Letter: Comment on West Virginia Social Studies Standards

Editor’s Note: The National Association of Scholars (NAS) and the Civics Alliance work to ensure that every state has academic standards that promote first-rate education and protect school children from political indoctrination. We promote reform of content standards in every state, along the lines modeled by the Civics Alliance’s American Birthright: The Civics Alliance’s Model K-12 Social Studies Standards, and we have been asked by West Virginia citizens to comment on the West Virginia Department of Education’s proposed POLICY 2520.4 - West Virginia College-and Career- Readiness Standards for Social Studies (2024). We conclude that the proposed standards require substantial improvement—and that this improvement should be conducted by recruiting an independent commission to redraft new social studies standards.

We have sent the following letter to Director Erika Klose, Office of PK-12 Academic Support, West Virginia Education Department.

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Erika Klose, Director
Office of PK-12 Academic Support
West Virginia Department of Education
Capitol Building 6, Room 500
1900 Kanawha Boulevard, East
Charleston, West Virginia 25305-0330

April 17, 2024

Dear Director Klose,

The National Association of Scholars (NAS) and the Civics Alliance work to ensure that every state has academic standards that promote first-rate education and protect school children from political indoctrination. We promote reform of content standards in every state, along the lines modeled by the Civics Alliance’s American Birthright: The Civics Alliance’s Model K-12 Social Studies Standards,¹ and we have been asked by West Virginia citizens to comment on the Department of Education’s proposed POLICY 2520.4 - West Virginia College-and Career-Readiness Standards for Social Studies (2024).² We conclude that the Standards require substantial improvement—and that this improvement should be conducted by recruiting an independent commission to redraft new social studies standards.

The Proposed Standards: Significant Accomplishments

The proposed Standards possesses significant accomplishments.

• The Standards largely has resisted adopting the unprofessional and ideologically extreme vocabulary and content that, since ca. 2020, has degraded social studies standards in states including Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Minnesota.³
• The Standards provides substantial amounts of factual content, presented in unpoliticized language, and frequently including specific names of individuals, laws, and events.
• The Standards provide a good framework for United States history, although United States history, as the Standards as a whole, suffers from structural absences and presents too much material vaguely and hastily.
• The Standards format is mostly lucid and will be fairly easy for teachers to understand and for West Virginia citizens to assess and use to provide accountability for school districts.

While our critiques of the Standards are substantial, we believe that the Department of Education did a great deal of good work in preparing these Standards.

The Proposed Standards: Critiques and Recommendations for Revision

The Standards, unfortunately, do possess significant problems. We list our general critiques below and accompany each critique with a recommendation for how to revise the Standards.

• Radical Dependence. The Standards unfortunately derives too much of its structure and comment from the National Council for the Social Studies’ (NCSS) College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework for Social Studies State Standards, which replaces content knowledge with hollow and opaque “inquiry”; replaces social studies pedagogy with identity politics ideologies such as Critical Race Theory; and inserts radical activism pedagogies such as Action Civics.⁴ The Standards, as a result of their dependence on the C3 Framework:
  • pervasively have adopted “inquiry” pedagogy, and in this current revision (emblematically) change the instruction from the pedagogically effective “Identify” to the pedagogically ineffective “Investigate” (SS.2.17, p. 9);
  • have added many items of “skills” instruction (e.g., SS.4.3), keyed to inquiry pedagogy, which restrict teacher freedom and which do not belong in social studies standards;
  • have incorporated action civics throughout the document; and
  • to a limited extent have added rote identity-politics ideology content.

Recommendation: The Department should detach the Standards from such radicalized frameworks as the NCSS’C3 Framework. It also should detach the Standards from the NCSS’s radicalized definition of social studies.⁵

Recommendation: The Department should remove all “inquiry” pedagogy from the Standards, and frame them instead as specific content to be taught and learned.

Recommendation: The Department should place any recommended pedagogies or skills in a separate Curriculum Framework, which should be made available for teachers, but not forced upon them by regulation or financial incentive. For example, teachers should not be directed “to create a visual or oral presentation” in the Standards (SS.4.3, p. 13); that level of classroom management belongs with the teacher and should at most be suggested by a discrete Curriculum Framework.

