TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — Kansas State Board of Education members approved new history and social studies standards Tuesday for public schools despite concerns that they don’t do enough to ensure that students learn about minorities and their contributions.
The board voted 9-0 in favor of the guidelines, which will replace standards in place since December 2004 and overdue for revisions under state law. The Department of Education will use the guidelines to develop annual standardized tests for students and measure how well schools are teaching from the scores. The state hopes to start giving tests based on the new standards by the spring 2016.
Educators involved in drafting the new standards say they emphasize teaching research and critical thinking skills over memorizing names, dates and facts about historical events. Kansas leaders of the NAACP also had criticized the older standards for having relatively few references to prominent historical figures who were minorities.
Board member Carolyn Campbell, a Topeka Democrat who shared those concerns, said she voted to approve the new standards because they were an improvement but still considered them lacking.
The Rev. Ben Scott, a former Topeka school board member and a longtime local and state NAACP leader who served on the standards-drafting committee, said he worries that the guidelines don’t have enough “teeth” to ensure that teachers don’t skip over material about minorities.
“If it’s not assessed and taught in schools, they’re really not going to get it anywhere else,” Scott said of students. “I still hope that the state board would monitor these standards.”
But Don Gifford, the Department of Education official who supervised work on the new standards, said the state is shifting from a focus on specific content to teaching students how to gather evidence about historical figures and events, then using it frame arguments.
“What we really did was empower teachers,” he said.
For example, one new standard for high school students says that they will evaluate the effectiveness of New Deal government programs during the Great Depression in the 1930s. The old standard on the same topic said the student would analyze the debate over expanding government programs during the Depression.
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Online:
New and old Kansas history standards: http://bit.ly/10clVHP
Kansas State Board of Education: http://bit.ly/11eSoc4
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