Teachers, school officials, historians and advocacy groups are expressing anger this week after a new draft of the Virginia social studies standards appears to have largely thrown out a version of the draft that experts spent months developing.
“I don’t see this as a re-draft, I see this as a new draft,” said Norfolk State University’s Cassandra Newby-Alexander, a history professor and co-chair of the Virginia Commission on African American History Education. Newby-Alexander was involved in the development of the original 2022 standards which were released this summer.
“There are a lot of things that I find very problematic and concerning in this new iteration,” Newby-Alexander said. “First and foremost, because it is not a redraft, it is a new draft, it should go through the same process as the other one that was presented to the board.
The standards were up for review this year per Virginia law, which requires standards for each subject to be reviewed at least once every seven years. The process began nearly two years ago, and the initial draft — just over 400 pages — was ready for review this summer.
But the board held off on reviewing the draft in August per a request from the Superintendent of Public Instruction Jillian Balow, who wanted to address some “omissions and typos,” according to a Department of Education spokesman. Then in October, Balow told the board she was still waiting on input from various groups, including from representatives at American University, Hillsdale College and the University of Virginia.
Last Friday, ahead of this week’s State Board of Education meeting, a new, 53-page draft of the standards was released.
Sookyung Oh is the director of Hamkae Center, a group focused on organizing Asian Americans to achieve racial, economic and social justice. Oh said the delays in reviewing the standards had been framed as a chance for omissions and typos to be corrected and give time to new members — Gov. Glenn Youngkin appointed five new faces to the nine-member board in September — to review the draft. But she said the draft shows Balow was convening her own experts to “completely re-write the proposed standards.”
“She threw out thousands of hours of work by hundreds of qualified professionals, right here in Virginia, so that she could work with groups outside of Virginia, like the Michigan-based Hillsdale College,” Oh said.
James Fedderman, president of the Virginia Education Association, said the draft represents “the worst kind of politically motivated meddling with academic curriculum.”
Fedderman said the draft appears to have been largely taken from the Hillsdale 1776 Curriculum, which has been criticized by historians for inaccuracies and biases as it was adopted in other states.
“The standards are full of overt political bias, outdated language to describe enslaved people and American Indians, highly subjective framing of American moralism and conservative ideals (and) coded racist overtures throughout,” Fedderman said.
He also expressed concern that the standards placed a restriction on “teacher-created curriculum,” which are permitted in other subject areas.
Ian Prior, founder of the advocacy organization Fight for Schools, said, “History is a function of human nature, conflict, and progress. It can be inspiring, it can be dark, and it can be challenging to teach and learn. These proposed changes to history and social studies education address those challenges by providing students with an objective knowledge of historical facts and an understanding of human nature that drives both conflict and progress.
“Applied correctly by educators in the classroom, it will unlock key critical thinking skills that students can use to make their own analysis and decision as they mature into young leaders.”
Virginia Beach Superintendent Aaron Spence said though he acknowledges some improvements were introduced into the new draft, he is concerned about the lack of transparency about the process.
“In Virginia, we are accustomed to a transparent process of policymaking and governance, and to engagement with the public and with the professional educators of the commonwealth,” Spence said. “And this state superintendent seems intent on making sure that that doesn’t happen.”
Spence also questions some of the sequencing and omissions in the new draft.
He said some of the sequencing changes can have significant implications for school divisions, in terms of teacher training and curriculum support services.
Among Spence’s concerns about content are that Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Juneteenth and Veterans Day were eliminated from the curriculum for the early grades. He also does not understand the “historical framing” of Native Americans as the nation’s “first immigrants.”
Many other groups, including the Virginia Social Studies Leaders Consortium, expressed similar concerns about content changes. Other alterations they noted include an emphasis on Western civilizations, the removal of contributions from the Sikh and the Asian American Pacific Islander communities, as well as the elimination of many of the edits from the Commission on African American History Education.
Department of Education officials say the new draft eliminates redundancies and only includes standards. Curriculum frameworks — which offer suggestions for instructional resources, student activities, evaluation materials and pacing — will be issued separately after the board approves the standards.
In a presentation going over the new draft, officials describe some of the changes from the summer version:
— A more thorough treatment of slavery, Reconstruction, the Jim Crow era and the Civil Rights Movement across all grade levels
— A more thorough introduction to the Constitution and the branches of government in the early grades
— The presentation of content in unbiased and dispassionate language
— The revision of “vague skills-based standards subject to multiple interpretations by teachers”
— The creation of a “staircase” of standards that build students’ understanding of the rights and responsibilities of citizenship
The presentation also states that recommended changes to sequence “promote consistency in the content taught at each grade level across the Commonwealth.”
According to a timeline presented by the Department of Education, the standards will be up for a first review at Thursday’s meeting, followed by public engagement sessions in November and December. The department did not specify who would attend the sessions or how people would be selected. A spokesman said further details about the sessions would be provided at a later time.
The Hamkae Center, along with other groups, are planning a rally Thursday morning. The “Rally for Our Voices, Our Education” will be at 11:30 a.m. outside the James Monroe Building in Richmond — participants will call for the Board of Education to reject the draft standards.
Public hearings are scheduled for early January, and final review and adoption are expected in February.
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