Texas Social Studies Reform: What Texans Aren’t Talking About—But Should Be
As a father, a historian, and a social studies teacher educator, I call attention to three things that Texans aren’t talking about—but should be. We must abandon the laundry list approach to consider historical change, significance, and skills. Then we must hold the SBOE publicly accountable for their actions in the coming months.
1. Historical Change
The concept most basic to the study of history is change. The laundry list approach implies that “Great Men” (or women) change history. 2 Indeed, the version of the TEKS currently taught in schools effectively attributes the entire civil rights movement to Martin Luther King Jr. While clearly an influential individual, King was one of many working to change political and social conditions of the time. The Montgomery Bus Boycott, for example, was orchestrated by hundreds of residents—black and white—who challenged that city’s laws. 3
The first revision of the TEKS added additional names and organizations to the civil rights laundry list, but the second draft broke the mold to present individuals, organizations, and congressional debates pushing for and against changes in the civil rights era. 4 This improved view of historical change is a highlight of the revisions and should be replicated throughout the curriculum. For instance, a laundry list of scientists has been removed from world history with no improved treatment of scientific advancement while foot-severing conquistador Juan de Oñate has been squeezed into third grade as a community builder with Columbus and the Founding Fathers.5
2. Historical Significance
The laundry list approach implicitly invites a fight over significance. Presently, Hispanic state legislators are challenging the latest draft of the TEKS by calling for increased inclusion of Hispanics. Predictably, reactionary public comments have called to include more Scots, more bankers, or whatever the tribe of the aroused responder. We must instead converse about how and why something from the past is considered significant.
Significance is not so much an innate trait as a rhetorical concept. Things from the past are significant to someone at some time for some reason—and while the past does not change, the audience, times, and reasons do. 6 Selecting significant items from the past is in many ways like searching the Internet today—one will find millions of “hits” but can only click on some of them. Unlike Google, historians do not have a secret algorithm and robotic spiders that plumb the past (but like Google we, too, are influenced by outside appeals). Generally, we consider the effect of things that came before an item, its immediate influence in its time, and its long-term impact on subsequent events—the Republican Party drew membership from the dying Whig Party, the Pullman Strike shut down American rail transportation, the League of Nations set a precedent for the United Nations. Declaring that an item “was there, too” proves far less persuasive than showing how someone did something novel, influenced her time, or impacts Texas today.
3. Historical Skills
Perhaps the greatest flaw of the laundry list approach lies in its incomprehension of history as a way of knowing. Every grade level in the TEKS ends with a section on “social studies skills” but they are typically generic statements copied and pasted from year to year. Scholars of history teaching and learning employ numerous means to help students read and understand historical sources, think about change and significance, evaluate evidence and bias in historical interpretations, and write effectively about the past—skills that will, of course, benefit our children throughout their lives.
One example from seventh grade Texas history may illustrate this benefit. The revised TEKS draft adds reasons for Texas secession during the Civil War—“states rights, slavery, sectionalism, and tariffs.” 7 By contrast, in 1861 Texans issued “A declaration of the causes which impel the State of Texas to secede from the Federal Union” in which they named slavery and sectionalism but did not mention the tariff or our modern concept of states’ rights. Instead they emphasized racial superiority and argued that northerners had annulled the Constitution.8 Helping students read and evaluate this source will teach them far more about Texas history than simply mandating an inaccurate laundry list.
An Open Public Revision Process
With the crucial final two months of public debate and revision upon us, Texans can improve the process by demanding that the SBOE openly document their final revisions. For the first draft of revisions, the SBOE required review committees to explain every change. But changes made between drafts 1 and 2 were not all documented or explained— references to “Hebrew” culture have been replaced by “Judeo-Christian” and the Catholic Church was removed from world history.9 Furthermore, the Texas Education Agency has unexplainably obstructed the process by posting SBOE updates randomly across two different websites. Important announcements lay buried on one site, or worse, loaded online with no link from either. Our elected officials should follow the same standard of open communication they enforced earlier in the process.
All Texans—parents, teachers, journalists, politicians, employers, and SBOE members—should reject the laundry list approach and choose to talk openly about change, significance, skills. If we succeed, our children will thank us for the historically significant change we wrought in their lives and in the history of Texas.
1 In 1998 Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) directed the state legislature to adopt the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) as the legally governing standards for public school instruction; they may be found online at http://ritter.tea.state.tx.us/rules/tac/chapter113/index.html. In 2009 the SBOE began to oversee a revision of the TEKS. It appointed review committees composed of school teachers, university faculty, and private citizens to propose changes to each grade and appointed six expert reviewers to make recommendations. The first (July 31, 2009) and second (October 17, 2009) drafts of revisions to the social studies TEKS are available online at http://www.tea.state.tx.us/index2.aspx?id=3643. A third draft of revisions has been submitted for the formal public hearings in January; it available online as an 87-page pdf file at http://ritter.tea.state.tx.us/sboe/e_attachments/2010/january/full_board/thur_5_social_studies_economics_a2.pdf. For more on the complicated review process visit TEKSWatch at http://academics.utep.edu/Default.aspx?tabid=61097.
2 Students tend to grasp quite easily that technology and clothing styles change; they are less likely to see change in abstract concepts such as political ideologies and religious practices.
3 Sociology professor and author Michael Eric Dyson characterizes histories that mention only Martin Luther King as employing a “Lone-Ranger theory of Historical Change” in I May Not Get There with You: The True Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Routledge, 2000), 297. For a broader view of the Montgomery Bus Boycott see David J. Garrow, ed., The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It: The Memoir of Jo Ann Gibson Robinson (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987); Herbert Kohl, She Would Not Be Moved: How We Tell the Story of Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott (New York: The New Press, 2005).
4 In the 1998 TEKS, the civil rights movement is treated in section §113.32.c.7; the first draft of revisions (October 17, 2009) moved it to §113.32.c.8 where it remained in the second draft. The draft submitted for the public hearing makes the section §113.41.c.8
5 In 1998 the scientists were listed in §113.33.c.23.E and §113.33.c.24.C; the second (October 17, 2009) draft of revisions replaces them with vaguer §113.33.c.25.A and §113.33.c.25.D; which are now item 113.42.c.25 in the draft submitted for public hearing. In the second (October 17, 2009) draft, Oñate “contributed to the expansion of existing communities or to the creation of new communities” in §113.5.b.1.C (§113.14.b.1.C in the draft submitted for public hearing).
6 For example, three years ago, students in my university courses glazed over during our discussions of the economic causes of the Great Depressions while today they will not stop asking questions about them. The Depression has not changed, and though I would like to take all of the credit for increasing student engagement, the humbler approach acknowledges that our present recession has made this part of the past more significant to my students and their families at this time in our lives.
7 In the second (October 17, 2009) draft of revisions, discussion of Texas in the Civil War is treated in §113.23.b.5.A (§113.19.b.5.A in the draft submitted for public hearing).
8 The “Declaration of Causes” is published online by the Texas State Library and Archives Commission at http://www.tsl.state.tx.us/ref/abouttx/secession/2feb1861.html.
9 The 1998 edition of the world history TEKS spoke of the “authority” of the Catholic Church in §113.33.c.3.B; the first (July 31, 2009) revised draft moved Catholics to §113.33.d.1.E and spoke of their “decline”; the second (October 17, 2009) draft moved the item to §113.33.c.1.D and removed any reference to the Church (§113.42.c.1.D in the draft submitted for public hearing).