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Changing the Subject in the School Wars: An American Historical Association Research Team Perspective
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 March 2025
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- © The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of History of Education Society.
References
1 For commentary and analysis from liberals and progressives, see Valerie Strauss, “It’s Back in the Age of ‘Alternative Facts’: ‘Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong,’” Washington Post, July 26, 2018; Cory Turner, “Why Schools Fail to Teach Slavery’s ‘Hard History,’” All Things Considered, National Public Radio, Feb. 4, 2018, https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2018/02/04/582468315/why-schools-fail-to-teach-slaverys-hard-history; Nikita Stewart, “‘We Are Committing Educational Malpractice’: Why Slavery Is Mistaught—and Worse—in American Schools,” New York Times Magazine, Aug. 18, 2019; Ana Rosado, Gideon Cohn-Postar, and Mimi Eisen, “Erasing the Black Freedom Struggle: How State Standards Fail to Teach the Truth about Reconstruction,” Zinn Education Project, 2022, https://www.zinnedproject.org/materials/erasing-the-black-freedom-struggle/; “Teaching Hard History: American Slavery,” Southern Poverty Law Center, 2022, https://www.splcenter.org/sites/default/files/tt_hard_history_american_slavery.pdf.
2 For critique and analysis from the right, see Newt Gingrich, “Did Slavery Really Define America for All Time?,” Newsweek, Aug. 27, 2019; David Marcus, “US History Doesn’t Need to Be ‘Reframed’ around Identity Politics; It Already Has Been,” Federalist, Aug. 20, 2019; Christopher Rufo, “How Critical Race Theory Is Dividing America,” interview by Michelle Cordero, Heritage Foundation, Oct. 26, 2020, https://www.heritage.org/progressivism/commentary/how-critical-race-theory-dividing-america; Zach Goldberg and Eric Kaufmann, “Yes, Critical Race Theory Is Being Taught in Schools,” City Journal, Oct. 20, 2022.
3 “The 1619 Project,” New York Times Magazine, Aug. 18, 2019, https://pulitzercenter.org/sites/default/files/full_issue_of_the_1619_project.pdf; Donald J. Trump, “Remarks by President Trump at the White House Conference on American History” (speech, Washington, DC, Sept. 17, 2020), National Archives, https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-white-house-conference-american-history/. On the wave of anti-critical race theory legislation, see Jeremy C. Young and Jonathan Friedman, “America’s Censored Classrooms,” PEN America, Aug. 17, 2022, https://pen.org/report/americas-censored-classrooms/.
4 The project’s findings, published in a two-hundred-page report in September of 2024, are available for free and in full at American Historical Association, American Lesson Plan: Teaching US History in Secondary Schools, 2024, https://www.historians.org/teaching-learning/k-12-education/american-lesson-plan/what-are-american-students-learning-about-us-history/.
5 Each of the selected states—Alabama, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Iowa, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Texas, and Washington—represents one of the nine regional divisions used by the US Census, reflecting our desire for a mix of political, administrative, and social contexts shaping education. In the full report, we include an appendix describing the differences in partisan politics, state agency authority, social studies assessment, and labor and licensure rules across these nine state contexts. The data collection for this project took place between spring of 2022 and summer of 2024.
6 To assemble a corpus of state laws, AHA researchers used a variety of databases, including HeinOnline, LexisNexis, and state legislative websites. The legislative database, while not exhaustive, provides a wide sample of the variety of approaches that legislatures have taken to affect social studies instruction.
