New Texas Social Studies Standards Are Content-Specific but Divisive

States can adopt rigorous standards without sparking culture wars.

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Just in time for the nation’s 250^th birthday, the Texas State Board of Education has approved new social studies standards that are designed to foster patriotism—and are already exacerbating partisan division.

As with its recent approval of a required reading list for K-12 public schools, the Texas SBOE’s action on K-8 social studies standards has been a lightning rod for criticism, particularly from the left.¹ Arriving in the wake of the Trump administration’s efforts to promote “patriotic education,” the standards have been attacked as pro-Christian and anti-Muslim, insufficiently appreciative of the contributions of women and minorities, and overly dense.

Before the standards were adopted, the American Historical Association issued an “action alert” urging people to weigh in against them. The standards, the AHA warned, invoke “Western Civilization” to “justify disproportionate attention to a single strand of European intellectual history at the expense of the broader human experience.”

Another line of criticism, also promoted by the AHA, faults the new standards for taking what it calls “an experimental and untested approach.” It might surprise lay people to learn that this untested approach is to present historical events in chronological order.

Putting the Standards in Perspective

I do see problems with the new Texas standards, but—as with the state’s new required reading list—it’s important to put the standards in perspective. They are indeed dense and quite specific about content to be covered, but most state social studies standards suffer from the opposite problem: vagueness.

A 2021 review of state social studies standards by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute identified only five jurisdictions that were “exemplary” in both civics and U.S. history, with 20 states getting a rating of “inadequate.” Illinois’s standards, for example, were deemed “so general as to be useless.” Those standards are still in effect, and as Fordham noted, the entire history strand, covering all grade levels, takes up only two pages. It lists four “conceptual topics,” like “Change, Continuity and Context.”

“Notably missing,” the Fordham report observes drily, “is any reference to historical content.”

Meanwhile, the performance of American students on national assessments in U.S. history and civics have been abysmal, with only 13 and 22 percent of eighth graders scoring proficient in those subjects, respectively. Forty percent scored below basic in history, and 31 percent did so in civics.

Many American adults, particularly younger ones, are unaware of basic facts about American history, like why the American colonies declared independence from Britain. Most young adults in the U.S., according to a recent survey, take a passive view of democracy, and almost a third don’t even value the concept. Vague social studies standards aren’t the only reason for this dismal situation, but they surely haven’t helped.

In 2021, Fordham gave the old Texas standards a B+ for civics and a C+ for history. The state’s history standards, the report observed, included holidays, patriotic symbols, and “somewhat arbitrary lists of influential individuals that manage to check both traditional and diversity boxes but have little historical rationale.”²

Some standards were ridiculously broad. One fifth-grade standard, the Fordham report noted, reduced the entire 20^th century to “a single twenty-eight-word expectation, mentioning industrialization, urbanization, the Depression, world wars, civil rights movements, and military actions, plus a few scattered names.”³

Content, Coherence, and Chronology

Running to 39 pages for the elementary grades and 33 for the middle grades, albeit including a lot of repetition, the new Texas standards cannot be faulted for lacking historical content. In fact, they go into such exhaustive detail that teachers will be hard pressed to cover it all in a meaningful way. Still, too much detail is better than none. And the new standards are clearly more coherent than the ones they’re replacing

The standards may not give as much attention to non-Western history and historically disadvantaged or marginalized groups as some would like, and they do focus a lot on Christianity. But they cover more non-Western and non-Christian topics than critics acknowledge. Fourth-graders, for instance, learn about the Middle Ages not only in Europe but also in Asia and Africa, with specific attention to Mansa Musa and the Malian Empire.

The standards also include some of Western civilization’s failings as well as its strengths. Contrary to the claims of the AHA, they discuss slavery in the 17^th and 18^th century at several grade levels, characterizing it as a horrendous institution and the cause of the Civil War.⁴ Various Indian tribes appear frequently, especially at lower grade levels.