Recommendation: The Department should remove all action civics items from the Standards, including SS.1.5 (p. 7); SS.3.6 (p. 11); SS.4.4 (p. 13); SS.5.1 (p. 15); SS.8.2 (p. 26); SS.W.5, p. 32; SS.US.4, p. 36; SS.USC.3, p. 40; SS.CS.5, p. 44; and SS.C.1, p. 48.⁶ It also should remove all references to “a real-world problem” (First Grade Standards, p. 7), “community service projects” (SS.2.4, p. 8), “informed action” (3-5 Social Studies Indicators, p. 10), “community service” (SS.3.1, p. 11; SS.4.1, p. 14), “participate in a school or community project” (Fourth Grade Standards, p.13), “real-world situations” (SS.5.18, p. 16), “contemporary means of changing societies and promoting the common good” (Civics, p. 19). It also should remove study of “media bias” (SS.USC.4, p. 40).⁷

Recommendation: The Department should remove items that forward identity politics ideology, including references to concepts such as diversity and equity that now have become prompts for imposing belief in discriminatory concepts by inculcation of ideologies know by names including Critical Race Theory; Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion; and so-called “anti-racism.”⁸ Above all it therefore should remove diversity from its list of “commonly-held American democratic values, principles, and beliefs “(SS.3.1, p. 11; SS.4.1, p. 13), and replace it with pluralism.

Recommendation: Reword language that assumes “promoting societal and/or political change” (SS.6.5, p. 20) is virtuous or patriotic, and make explicit that work to conserve or preserve a given social or political order is at least as virtuous or patriotic as work to change it.

• Minimized Liberty. The Standards reduces mentions of liberty and freedom; and it substitutes phrase such as democratic principles for American principles, which would encompass liberty, law, justice, civic virtue, natural law, a republican form of government, and democracy. The Standards also provides no sustained attention to teaching America’s documents of liberty, such as but not limited to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, or, more broadly, to using primary sources in history and civics instruction.

Recommendation: The Department of Education should add to the four areas of social studies (Civics, Economics, Geography, and History; pp. 3-4) an area on Liberty, defined as:

The slow development and application of the ideals and institutions of liberty, partic­ularly those embodied in constitutional self-government. Students generally should be able to identify the ideals, institutions, and individual examples of human liberty, individualism, religious freedom, and republican self-government; assess the extent to which civilizations have fulfilled these ideals; and describe how the evolution of these ideals at different times and in different places has contributed to the formation of modern American ideals.⁹

Recommendation: The Department of Education should add to the four areas of social studies an area on Documents of Liberty. The Department of Education should incorporate a series of named documents into the Standards and integrate coverage of them throughout the Standards. The series should include at least the 24 documents specified by Kentucky in KRS 158.196, which provide an excellent model for West Virginia. (Appendix 1: The 24 Documents and Speeches Specified in KRS 158.196.) Ideally the series also should include a broader selection of documents, keyed to the history of the intellectual background of the Founding Documents and the history of the United States. (Appendix 2: Recommended Historical Documents.) The Department of Education should then publish a Documents of Liberty Reader, and provide lesson plans and professional development, to facilitate teachers’ ability to provide instruction in the Documents of Liberty.

Recommendation: The Department of Education should consider a larger integration of primary sources into their Standards, such as are provided by American Birthright.

Recommendation: The Department of Education should replace “democratic” with “American” throughout, wherever democratic and democracy have been used as shorthand for the complex of American values which include liberty, law, justice, civic virtue, natural law, a republican form of government, and democracy.

• Distorted Geography Strand Definition. Standards’ Geography definition prompts teachers to replace factual content with empty “skills,” and provides prompts to radical activism: “The geography standards stress the world in which we live and the role of the U.S. in the global community. … Students examine the varying ways in which people interact with their environments and appreciate the diversity and similarities of cultures and places created by those interactions” (p. 4).

Recommendation: The Standards should replace the Geography Area with this language: “Geographers and students of geography learn how to make and understand maps, inform themselves of the natural and political contours of the world, and use this knowledge to illuminate their understanding of economics and history.” The Standards should be revised throughout to reinforce coverage of factual knowledge of the geography of West Virginia, the United States, and the world, and to remove all material that prompts toward radical activism.

