In 1971, the state of Texas enacted a legislative requirement that students at public institutions complete two courses in American history. With that mandate in mind, the Texas Association of Scholars and the National Association of Scholars' Center for the Study of the Curriculum proposed to determine how students today meet the requirement, and…

Monuments are valuable resources for social studies teachers. They provide opportunities for student learning and engagement that are not easily duplicated in the classroom. Their physical appearance, history of creation, narratives, and other features promote opportunities for students to deepen understanding of specific content and to develop…

In this article, Julian Vasquez Heilig, Keffrelyn Brown, and Anthony Brown offer findings from a close textual analysis of how the Texas social studies standards address race, racism, and communities of color. Using the lens of critical race theory, the authors uncover the sometimes subtle ways that the standards can appear to adequately address…

For more than a decade, the world history course taught in the public high schools of Texas has provided the only comprehensive overview of the story of humanity to millions of students, most of whom are of Mexican descent. The Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills curriculum standard for world history has been foundational for textbook selection,…

The overall objective of this investigation was to explore the views of border history teachers on a wide variety of issues that influence their instructional approaches, curricular content choices, and capacity to teach history more effectively. More specifically, the focus was on identifying factors that affect their ability to utilize…

As debate continues around the development and adoption of common standards in English and mathematics, several states are independently wrestling with rewrites of standards in a content area largely absent from that national discussion--social studies--and encountering their own shares of controversy. Flash points in the social studies debates…

The Texas board of education which consists of 15-member elected body drew national attention as a bloc of staunch conservatives largely succeeded in putting its stamp on a revised set of social studies standards. The debate was marked by tussles over such matters as the separation of church and state, the representation of minority figures and…

The politicians and pastors who revised the Texas social studies standards made national and international headlines. However, much of that coverage was sensational and squeezed the process into a narrow "culture war" storyline. Politics and the History Curriculum sets the debate over the Texas standards within a broader context by…

In 2010 the Texas Education Agency adopted newly rewritten curriculum standards for the state's social studies courses K-12. The period leading up to the adoption of the standards proved contentious as the new standards moved out of the writing committees and into the public realm. The issues brought forth from initial readings of the standards…

This article frames history education as a social construction designed to create a national identity through the inclusion, exclusion, and treatment of various societal groups. Using this lens, the author analyzes curriculum standards from nine states that annually assess student knowledge of American history to better understand the depiction of…

The purpose of this study was to re-examine the consensus and difference in American students' understanding of national history, on which there were divergent research results. With three sets of questions that examined students' perspectives of the collective memory, historical significance, and credibility of historical sources, we found that…

This series of reports, "Teachers Are the Center of Education," was developed to highlight the importance of teachers and the quality of their work. This specific report, a partnership among the College Board, the National Writing Project and Phi Delta Kappa International, shines the spotlight on one aspect of teacher work: the…

In this article, the author relates his experiences preparing Mexican teachers wishing to enter bilingual classrooms in Texas. The author, who was about to teach U.S. history, envisioned to teach his class with Howard Zinn's "A People's History." However, during his briefing, he was instructed by his program director to use a book called…

On an earlier column titled "What I learned at the NCSS Annual Meeting," the author wrote about the Internet-oriented materials and resources featured at the 2006 NCSS convention in Washington, D.C. Having received many e-mails from readers telling him that they appreciated having the opportunity to see which companies, not-for-profit,…

Criticisms of Howard Zinn's work on U.S. History are examined in the context of increasing emphasis on the idea of "American exceptionalism" in contemporary political and cultural discourse, and particularly the insertion of American exceptionalism into revised social studies standards for the state of Texas. Analysis focusing on the…