s tragic. For kids, for teachers.
The vague, abstract, skills-based “standards” lists grew out of a progressive education idea: the world is constantly changing; give kids the skills they need, because the facts change; don’t subject them to “rote memorization.” LMAO. It often happens in education that people have an extremely fuzzy idea and run with it without really testing it objectively. So, people remembering their awful history tests about dates and names of battles (those rote facts lists) led to these stupid, vague skills lists being thought of as proper educational “standards.” And then Gates needed a single national list to correlate computerized instruction and testing to, because he wanted to eliminate schools for prole kids and replace them with computerized instruction. And so Coleman and crew hacked together a puerile list based on existing puerile lists, hyped it as the next big thing, and this was tied to tests and accountability, and K-12 ELA pedagogy pushed out everything else and became breathtakingly dumbed down into test prep and coherent, substantive lessons became history except where individual teachers refused to go with that nasty flow from “think tanks” and astroturf political groups funded by Gates.
Succinct wrap-up, Bob. I especially like the background on pre-CCSS state standards. Thanks! That’s going right into my archives!
Before reviewing the history standards of others, Fordham Institute’ should review their own history of standards.
If they did it in an unbiased way (which is impossible, I know), Fordham would find that invariably, Fordham’s conclusions and/or suggestions correlate perfectly with the ideologies and policies of Fordham’s funders.
Now, I am not among those who (like Fordham) subscribe to the idea that correlation implies a causal relationship, but let’s just say that a perfect correlation is curious and leave it at that.
Fordham services its oligarchical clients extremely well.
And gets remunerated correspondingly well. It REALLY pays to be on the Deformer side of the education wars. That’s why quite a few education gurus completely sold out when the Common [sic] Core [sic] and the new generation of tests hit. People in for years had been talking about the importance of formative testing and railing against substantive testing, for example, nationally known people who were always being invited to speak at conferences and to consult with school districts, suddenly became big converts to high-stakes testing of the backward, ignorant, puerile Gates/Colman bullet list.
No one would ever hire a think tank like Fordham if they actually wanted an honest, unbiased assessment based on legitimate research and expertise in a particular area.
In fact, the only reason they would hire them is if they had certain expectations about the outcome of the assessment based on the historical record of the think tank.
The purpose of think tanks is certainly not to do legitimate research and/or assessment. It is to reinforce preconceived notions — and, of course, to get paid for doing so.
Think tanks are places where thinking tanks.
Propaganda institutions pretending to scholarship.
These guys used to describe themselves in their bios as “thought leaders.” LOL. I lead people around by the nose to prevent them from having to think anything disagreeable or uncomfortable.
People who believe otherwise should answer these questions:
Why are think tanks even needed if their purpose is to do legitimate research? Isn’t that why we have universities with PhDs who are actually educated and trained in the relevant areas?
And to paraphrase Upton Sinclair: How can one expect a think tank to reach certain conclusions if their funding depends on their not reaching those conclusions?
Exactly
Think tanks, lobbyists/activists and some high ups in the Ivy academia = the 4th branch of the government. K Street IS the Deep State. If only more people would understand this.
Yes, Lisa.
A perfect correlation, that is a 1:1 correlation indicates/is causation.
You get the joke
What is the basis for the legitimacy of Fordham? What are the credentials of Fordham’s staff and who was charged with reviewing them? What is the organization’s record relative to integrity? Was it reviewed? We are talking about public interest, was there a competitive process to select Fordham for the job or, is it the god ole’ boys network?
What a governor wants, a governor gets.
…except when it comes to women in the office (as Andrew Cuomo found out)
There should be a rolling van playing this song on loudspeakers in front of think tanks and statehouses.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/marble-freedom-trust-dark-money-donation_n_63046a10e4b052615d744875
Leonard Leo, described by Clarence Thomas as “No. 3 most powerful person in the world”
The Wikipedia entry for Thomas Lindsay (connected to Barre Seid) is interesting.
I was a member of the board at Fordham until 2009. There is no special expertise there. Few, if any, of its staff or board was ever a teacher. Most experience is having worked in a GOP administration.
Political review of academic material is futile. Standards, Written lists of academic goals are always going to narrow education rather than broaden it. When accompanied by testing, it narrows it harshly, making the sum of the total ideas in the lists like roots that go into very shallow soil. Soon the plant perishes in the inevitable drought.
“. . .Youngkin stressed the importance of the Board of Education in developing policies and improving student achievement, including through the revision of the standards for history and social science.”
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. . . whoa Nellie someone throw a bucket of ice water on me to stop me from laughing so hard.
So much BS packed into so few words. Amazing!
Youngkin campaigned heavily on education issues. . . , and ordered the state to raise academic standards.
And by command so it was. . . .
Let’s go back to an older thought: If America was the greatest country on the earth how did we get to that point well before there were “academic standards” in place, i.e., pre-2001?
One can easily contend that the academic standards (and testing) malpractice regime is responsible for many harms done to students through a bastardization of the teaching and learning process.
Don’t give a damn about “raising academic standards”!
The Youngkinistas will answer by suggesting that America became great because of all the perfect Christian attitudes that promoted the advancement of a vigorous culture. Nonwithstanding the ignoring of other influences not as uplifting (the various exploitation’s and natural deviance), this narrative is attracting attention because collective guilt makes people uncomfortable.
My favorite unintentionally funny Ed Deform line ever is George Bush, Jr’s: “I solved the education problem on my first day in office.”
Said with utter seriousness. OMG.
“Edward Ayers, a historian and former president of the University of Richmond, said the revised standards could move Virginia students beyond memorizing names and dates “to lead the nation in a sort of inquiry-based learning in social studies that we’ve long used in science and in business education.””
Okay, where are my hip boots? There are so many blathering absurdities in this post that it’s getting deep. I may need to switch to my chest waders.
Clueless. No notion what is actually done in history classes by history teachers. For example, most K-12 history programs now have a significant document-based learning component. Has Dr. Ayers ever heard of this? Does he have any idea what it is? Has he actually looked at a middle-school or high-school history textbook program and its ancillaries, in print and online, in the last 40 years? I would put the chances of that between extremely doubtful and not a chance in oh heck.
(Trying to avoid being put in moderation again.)
When asked to comment on K-12 education, most of these people just expel hot air.
Inquiry based history?
What does that mean?
Doing experiments to determine what happened?
One can only imagine what the World War experiments would entail.