The Thomas B. Fordham Institute has issued a report card on the teaching of history to K-12 students, and a lot of states won’t want to see their grades.

 

In producing its first study since 2003 on the quality of U.S. history standards, the Fordham Institute found a majority of states’ standards ranged from “mediocre to awful.” The average grade given out was a “D,” and 18 states earned an “F.”

 

Only South Carolina had strong enough standards to warrant an “A” grade.

 

Five other states—Alabama, California, Indiana, Massachusetts and New York, along with the District of Columbia—earned A-minuses.

 

The authors of the report accused schools of “creating a generation of students who don’t understand or value our own nation’s history.” They cited as the primary reason for this problem the fact that “few states and school systems take U.S. history seriously. So why should students?”

 

The amount of time devoted to social studies, according to the report, has been decreasing over the past two decades. By 2003-2004, students were spending an average of 18 hours less in social studies classes each year than they did in 1987-1988.

 

The report praises South Carolina for emphasizing the presentation of opposing views of history. For example, “After discussing the 1925 Scopes trial, the text calls attention to the debate, then and now, ‘between social conservatives who advocate conformity to a traditional moral code and liberals who advocate individual rights,’ stressing that ‘students should understand the positions of both conservatives and liberals in the 1920s.’”

 

Mississippi, on the other hand, is criticized for offering only “brief content outlines and mere fragments of historical specifics, arranged with little regard for chronology or coherence. Worse,

students aren’t even required to learn the limited content included in these flimsy standards.”

-Noel Brinkerhoff

 

The State of the State U.S. History Standards 2011 (by Sheldon M. Stern and Jeremy A. Stern Thomas B. Fordham Institute) (pdf)