• Compressed World History. The Standards provide a hasty survey of the history of Western Civilization and very abbreviated treatment of World History outside of Europe. Moreover, this revision removes substantial amounts of what remains of the Standards previous coverage of Western Civilization.¹⁰ It does this above all by transforming Grade 7 from instruction in Western Civilization from Sumer to the Age of Discovery into a survey course on World Geography.

Recommendation: The Standards should restore all material on the history of Western Civilization that it currently intends to delete.

Recommendation: The Standards should replace the current World History sequence with a required Western Civilization sequence, consisting of spiraled instruction in elementary school, middle school, and high school, which provides the coherent narrative of the ideals and institutions of liberty which formed America. This Western Civilization sequence should extract the existing materials on the history of Western Civilization from the current World History instruction, and expand upon them to provide greater detail, especially of the histories of liberty, faith, science, and technology. The Standards would especially benefit from extended historical coverage of two historical sequences now almost entirely absent (SS.3.21, p. 12; SS.W.18, p. 34; SS.US. 18, p. 37):

1. the Renaissance rediscovery and elaboration of the concepts of liberty, individualism, republicanism, and tolerance;¹¹ and
2. England’s history of liberty from Henry VIII (misidentified in the Standards as Henry VII) to John Wilkes, including the growth of parliamentary power, the English Civil War, the Glorious Revolution, legal freedoms such as habeas corpus, and the expansion in England of a culture and society animated by the ideals of freedom.

Recommendation: The Standardsshould create a distinct World History sequence, which provides fuller coverage of Asian, African, and Latin American history.

Recommendation: The Standards should move the new material on World Geography from Grade 7 to Grade 6, and, as necessary, shift material on 20th-century United States History instruction from Grade 6 to a more rigorous sequence of United States History instruction in Grade 5.

• Inadequate American and West Virginian Cultural History. The Standards provides too little material on America’s common culture. There generally are only vague prompts to that cultural history (SS.K.16, p. 6; SS.2.15, p. 9), some of which undercut what Americans share by using modifiers such as “multicultural” (SS.3.3, p. 11) or “diversity in American culture” (SS.2.3, p. 8); and see SS.USC.17, p. 41). Contemporary Studies only mention American cultural history to refer to the Lost Generation, jazz, the Harlem Renaissance, and “the role of sports, movies, radio and other forms of entertainment in the development of a new culture in America”. (SS.CS.18-19, pp. 45-46). West Virginia students should learn far more American cultural history, from Edgar Allan Poe to Tin Pan Alley to Georgia O’Keeffe.¹² West Virginia students also should learn more about West Virginia’s common culture, including faith – subjects which do not appear in Eighth Grade West Virginia Studies (SS.8, pp. 26-29).

Recommendation: The Standards should integrate coverage of the history of America’s common culture throughout its United States History and Contemporary Studies sequences.

Recommendation: The Standards should integrate coverage of the history of West Virginia’s common culture throughout its West Virginia Studies sequence.

• Vague Reading and Expectations. West Virginia’s Standards contain no firm reading or writing expectations.¹³ West Virginia’s Standards should have firm and clear expectations, which parents may use to hold their schools and their teachers accountable. Social studies instruction should include.

Recommendation: The Standards should integrate reading expectations, which build toward students capable by graduation from high school of reading an intellectually and stylistically sophisticated 200-page history book, to demonstrate that they are prepared for an undergraduate history course.

Recommendation: The Standards should integrate writing expectations, which build toward students capable by graduation from high school of writing an intellectually and stylistically sophisticated 10-page history paper, to demonstrate that they are prepared for an undergraduate history course.