As for criticism of the standards’ chronological approach, that may require some explanation. After all, a chronological approach to history would seem to be logical. But generally, state history standards take a “spiraling” approach, reintroducing similar content at higher grade levels in greater depth. For example, Texas, like many other states, previously had students learn about U.S. history initially in fifth grade (albeit superficially, as suggested by that fifth-grade standard) and then again in eighth grade and high school.

In a press release, the chair of the Texas SBOE explained that the new chronological approach will enable students to “observe how one event led to another” and thereby gain a “deeper, more coherent understanding of the forces that shaped the modern world.” He added, “This is how historians work.”

But the historians at the AHA apparently disagree, since they’re the ones that called the chronological approach “experimental and untested.” Perhaps they mean it’s untested at the K-12 level. But you could argue that the standard spiraling approach, while “tested,” hasn’t been working very well.⁵

Early Grades and Texas Connections

In any event, the new Texas standards actually do “spiral” quite a bit—especially if you include the standards for K-2, which represent one of the most radical breaks with tradition. Generally, standards for that level focus only on children’s families and communities, on the erroneous theory that young children can’t handle or won’t be interested in material remote from their own lives.

Refreshingly, the new Texas standards take kids on a whirlwind tour of history, along with some traditional topics like “community helpers” and “American symbols.” Kindergartners learn about the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag at Plymouth, first graders about the Civil War (and Juneteenth), second graders about ancient civilizations, the American Revolution, and the War of 1812. All of these topics are revisited at higher grade levels.

The standards also depart from the usual approach by constantly striving to connect whatever topic they’re covering to American and Texas history. Sometimes that makes sense, and sometimes it doesn’t. For example, when third graders study Ancient Rome, it’s logical to connect Rome’s republic to the similar forms of government it inspired in the U.S. and Texas. But do kids also need to learn that Sam Houston compared himself to “the ancient Roman leader Gaius Marius who was honored for his military leadership”?

Similarly, it’s fine for fifth graders to learn that the invention of the printing press helped spread the ideas of the Reformation, but it seems like a stretch to insert a discussion of how that invention did the same thing for the ideas of the American Revolution over 300 years later. In any event, the pressure to make these connections results in some spiraling because aspects of American and Texas history and government are constantly popping up, sometimes in unexpected places.

Clovis vs. the Fertile Crescent

The push to include Texas and the U.S. during whatever era the standards are covering can also distort priorities. When students learn about ancient civilizations in second and third grades, for example, the standards also have them learning about the Clovis civilization, which flourished in North America—including parts of what is now Texas—about 13,000 years ago. That might be an interesting topic, but history standards focus on particular parts of the world in certain eras because that’s where influential things were happening, at least as far as we can now determine.

That’s why students, including those in Texas, learn about ancient civilizations in the Fertile Crescent. That area seems to have been where humans first made the transition from hunter-gatherers to farmers, giving them the free time to do things like invent writing and the wheel—inventions that had a huge impact on history. It’s fine for kids to also learn about the stone spear points made by the Clovis, but if we’re short on time, as schools inevitably are, I would opt for the Fertile Crescent.

The rhetoric around the Texas standards has stressed that they’re designed not just to impart knowledge but also to convince students of the intrinsic superiority of the United States and, within those states, of Texas. The chair of the Texas SBOE declared that the previous incoherent standards resulted in “generations of students who do not know the greatness of America or its greatest state, Texas.” And the guiding framework for the standards refers to the founding of the U.S. and Texas as “the noblest experiment.” But the standards themselves, while undoubtedly Texas-centric, are more balanced than that rhetoric might lead you to assume.

Will the Standards Even Be Taught?

In any event, for all the impassioned debate over the standards, much will depend on how—and to what extent—they’re actually taught. Because few states require testing in social studies, standards for that subject often just sit on a shelf, or its digital equivalent, at least until high school. And if students haven’t learned anything about history, civics, or geography before they get to high school, many of them will lack the background knowledge to understand or absorb what they’re expected to learn there.