7 Using AHA, NCSS, National Council for History Education, and National History Day networks and cold calls, we recruited and interviewed 205 educators (147 teachers and 58 administrators) across our nine sample states. All interview subjects signed an agreement confirming their consent to be interviewed and affirming the research team’s commitment to protecting their anonymity; all interview materials (notes, releases, and identifying information) will be retained as confidential documents for sixty years, and then transferred to the AHA Archive. In April 2023, the AHA contracted with the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago to conduct an online thirty-minute survey of public middle and high school US history teachers in those same nine states. The survey elicited detailed information on multiple topics: teaching environment; background (years of teaching experience, highest academic degree); the role of curricular directives from the school, district, and state; materials used for teaching US history; familiarity with various free history teaching resources; teaching goals and values; and which areas participants find most important, most rewarding, and most challenging to teach. Teacher contacts for the survey came from a leased directory of teachers from MDR Education, a division of the commercial analytics company Dun & Bradstreet. Between April and August 2023, the survey hit the field, ultimately collecting usable responses from 3,012 participants. The number of teachers returning the survey in either “complete” or “partial” form represented a 13 percent response rate. Special care was taken by NORC to assess the social representativeness of the survey sample—both with regard to teachers and the environments they work in. For teachers themselves, this was achieved using data from the National Teacher and Principal Survey on the teacher population with respect to racial/ethnic background, gender, teaching experience, and degree attainment. For school settings, this was achieved by using Common Core Data figures on free and reduced price lunch recipients and percentages of nonwhite students in school populations. As NORC asserted, the analyses give “some confidence that the survey respondents are generally representative of US history teachers in the different types of locales and student grade levels,” as well as “some confidence that the AHA respondents are drawn from a set of schools that reflect the demographics of their respective states and locales.”
8 Scholarly consensus is a moving target, of course, but historians mark the factual and interpretive boundaries of their subfields in a range of formats: volumes of narrative synthesis; historiographic essays; state-of-the-field articles; “major issues” handbooks; and more. See, for example, Eric Foner, ed. The New American History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997); Eric Foner and Lisa McGirr, eds., American History Now (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011); Elizabeth Cobbs and Edward J. Blum, eds., Major Problems in American History, vol. 1, To 1877 (Boston: Cengage, 2017); Elizabeth Cobbs and Edward J. Blum, eds., Major Problems in American History, vol. 2, Since 1865 (Boston: Cengage, 2016).
9 On culture wars in education, see Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, Classroom Wars: Language, Sex, and the Making of Modern Political Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Adam Laats, The Other School Reformers: Conservative Activism in American Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015); Andrew Hartman, A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016); Jonathan Zimmerman, Whose America: Culture Wars in the Public Schools (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022).
10 On the history and historiography of the social studies, see David Warren Saxe, Social Studies in the Schools: A History of the Early Years (Albany: State University of New York, 1991); Ronald W. Evans, The Social Studies Wars: What Should We Teach the Children? (New York: Teachers College Press, 2004); Robert Orrill and Linn Shapiro, “From Bold Beginnings to an Uncertain Future: The Discipline of History and History Education,” American Historical Review 110, no. 3 (June 2005), 727-51; Larry Cuban, Teaching History Then and Now: A Story of Stability and Change in Schools (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press, 2016); Thomas D. Fallace, “The Intellectual History of the Social Studies,” in The Wiley Handbook of Social Studies Research, ed. Meghan McGlinn Manfra and Cheryl Mason Bolick (Chichester, UK: Wiley, 2017), 42-67; Steven J. Thornton, “A Concise Historiography of the Social Studies,” in Manfra and Bolick, The Wiley Handbook of Social Studies Research, 7-41. On educational federalism, see Patrick J. McGuinn, No Child Left Behind and the Transformation of Federal Education Policy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006); Paul Manna, School’s In: Federalism and the National Education Agenda (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2006); Gareth Davies, See Government Grow: Education Politics from Johnson to Reagan (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007); Campbell F. Scribner, The Fight for Local Control: Schools, Suburbs, and American Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2017). On the curricular and administrative implications of the civil rights revolution, see John D. Skrentny, The Minority Rights Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2002); Guadalupe San Miguel, Contested Policy: The Rise and Fall of Federal Bilingual Education in the United States (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2004); Daniel