• Miscellaneous Miscues. The Standards makes several smaller mistakes, which should be corrected.
  • Deleted Detailed Knowledge: The Standards revision deletes detailed knowledge throughout (e.g., SS.2.9, p. 8; SS.3.4, p. 11; SS.4.12, p. 14; SS.5.2, p. 15; SS.6.12, p. 21; SS.6.20, p. 22; SS.8.20, p. 28; SS.8.21, p. 28; SS.W.16-19, pp. 33-34; SS.US.19, p. 38; SS.US.20, p. 38; SS.CS.14, p. 45; SS.CS.20, p. 46). The Standards generally should restore every deletion that reduces academic expectations.
  • Compressed Military, Religious, and Economic History. The Standards compress, although they do not delete, military, religious, and economic history. Above all they compress the narratives and the importance of Western, American, and West Virginian valor, faith, and prosperity. The Standards should revise their content throughout to make central these fundamental themes of history.
  • Distorted Focus. Aspects of the Standards accentuate negative aspects of American history, without providing knowledge of the more positive aspects. E.g., “Research and examine how slavery and indentured servitude influenced the early economy of the United States by constructing graphics (e.g., charts, graphs, tables, and grids, etc.) displaying the effect of having slaves and indentured servants” (SS.4.7, p. 13). The Standards ought to accompany such an item with (for example) an instruction to research why colonial America was called the best poor man’s country in the world, or to research the positive effects of entrepreneurialism in nineteenth-century America.
  • Politicization of Sociology and Psychology. The Standards should delete or revise SS.S.3, p. 54; SS.S.9, p.55; SS.S.24, p. 55; SS.S.28, p. 55; SS.P.17-19, pp. 58-59. The Psychology standard also should discuss the irreproducibility crisis, the grave weaknesses that have been revealed in social psychology, and the strong evidence that there is no such thing as “implicit bias.”¹⁴
  • Distorted Historical Presentation. The Standards distorts historical presentation at key moments.
    • The U.S. Constitution repeatedly presented as “a living document” (United States Studies, p. 35; United States Studies – Comprehensive, p. 40; SS.C.7, p. 49), which is a phrase associated with one side of an extraordinarily important and active political and intellectual debate about the proper nature of Constitutional interpretation.
    • The insertion of the phrase “the changing perceptions of” to modify “citizenship” (SS.US.3, p. 36), which improperly gives the impression that the legal characteristics of U.S. citizenship are a matter of mere perception.
    • The discussion of the Bill of Rights fails to mention the Second Amendment (SS.C.23-25, p. 50).
    • The Cold War presented as significantly consisting of “movements to redistribute land in Latin America, Asia, and Africa” (SS.W.26).
    • The revision from “the duties of citizens that are necessary to preserve global democracy” to “the duties of citizens that are necessary to promote global democracy” (SS.CS.2, p. 44) inserts a radical supposition that America does not already constitute a liberal and democratic polity worth preserving.
  • Distorting Vocabulary. The Standards too frequently uses a politicized jargon that facilitates the imposition of radical ideology or counterproductive pedagogy. The Standards should remove these and similar words, phrases, and concepts throughout: civic engagement, collaborative, community, community service, critical thinking skills, critique, decolonization, democratic, diversity, engagement, enslaved, equity, global, indigenous, informed action, interactions, investigate, marginalized communities, migrants, model, needs, participatory, practices, problem solving, processes, relevant, responsible, society.
  • Impact. The Standards uses impact throughout, when they should use affect or effect. The Department should replace impact throughout.
  • Abbreviation. The Standards replaces “World War I” and “World War II” throughout with “WWI” and “WWII.” The Standards should express the dignity of West Virginia’s government by using formal diction and eschewing abbreviations. The change also makes it possible for West Virginia teachers and students to forget that “WW” stands for “World War.” The Standards should restore “World War” throughout.

Strategic Recommendations

We have provided the above recommendations for revision to the Department of Education, but we do not believe that social studies standards revision can or should be undertaking entirely by the Department. We make three strategic recommendations to the Department.

• Independent Commission. The Standards require fundamental change rather than cosmetic revision. We therefore recommend that the Department ask West Virginia’s policymakers to appoint an independent commission to redraft West Virginia’s social studies standards. Effective revision of the Standards must be carried out by a commission independent of the Department personnel.
• Licensure Requirements and Professional Development: The Department of Education also should update its licensure requirements and professional development to ensure that its teachers are equipped to teach curriculum that aligns with emphases, including Liberty, Documents of Liberty, and American Common Culture.
• Statutory Reform: The Department of Education should ask state policymakers to enact laws that ensure proper social instruction in all West Virginia public K-12 schools.¹⁵

Conclusion

The West Virginia Department of Education’s proposed Standards possess significant virtues, but they also possess substantial shortcomings. The Department should revise the proposed Standards in detail as we have recommended in this public comment. We suggest that the Department examine our model American Birthright social studies standards, but we also suggest that West Virginia examine the fine alternate models of Louisiana, South Dakota, and Virginia.¹⁶ The Department also should request West Virginia policymakers to appoint an independent commission to redraft new social studies standards.

