During the 2024-2025 school year, the state of South Dakota will implement a curriculum inspired by the conservative Hillsdale College model. South Dakota teachers will need to expand their content coverage without the benefit of additional instructional time; find ways to teach young students content that is developmentally inappropriate; base…

Teaching about religion in public schools is a complicated and nuanced topic. Though religious illiteracy has been named as a widespread concern throughout the United States, little research has been conducted that critically analyzes what teachers are asked to cover. Preservice teachers often confess they do not understand what they are and are…

This article explores the extent to which official social studies curriculum documents acknowledge difficult questions raised by the persistence of poverty in the United States. As it turns out, just as some parts of social studies curricula tell distorted stories about U.S. history, other parts tell misleading stories about the nation's present…

Oklahoma HB1775 seeks to both shape the discussion of race and gender in PK-12 education. We conducted a content analysis of the Oklahoma Academic Standards for Social Standards (2019) in reference to HB1775. This paper examines how the language of the law is reflected in the standards and implications for teachers and administrators. The authors…

World history curriculum in the United States is Eurocentric. By downplaying contributions from non-Western societies, state standards of world history in the modern era create a narrative of the West as a driver of progress and Europe as the primary protagonist of global events. Research further shows social studies teachers rely on such state…

Overwhelmingly, elementary social studies standards focus on Native Americans in past tense. If elementary teachers follow state curriculum for social studies, students are often not provided the opportunity to learn about Native people in the present. The purposes of this study were to (a) determine the number of current state elementary (K-5)…

Implementing curriculum standards in high school social studies education often challenges educators in shaping their instructional decisions and students' learning experiences. North Carolina social studies educators have faced challenges in balancing the requirements of curriculum standards with the need to teach sensitive topics such as race,…

On Constitution Day 2013, the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) published the "College, Career and Civic Life (C3) Framework for Social Studies State Standards." The document was written by a team of academics with specialties in social studies education and its disciplines in consultation with state education agencies,…

The authors describe the politicization of the process to revise Michigan's social studies standards from 2005 to the present. In 2005, critics objected to the omission of topics they considered important, even though the content expectations document was not intended to be an exhaustive list of material to be covered. The latest, more limited…

When the standards reform movement was introduced, researchers postulated the dual methods of rigorous standards and assessment to measure performance on those standards. Through the early part of the 21st century, the standards corpus has grown, and so too have the accompanying testing regimes (Delandshere and Arens, 2001). However, in…

We examined LGBTQ inclusion in state social studies standards. Our content analysis revealed widespread exclusion as shown in the frequencies of the words "lesbian," "gay," "bisexual," and "transgender." We discussed the implications of this exclusion for LGBTQ students, as well as all students. We…

The school shooting in Parkland, Fla., in February 2018 led many students to engage in walkouts and other protests during the school day. Some schools supported their actions, while others disciplined students who participated. Alan Singer considers these schools' responses and explains that the social studies standards in many states encourage…

High-stakes testing policies have reduced elementary-level instructional time for untested subjects, raising questions about the extent to which students' content knowledge in social studies has been compromised. This research project compared social studies assessment performance of two student cohorts from the same school district, one required…

Teachers learned knowledge, skills, values, and dispositions through spending significant amounts of time working with heritage sites as they learned more about social studies. Elementary social studies teachers engaged in teacher in-service to increase their abilities to meet geography standards. Teacher professional development that caused…

The museum community is exceedingly aware that time allotted for teaching social studies shrinks every year. The National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) is doubly aware that as social studies classroom time shrinks, so do opportunities to explore American history through an African American lens. Knowing this, NMAAHC, and…