Rewriting Virginia’s History: The Next Chapter

Dozens of scholars, historians, teachers, and educational leaders spent about two years producing a more than 400-page document updating Standards of Learning for teaching history and social studies in the public schools. Such updates are required every seven years, and this update done during the previous administration of Governor Northam was presented to the Youngkin administration as soon as it took office. There was little surprise that it was immediately rejected for the new governor had campaigned against the direction of education in the Commonwealth and promised to root out “divisive concepts” and “critical race theory” from the school curriculum.

What has happened over the past ten months since that time would be hilarious if it were not so serious. The Department of Education produced in that period a 75-page document utilizing outside consultants to replace the document produced in the last years of the Northam administration. After eight hours of debate and public testimony, the State Board of Education rejected the new document as full of omissions, inaccuracies, biases, and lack of context.

As one historian who is familiar with school social studies curriculum told me, he would grade the Northam administration document as “A” and the recent Youngkin administration document “F.” Who was it that spent less than half the time writing new standards and less than a quarter in depth of the previous ones that even the Youngkin appointees on the State Board of Education would not approve?

At the request of a member of the State Board of Education and reported first by the Richmond Times Dispatch, the Department of Education released a list of persons and organizations involved in writing the new standards. They include:

• Hillsdale College in Michigan, a conservative Christian college that has no known expertise in Virginia history but created the “1776 Report” as part of a commission appointed by former President Trump.
• The Louisiana Department of Education that has a long way to go to catch up with Virginia schools.
• Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative education policy think tank.
• The National Association of Scholars, a conservative advocacy organization whose goals include keeping critical race theory (which has not been shown to exist in Virginia public schools) and action civics (whatever that is) out of schools.
• James W. Ceaser, a former staff member of the Heritage Foundation.
• William Bennett, Secretary of Education under President Ronald Reagan.

The recent draft of standards and the persons who hastily put them together are clear indications of the Youngkin administration plan to make the schools purveyors of conservative ideology and despite their protestations otherwise to indoctrinate children rather than teaching them how to think.

The public outcry over the standards and the way the process has been handled has been heartening. Virginia parents on the whole are too smart and well-educated to support a subversion of the schools. If Virginia were to adopt standards such as the administration has been proposing, the Commonwealth would be the laughingstock of the nation. We have come too far in improving our schools to turn back now. Join me in being vocal on this issue to support our children, teachers, and schools!