H. Perlstein, Justice, Justice: School Politics and the Eclipse of Liberalism (New York: Peter Lang, 2004); Desmond King, “America’s Civil Rights State: Amelioration, Stagnation or Failure” in Developments in American Politics 7, ed. Gillian Peele et al. (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2014), 263-83; R. Shep Melnick, “The Odd Evolution of the Civil Rights State,” Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy 37, no. 1 (Jan. 2014), 113-34; Russell Rickford, We Are an African People: Independent Education, Black Power, and the Radical Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Elizabeth Todd-Breland, A Political Education: Black Politics and Education Reform in Chicago since the 1960s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018). On the national and global contexts of accountability reform, see Diane Ravitch, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education (New York: Basic Books, 2010); Jack Schneider, Excellence for All: How a New Breed of Reformers Is Transforming America’s Public Schools (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2011); Daniel Tröhler, Languages of Education: Protestant Legacies, National Identities, and Global Aspirations (London: Routledge, 2013), especially chapters 11-12; Ethan Hutt, “‘Seeing Like a State’ in the Postwar Era: The Coleman Report, Longitudinal Datasets, and the Measurement of Human Capital,” History of Education Quarterly 57, no. 4 (Nov. 2017), 615-25; Antoni Verger, Lluís Parcerisa, and Clara Fontdevila, “The Growth and Spread of Large-Scale Assessments and Test-Based Accountabilities: A Political Sociology of Global Education Reforms,” Educational Review 71, no. 6 (Oct. 2018), 1-26; Ethan Hutt and Jack Schneider, “A History of Achievement Testing in the United States or: Explaining the Persistence of Inadequacy,” Teachers College Record 120, no. 11 (2018), 1-32; Maris Vinovskis, “History of Testing in the United States,” Annals of the American Academy of Political Science 683, no. 1 (May 2019), 22-37; Christian Ydesen and Sherman Dorn, “The No Child Left Behind Act in the Global Architecture of Educational Accountability,” History of Education Quarterly 62, no. 3 (Aug. 2022), 268-90; John L. Rury, An Age of Accountability: How Standardized Testing Came to Dominate American Schools and Compromise Education (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2023).
11 Forty-four percent said that they had never encountered an objection to anything they’ve taught.
12 Slavery—identified as a challenge by 21 percent of teachers—was the outlier, with 43 percent of that segment citing controversy as the source of difficulty.
13 For analysis and strategy from the right, see The Manhattan Institute, “Woke Schooling: A Toolkit for Concerned Parents,” June 17, 2021, https://www.manhattan-institute.org/woke-schooling-toolkit-for-concerned-parents; Christopher Rufo, America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything (New York: Broadside Books, 2023); Richard Hanania, The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics (New York: Broadside Books, 2023). From the liberal center, see John McWhorter, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America (New York: Portfolio, 2021); Yascha Mounk, The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time (New York: Penguin, 2023). For critiques from the left, see Walter Benn Michaels and Adolph Reed Jr., No Politics but Class Politics (London: Eris, 2023); Susan Neiman, Left Is Not Woke (Cambridge: Polity, 2023); Musa al-Gharbi, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2024). On schools as battlefields, see Laura Pappano, School Moms: Parent Activism, Partisan Politics, and the Battle for Public Education (Boston: Beacon Press, 2024); Mike Hixenbaugh, They Came for the Schools: One Town’s Fight over Race and Identity, and the New War for America’s Classrooms (Boston: Mariner Books, 2024); Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire, The Education Wars: A Citizen’s Guide and Defense Manual (New York: The New Press, 2024).
14 While low overall, rates of reported experience with direct criticism among surveyed teachers revealed some correlation with the social profile of their communities. Teachers working in wealthier districts (as measured by the rates of students who qualified for free or reduced lunch) were the most likely to report having experienced objections “several times” over the course of their career. (This group made up 17 percent of surveyed teachers.) Meanwhile, teachers working in low-income districts were far more likely to report that they had never experienced any criticism (51 percent). Suburban teachers, among all locales, were the least likely to say that their careers were without challenge, while teachers in other locales showed little variation. An important caveat: aside from standards and legislation, our study could not capture conditions outside of our nine sample states—or outside of the time that we spent on the project. If, as we note, political flare-ups are local and contingent, then it’s altogether possible that things might be worse (or better) beyond the boundaries of the times and places we studied.
15 On goals, “Survey of US History Teachers,” AHA/NORC questionnaire, 2023, question 34. In our survey, we asked teachers to register their familiarity and usage of over two dozen digital US history teacher resources. Only a small handful provoked negative reactions. Of those, the only resources that earned suspicion from surveyed teachers because of what they or others judged as an ideological bias were the Pulitzer Center’s 1619 Project Education Network and The Hillsdale 1776 Curriculum. “Survey of US History Teachers,” AHA/NORC questionnaire, 2023, question 34.
