Students in one Colorado school district walked out of school in protest over a proposed change in the district’s US history curriculum by a conservative board of education, and now teachers have joined them, causing several days of school closings, Colorado Chalkbeat reports.
The school board in Jefferson County, which serves about 84,000 students just west of Denver, refuses to budge from its stance to incorporate more “American” superiority in the course taught to students who are preparing to take an exam that could earn them college credit if their scores are high enough.
“This is tyranny in slow motion. This is how it happens. We all need to stand up and raise our voices,” the Huffington Post quoted one district parent as saying.
The protests have been going on for nearly a month, but since different sources were reporting different versions, we have remained silent. Students, teachers, and parents, who have been protesting, mostly during non-school time, and causing, on a few occasions, the closing of schools for a day or more, say the changes to the curriculum proposed by the board aren’t right.
“It’s gotten bad,” the New York Times quoted a junior at Arvada High School as saying. This student wants to become a teacher and spent the school day soliciting honks from passing cars. “The school board is insane. You can’t erase our history. It’s not patriotic. It’s stupid.”
We agree. But, in 2012, the College Board revamped the AP US history course to cover fewer topics and require students to study those topics more in depth. Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington Carver, and James Madison aren’t even mentioned in the new course.
That doesn’t make it less American or less patriotic; it just makes it more in depth.
Comparing the new curriculum to the old
The curriculum used to give teachers a list of topics but say that the list was by no means inclusive of everything that could be on the test. Teachers therefore started touching on as many subjects as they thought might appear on the test, covering each one only an inch deep.
The new curriculum requires students to make arguments based on historical evidence, which means they will score higher if they know a few historical facts but are able to synthesize more information about those historical events.
An example here might be discovered in the new curriculum itself. Students are asked to “analyze documents for one or more of the following features: audience, purpose, point of view, format, argument, limitations, and context germane to the historical evidence considered.” That is, they need to study a few documents in depth, in order to provide all of this analysis, rather than providing a list of documents that deal with a specific historical event and not have very much to say about any of them.
“AP teachers can expose students to a variety of sources to help them draw their own conclusions and inferences,” the curriculum continues. “Recent research in U.S. history highlights the inclusion of underrepresented groups and cultures, which also has increased the diversity of sources that historians use. For example, in determining the relationship of Native American tribes to their environment and making assertions about why some persevered and others disappeared, students may have to rely on archaeological or geographical analysis instead of the more traditional forms of evidence in historical research.”
So, while the board in Jefferson County may want students to learn about every imaginable document ever written by the founding fathers, that’s not what’s going to be on the test and it’s not what will get students ready for college or make them better able to engage in debates and discussions about important issues facing America today.
This goes along with Albert Einstein’s famous quote about not having to memorize something you can just look up. Students in Jefferson County have access to the Internet and can easily get the exact text of many of these historical documents the school board seems to want them to dwell on. We say it’s good for them to be able to analyze the documents they do find and respond to discussions about them with evidence relevant to their citizenship today.
If history students who had memorized the most facts got the highest score, we’d be awarding college credit to computers or to Google. But computers don’t make good citizens. History, rather, is about reaching conclusions, based on relevant historical evidence, about our history, our country, and our world.
“The redesigned AP US History course emphasizes developing students’ ability to analyze historical texts and to support their written responses using valid reasoning and relevant evidence,” reads a Frequently Asked Questions guide put out by the College Board. “This emphasis dovetails with the Common Core State Standards for reading and writing literacy in history.”