As printed textbooks increasingly gather dust in classroom bookshelves, a new and expansive survey published Sept 19 finds that US social studies teachers are turning to digital sources and primary documents from the nation’s past.
While the most popular curriculum providers are not ideologically skewed, the report warned about a trend of “moralistic cues” in some left-leaning school districts, with lessons that seemed to direct students toward viewing American history in an “emotional” manner, as a string of injustices.
In conservative areas, the report said laws restricting the teaching of “divisive concepts” had been “extremely corrosive of teacher morale and detrimental to the integrity of good history teaching.”
Still, the report, from the American Historical Association, found that history teachers overwhelmingly affirmed the goals of presenting “multiple sides of every story” and depicting U.S. history as “a complex mix of accomplishments and setbacks.”
The survey paints an unusually detailed portrait of how the nation’s history is being taught during an era of intense political polarisation. It reached 3,000 middle and high school teachers across nine states: Alabama, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Iowa, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia and Washington.
Nicholas Kryczka, a research coordinator at the American Historical Association and an author of the report, said that overall, the survey suggests that most educators understand the need to exercise self-restraint on political issues.
“You can be an enthusiastic progressive, ardent conservative or resolute centrist and still be a good history teacher,” he said.
Seeking history lessons online
Debates over how to teach American history have animated politics over the past several years. In the 2024 presidential race, the Republican candidate, former President Donald Trump, has promised to “fight for patriotic education in America’s schools,” while the Democrat, Vice President Kamala Harris, has told teachers she would protect them from “extremists” who “attack the freedom to learn and acknowledge our nation’s true and full history.”
Still, the report by the American Historical Association, a professional association of historians with 11,000 members, shows that many of the core conflicts in social studies education do not play out on a binary, left-right political spectrum.
Teachers who participated in the survey said they were drawn to social studies because of their love for American history and civics. Many said their frustrations came from not having enough time to guide students through content – the founding documents, World War II, the Civil Rights Movement.
Just 2% of teachers said they “frequently” heard complaints from the community about what or how they taught. About half of teachers said they occasionally heard such complaints.
The report was funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies, the charity of Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire former mayor of New York City.
It found that as schools increasingly embrace technology, both lesson-planning and student assignments have moved online. According to the survey, large majorities of teachers draw lesson materials from the websites of the Smithsonian Institution and other federal archives; from PBS; and from the popular YouTube channel of John Green, an author of young adult books who makes jaunty, fast-paced videos about key moments in American history.
More than half of the respondents had used materials from the lesson-sharing website Teachers Pay Teachers. But that source was divisive, with many educators voicing concern about a lack of quality control there and on social media sites like Pinterest.
Also popular were resources from National Geographic; the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, a widely-respected nonprofit; and Khan Academy, the Silicon Valley group that provides online tutoring.
Notable minorities of teachers used curriculum materials that came from organizations associated with a particular ideology or interpretation of American history.
Some of the most popular options among these have been called unacceptably left-wing by critics.
For example, 42% of the survey respondents had used materials from Learning for Justice, a project from the Southern Poverty Law Center. About a quarter had used the Zinn Education Project, which was inspired by the work of historian Howard Zinn and which often celebrates left-leaning activist movements.
Seventeen percent of teachers had used resources from the 1619 Project Education Network, though 18% said they purposefully avoided the project. The 1619 Project began as a series of articles in The New York Times Magazine, seeking to “reframe” American history around the consequences of slavery and the contributions of African Americans. The curriculum materials are produced by the Pulitzer Center, an independent nonprofit.
On the more conservative side of the spectrum, 18% of teachers had drawn from Teaching American History, a project of the Ashbrook Center, a nonprofit whose goals are to inculcate “civic virtue” and create “informed patriots.”
Just 4% of teachers had used the 1776 curriculum from the Christian-conservative Hillsdale College, but twice as many – 8% – said they purposefully avoided those materials, which have become closely associated with Republican political activists.
Navigating political pressures
In addition to the survey of teachers, the researchers examined state social studies learning standards and district-level curriculum materials – though the specific districts were not named. With several states embracing ethnic studies, concepts from that left-leaning discipline have suffused some history classrooms in liberal regions, the report found.
The researchers saw lesson plans on “power, privilege and oppression contested,” and assignments that encouraged students to explore “liberatory mindsets” and “Indigenous ways of knowing.”
Questions posed to students occasionally seemed to gesture toward a particular response, as in a lesson on Native American history that asked students whether they would rather “be part of the environment or dominate the environment.”
In interviews for the report, some social studies teachers described themselves as deeply skeptical of this moralistic turn, even if their own personal politics leaned to the left.
One teacher in Washington state decried “white performative work,” while another in a liberal, affluent part of Colorado complained that “equity buzzwords” were mostly about “optics.”
The report did not find much evidence in curriculum materials of conservative myths about American history that were once dominant, particularly in the South, such as the idea that slavery was not the cause of the Civil War.
It did, on occasion, find an overemphasis on the inevitability of Manifest Destiny, the 19th-century belief that the US was destined to expand westward. Also noted was a tendency to teach Native American history through one or two well-known tragedies, such as the Trail of Tears, instead of as a robust and living part of the American story.
In Republican-leaning states and regions, many teachers said restrictive curriculum laws and fiery school board meetings had prompted some measure of fear or even self-censorship when discussing subjects like race and gender.
Michelle Nystel, a high school social studies teacher in rural Iowa, said in an interview that her state’s anti-critical race theory law had not affected her curriculum. Still, she has fielded complaints about assignments that involve news reports. Some conservative parents, she said, perceived mainstream news outlets as biased – even when, in her view, they were not.
Another challenge, she said, was teaching students who hold conspiratorial views, such as the idea that Barack Obama is secretly still acting as president, or that the riot at the Capitol on Jan 6, 2021 was a hoax.
Having a strong principal was key, Nystel said, in that it has protected her ability to push back against off-base demands from parents and students.
“I love what I do,” she said, “and I think having a supportive administrator makes or breaks your teaching career.”
More time to read
The report covered a politically mixed group of districts but did not survey teachers in several of the states where the curriculum has been most heavily politicized in recent years, including Florida, California and Oklahoma.
David Blight, a Yale University historian who is active in K-12 teacher training, said those limitations might skew the findings some.
“I was surprised at the poignancy of some of the findings,” he added. “A lot of teachers just want some time to read. They’d be grateful if somebody gave them a US$100 book budget.”
Lucas Morel, a political scientist at Washington and Lee University who has worked with Hillsdale and other curriculum providers that emphasize pride in the nation’s founding documents, said the report was reassuring in many respects, although he worried it downplayed legitimate concerns about left-leaning curriculum materials.
While the term “critical race theory” may not be often used in American K-12 schools, ideas about the persistence of systemic racism are certainly “shaping how certain subjects are being presented,” he said. “That itself is a contested way of looking at history.” – The New York Times