16 For the influential literature on professional learning communities and the like, see Richard DuFour and Robert Eaker, Professional Learning Communities at Work: Best Practices for Enhancing Student Achievement (Bloomington, IN: Solution Tree, 1998); Robert J. Marzano, Debra J. Pickering, and Jane E. Pollock, Classroom Instruction That Works: Research-Based Strategies for Improving Student Achievement (Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 2001); Douglas B. Reeves, Accountability for Learning: How Teachers and School Leaders Can Take Charge (Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 2004).
17 Of the twenty-one states with a testing mandate for US history on the books, only twelve have stakes for districts or schools with regard to state accountability evaluations; only seven have stakes for students with regard to graduation. Among our sample states, Texas was the clear outlier in terms of its accountability environment, having the most detailed standards, the most unified assessment regime, and the highest-stakes accountability system for districts. As we discovered, Texas’s system produced strong trickle-down effects on local paperwork and benchmark testing. Seventy-four percent of Texas teachers we surveyed reported that they and their department colleagues gave a common test at the end of every curricular unit, compared with only 33 percent in other surveyed states.
18 Sixty percent of surveyed teachers said they actually use state standards directly in their teaching—although there are important differences from state to state. Over three-quarters of teachers in Alabama, Texas, and Virginia report using their state standards, while half or fewer teachers in Connecticut, Illinois, and Pennsylvania said the same. Interviews are cited here as either HST (for high school teacher), MST (for middle school teacher) or SSA (for social studies administrator).
19 Interview with High School Teacher, HST 729, Oct. 24, 2023.
20 Interview with high school social studies teacher, HST 605, July 10, 2023.
21 Interview with social studies administrator, SSA 305, May 23, 2023; interview with high school social studies teacher, HST 725, Aug. 30, 2023.
22 Interview with high school social studies teacher, HST 419, June 7, 2023; interview with high school social studies teacher, HST 725, Aug. 30, 2023.
23 Interview with social studies administrator, SSA 819, Sept. 18, 2023.
24 On critiques of textbooks, past and present, see Frances FitzGerald, America Revised: History Schoolbooks in the Twentieth Century (New York: Vintage, 1980); Kyle Ward, History in the Making: An Absorbing Look at How American History Has Changed in the Telling over the Last 200 Years (New York: The New Press, 2007); James Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (New York: New Press, 1995); Diane Ravitch, The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn (New York: Vintage, 2004); Dana Goldstein, “Two States. Eight Textbooks. Two American Stories,” New York Times, Jan. 12, 2020; Donald Yacovone, Teaching White Supremacy: America’s Democratic Ordeal and the Forging of Our National Identity (New York: Pantheon, 2022).
25 Sam Wineburg, “Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts,” Phi Delta Kappan 80, no. 7 (Spring 1999), 488-99.
26 See, for instance, National Council for the Social Studies, The College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework for Social Studies State Standards: Guidance for Enhancing the Rigor of K-12 Civics, Economics, Geography, and History (Silver Spring, MD: National Council for the Social Studies, 2013); “The Inquiry Design Model,” C3 Teachers, https://c3teachers.org/idm/; “C3 Framework: Inquiry Showcase,” National Council for the Social Studies, https://www.socialstudies.org/professional-learning/inquiry-showcase; “2023 Conference Resources,” National Social Studies Leaders Association, https://www.socialstudiesleaders.org/.
27 C3 Teachers Inquiry, “What Does It Mean to Be Equal?,” https://c3teachers.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/NewYork_7_Womens_Rights.pdf; “Is Republican Democracy the Best Form of Government?,” district document, Texas, City: Midsize. In our full report, all references to unpublished instructional materials (as with our survey and interview informants) were anonymized. Our mission was to describe the common strong suits and weak spots that characterized coverage of our six topics—not to celebrate or denigrate any particular teacher, district, or state education agency.
28 Iowa Teacher, “Survey of US History Teachers,” AHA/NORC questionnaire, 2023, question 22.
29 When teachers took time to make mention of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. in their free responses, the most common purpose was to explain why they were not the movement’s only important figures. AHA/NORC questionnaire, 2023, question 19.