For Republican governors, civics is the latest education battleground

Lisa Phillip, a seventh-grade social studies teacher at an Orlando school, appreciates many of Florida’s new guidelines for teaching social studies.

She enjoyed discussing, as state requirements require, the advantages the U.S. government and economy have over socialism and communism — something some of her immigrant students feel naturally, she said.

And she doesn’t mind teaching about “the influence of the Judeo-Christian tradition” on the country’s founding documents. The topic prompted her students at the Central Florida Leadership Academy to reflect on how the nation’s politics, they believed, failed to live up to the basic morality of the Ten Commandments.

This fall, Ms. Phillip will be one of thousands of social studies teachers adjusting to a hotly debated overhaul of social studies in several conservative states. The overhaul is led by Republican governors — Ron DeSantis of Florida, Kristi Noem of South Dakota and Glenn Youngkin of Virginia — who have also limited how race and gender are discussed in schools.

Above all, the new standards for citizenship are explicitly patriotic and emphasize the importance of children being proud of their country. The standards do not avoid discussions about race, but rather portray racism in a particular light, not as a structural feature of American life, but as a deviation from the country’s norms and ideals.

The guidelines also eliminate or reduce practical activities such as mock elections, debating current events and writing to elected officials — a response to widespread concerns among conservatives that teachers are using these activities to push their own political beliefs.

The state standards are yet another sign that the nation’s schools are on two tracks, with deep divisions over what children should learn about their country. In the past decade, states like California, Oregon, and Vermont have transformed social studies by adopting ethnic studies requirements and adding LGBTQ history, housing and credit discrimination, and critiques of capitalism to the curriculum .

Civics – the study of American government and the rights and responsibilities of citizenship – is required in most states, but only about a fifth of American students have taken it. skill achieved in this subject, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress. According to the assessment, students in eighth grade should be able to identify the three branches of the federal government and explain how the Electoral College works.

Republican state officials say their civic standards will address knowledge gaps with a back-to-basics approach, focused in part on a close reading of the Constitution. But there is also an ideological motivation that some experts say could prevent students from gaining a full understanding of the U.S. government.

In Florida, Virginia and South Dakota, education policymakers turned to experts affiliated with Hillsdale College, a Christian institution in Michigan that has taken on an increasing role in public education policy.

In South Dakota, Governor Noem has done just that promised to defeat what she called “rising anti-Americanism” in schools. Under state standards, which will be phased in over the next two years, first-graders are expected to recite the Preamble to the Constitution and much of the Declaration of Independence by heart. In fifth grade, they are expected to recite the Gettysburg Address and explain the major ideas of Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Frederick Douglass, and Susan B. Anthony.

Recitation is a popular practice in classical Christian schools. But some teachers, parents and the American Historical Association to have said the standards could reduce the focus on critical thinking and have argued that memorization may be too difficult for many young children, especially those who are not fluent in English.

In Florida, state reform focuses on teacher training. It offers $3,000 to instructors of any subject and level, including math and PE, to take an in-person or online citizenship course with Hillsdale-affiliated scholars. Tens of thousands of teachers took up the offer.

“Every teacher is essentially a social studies teacher,” said Stephen Masyada, director of the Florida Joint Center for Citizenship at the University of Central Florida, who worked with the DeSantis administration on the training. “Whatever you teach, you are an example of good citizenship.”

According to several teachers who took the class but asked to remain unnamed because they were not authorized to speak to the news media, the course contains video lectures that contradict what mainstream historians tend to teach about the founding. The lectures argue that the founding fathers were influenced more by Christianity than by the secular Enlightenment and its ideas, such as Montesquieu’s theory of the separation of powers.

Mainstream historians tend to believe that while Christian beliefs played a role in its founding, secular ideas played a more central role.

Several teachers in Florida expressed doubts about their preparation to teach material about Christianity, saying their training focused on secular texts and ideas.

But teachers should not need a theological background to “research original texts” and “provide accurate and unbiased citizenship education,” Alex Lanfranconi, a spokesman for the Florida Department of Education, said in an email. Educators who doubt their ability to teach the influence of Biblical ideas, he added, “may not be suited to teaching civics in Florida.”

When it comes to race and slavery, civic norms follow laws that limit how history can be taught. The founders are depicted as flawed, but ultimately heroic.

For example, in South Dakota, seventh-graders learn that Jefferson enslaved people, but he condemned the slave trade in an early version of the Declaration of Independence.

Florida teacher education recognizes that the Constitution protected the institution of slavery, as in the Three-Fifths Clause and the Fugitive Slave Clause. But the training also argues that the Constitution planted the seeds for abolition by setting a path for Congress to end the foreign slave trade in 1808.

Albert S. Broussard, a history professor at Texas A&M University and author of widely used textbooks on American history, said many of the framers were aware that slavery contradicted their republican principles. But he teaches students that the Constitution was drafted as a document “for the protection of racial slavery” to secure the support of the Southern states.

Conservatives have promoted anti-communist curricula for a century. The new norms meet this goal by attacking the Soviet Union, China and Cuba. In Virginia, where the standards will go into full effect in two years, students will learn about “the inhumanity and hardship of totalitarian and communist regimes,” and will be prompted to reflect on the superiority of the U.S. government and the free market .

Aimee Rogstad Guidera, Virginia’s secretary of education, said the comparison was important because of “all the recent surveys and polls among young people who believe capitalism doesn’t work and that socialism is a better model.”

Comparing forms of government is “a good practice,” said Donna Phillips, vice president of the Center for Civic Education. The question is whether the guidelines provide “a foregone conclusion” about which systems are best; students, she said, should be encouraged to form their own ideas.

However, the debate is de-emphasized.

In its history and civic standards, South Dakota goes so far as to warn teachers against discussing current events, stating: “Discussing current political positions or engaging in political activism at the request of a school or teacher is not appropriate in a social school for primary and secondary education. studies class, and the color of one’s skin does not determine what one can or should learn.”

But shying away from current political events can go against the natural interest many teens have in exploring the world around them. Such discussions can be “motivational rocket fuel,” says David Griffith, deputy director of research at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a Washington think tank focused on school choice and academic rigor.

Still, Mr. Griffith said he supported South Dakota’s standards and praised what he called their “very rigorous” content.

In Florida, Mr. Masyada argued that even though the state banned critical race theory, discussions about race and current events, such as the killing of George Floyd, could be had legally.

“You can talk about it in terms of, ‘This doesn’t meet our basic tenets of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,’” he said. “You can’t talk about it like, ‘Our country has always been racist.’”

The big question is whether these social studies lessons will increase knowledge.

This fall, Ms. Phillip, the seventh-grade teacher in Orlando, presented new required content – ​​on the ancient Greek origins of America’s due process protections.

Her students looked for parallels with the American system.

One student asked, “Do the police make the laws?”

Another wondered: “Is there a jury in divorce court?”

Ms. Phillip noted that young adolescents tended to have basic but deep questions about government, which had a way of cutting through ideological debates.

“I make the choice to be positive,” she said. “America has changed a lot and there is still room for change. That is what the Constitution is about.”

Patricia Mazzei reporting contributed.