The push for “patriotic” standards like those adopted in Texas stems from a perception, on the right, that schools are indoctrinating students with a left-wing ideology that emphasizes the country’s failings. But the real problem, as James Traub has observed in a recent book, isn’t that kids are getting a biased view of history, either from the left or the right. It’s that they’re not learning much history, or civics, at all. That’s partly because the standards aren’t backed up by state tests.

Texas is one of the handful of states that does test social studies—but not until eighth grade. That used to mean a test in U.S. history. Under the new standards, eighth-graders will get a “Texas history capstone course,” which will incorporate “vertically aligned topics presented in Grades 3-7 in more complex and meaningful ways.”

Those topics stretch from the influence of the classical world on the founding documents of the U.S. and Texas through the presidency of Barack Obama. It’s an ambitious set of standards for one grade level, even if kids have encountered those topics previously. If they haven’t—and it’s likely many will not, unless Texas starts testing social studies earlier—it could be a disaster.

As with the new Texas required reading list, much of the intent behind the new social studies standards was admirable: to provide educators with the specifics that will ensure the state’s 5.5 million students get a content-rich, rigorous education. It’s unfortunate that some of those specifics have, in both instances, sparked partisan controversy that could result in distracting pushback from districts, schools and parents. That controversy could also reinforce the mistaken idea that there is something inherently politically conservative about specifying the content students should learn.

Look to Virginia

If other state officials are looking to beef up their social studies standards, as I hope many are, I would suggest they look to Virginia rather than Texas. A few years ago, that state’s board of education unanimously adopted a set of social studies standards that, while somewhat controversial, managed to avoid charges of Christian nationalism and America- or Virginia-first-ism. The board was specific about content to be covered in an even-handed way, noting as one of the standards’ foundational principles that “American is both exceptional and imperfect.”

Perhaps not coincidentally, the Virginia board was evenly split between Republican and Democratic appointees, and each side recognized the need to make compromises. The Texas board has a Republican majority, and votes on both the social studies standards and the reading list were essentially along party lines.⁶

Engineering an equal balance of Democrats and Republicans on a state board of education isn’t always possible—especially if members are elected rather than appointed, as in Texas. But I would hope that, whichever viewpoint commands a majority, board members will be able to imagine themselves in the shoes of those with an opposing perspective.

And whatever their political persuasion, those who make education policy need to recognize that unless standards specify content—and, ideally, are backed up by testing grounded in that content—students are likely to learn very little history or civics at all.

1. The board approved some high school social studies standards but postponed a vote on others.

2. One second grade standard required that students learn about Thurgood Marshall, Theodore Roosevelt, and a female Mexican-American state legislator—three individuals who have nothing in common in terms of their historical context.

3. The overwhelming emphasis on reading and math in the elementary grades has meant that many social studies standards end up getting “taught,” if they’re taught at all, through individual texts during the reading block rather than as part of a coherent curriculum. Several years ago, I observed a class at a Texas teacher prep program during which a student-teacher demonstrated how she would teach the sprawling 20^th-century history standard using a picture book about a Tokyo zoo’s effort, during World War II, to prevent its elephants from escaping by slowly starving them to death. The book provided no historical context, not even mentioning what war was going on or why it was happening. For a related activity, the prospective teacher planned to have her fifth-graders create posters on how to prevent animal cruelty.

4. Sometimes just as one cause of the Civil War. In second grade, for example, the standards make more of a states’ rights argument, say that the Southern states seceded “because they wanted states to make their own rules, including to keep slavery.” But the standards for that grade also say, more forthrightly, that “the Civil War was fought because of disagreements over the right to have slaves.”

5. An eccentric institution called The Ross School, on the eastern end of Long Island, uses what it calls a spiraling curriculum. In fact, the curriculum is so strictly chronological that there is no mention of the United States until 10^th grade.

6. One Republican board member voted against the required reading list.