Respectfully yours,

Peter Wood
President, National Association of Scholars

David Randall
Executive Director, Civics Alliance

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Appendix 1: The 24 Documents and Speeches Specified in KRS 158.196

1. The Mayflower Compact;
2. The Declaration of Independence;
3. The Constitution of the United States;
4. The Federalist No. 1 (Alexander Hamilton);
5. The Federalist Nos. 10 and 51 (James Madison);
6. The June 8, 1789, speech on amendments to the Constitution of the United States by James Madison;
7. The first ten (10) amendments to the Constitution of the United States, also known as the Bill of Rights;
8. The 1796 Farewell Address by George Washington;
9. The United States Supreme Court opinion in Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. 137 (1803);
10. The Monroe Doctrine by James Monroe;
11. What to the Slave is the Fourth of July? speech by Frederick Douglass;
12. The United States Supreme Court opinion in Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1857);
13. Final Emancipation Proclamation by Abraham Lincoln;
14. The Gettysburg Address by Abraham Lincoln;
15. Declaration of Rights of the Women of the United States by Susan B. Anthony, Matilda Joslyn Gage, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton;
16. The September 18, 1895, Atlanta Exposition Address by Booker T. Washington;
17. Of Booker T. Washington and Others by W.E.B. Du Bois;
18. The United States Supreme Court opinion in Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896);
19. The August 31, 1910, New Nationalism speech by Theodore Roosevelt;
20. The January 11, 1944, State of the Union Address by Franklin D. Roosevelt;
21. The United States Supreme Court opinions in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954) and Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 349 U.S. 294 (1955);
22. Letter from Birmingham Jail by Martin Luther King, Jr.;
23. The August 28, 1963, I Have a Dream speech by Martin Luther King, Jr.; and
24. A Time for Choosing by Ronald Reagan.

Appendix 2: Recommended Historical Documents

Founding Documents, Intellectual Background
Magna Carta (1215)
Petition of Right (1628)
English Bill of Rights (1689)
Toleration Act (1689)
John Locke, Second Treatise of Civil Government (1690)
Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws (1748)

United States Documents
Articles, Laws, and Orders of Virginia (1610)
Fundamental Orders of Connecticut (1639)
Massachusetts Body of Liberties (1641)
Pennsylvania Charter of Privileges (1701),
John Woolman, Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes (1754)
John Adams, Braintree Resolves (1765)
Common Sense (1776)
Virginia Declaration of Rights (1776)
Massachusetts Constitution and Declaration of Rights (1780)
Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (1786)
Northwest Ordinance (1787)
Anti-Federalist Papers: Brutus No. 1 (1787)
The Federal Farmer, Letter III (1787)
The Federalist Nos. 9 (Alexander Hamilton), 39 (James Madison), and 78 (Alexander Hamilton) (1787-88)
Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (1791)
Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address (1801)
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Volume I (1835) and Volume II (1839)
Abraham Lincoln, “Speech on the Dred Scott Decision” (1857)
Abraham Lincoln, “House Divided” speech (1858)
Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address (1865)
Niagara Movement Declaration of Principles (1905)
Theodore Roosevelt, “The Man with the Muck-rake,” speech (1906)
Woodrow Wilson, “Peace Without Victory,” speech (1917)
Schenck v. United States (1919)
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’ dissenting opinion in the case of Abrams v. United States (1919)
Herbert Hoover, Rugged Individualism (1928)
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, First Inaugural Address (1933)
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, “Four Freedoms” speech (1941
Justice Robert M. Jackson’s opinion for the Supreme Court in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943)
Learned Hand, The Spirit of Liberty (1944)
The Truman Doctrine (1947)
George Kennan, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” (1947)
John F. Kennedy, Inaugural Address (1961)
Ronald Reagan, Berlin Wall Speech (1987)
Ronald Reagan, Speech at Moscow State University (1988)
George W. Bush, Second Inaugural Address (2005)
District of Columbia v. Heller (2008)
Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization (2022)

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