New draft history standards reorient framing of race relations

The Virginia Department of Education on Wednesday morning revised its draft of K-12 history standards to include Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Juneteenth in elementary grade levels, following backlash from the public.

Charles Pyle, a spokesman for the Department of Education, said the omissions were unintentional.

New draft history standards written under Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s administration, which state education officials released on Friday prompted a scathing response from critics around the state and nation who called the new draft a whitewashing of history.

Major revisions to the draft history standards came two months after a Virginia Department of Education official said the department did not anticipate making significant changes to a draft the department released in July that was written largely by then-Gov. Ralph Northam’s administration.

The new Youngkin document does not reference the ongoing legacy of slavery and its effects on today’s society. It does, however, contain some new teaching requirements that were not mentioned in the original Northam document, including references to Japanese internment camps, hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan, and about Sen. Hiram Revels of Mississippi, the first African American to serve in Congress.

The Youngkin version released Friday which the department said “inadvertently” omitted King Day and Juneteenth in elementary levels did include teaching about King, starting in sixth grade.

While the Youngkin administration added several subject areas, it also removed teaching about labor leader and civil rights activist Cesar Chavez and most of the educational recommendations made in 2020 by the Virginia Commission on African American History Education.

The Department of Education and the State Board of Education are required by law to review Standards of Learning subject areas at least once every seven years. The history standards were last reviewed in 2015, and the board was set to review the original draft in August. But State Superintendent Jillian Balow urged the board to delay the first formal review of the standards in order to give Youngkin’s five newly appointed board members additional time to review the documents.

The State Board of Education is scheduled to review the new draft at its 9 a.m. Thursday meeting in the James Monroe Building in downtown Richmond. The board is scheduled to hold public engagement sessions between Nov. 28 and Dec. 16., and public hearings from Jan. 9-13.

If the process goes according to schedule, the board will propose and adopt a final version of the standards in February. If approved, the standards would be enacted in the 2024-25 school year.

The Northam administration created the original draft released in July over a span of nearly two years in consultation with advisory committees of historians, professors, parents, students and museums. The process by which the new revision was drafted under the Youngkin administration is not as clear.

Pyle, the spokesman for the Department of Education, did not disclose how much of a role institutions like the conservative Thomas Fordham Institute or Ohio’s Hillsdale College played in drafting the new proposed standards.

“I can tell you that, as Mrs. Balow said earlier this fall, she wanted the agency to reach out to a broader set of academics with expertise in the content and in the development of curriculum,” Pyle said. “And that’s what was done.”

Hillsdale College played a key role in writing the widely condemned “1776 Report” on U.S. history commissioned by then-President Donald Trump. The report, and Trump’s 1776 Commission, were created to promote “patriotic education,” and partly to counter The New York Times’ 1619 Project.

Other institutions that Balow and VDOE staff publicly acknowledged reaching out to are Core Knowledge Foundation, American Enterprise Institute, the National Association of Scholars and the Jack Miller Center.

A major difference in the documents the Northam and Youngkin officials proposed is the way that race relations are framed.

The new draft standards written under the Youngkin administration acknowledge the importance of students learning about slavery, and say that slavery is the “antithesis of freedom.” But there are no references in the new draft to the ongoing legacy of slavery in the U.S.

The new Youngkin standards also do not mention the word “racism.”

“That’s a problem,” said James Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association. “You don’t have to argue that racism is the central force in American history. You can argue that the central concepts in American history are freedom or liberty or democracy, but you cannot teach American history without helping students to understand that racism has been a central theme. You just can’t.”

Grossman, who heads the largest association of professional historians in the world, wrote letters to the state Board of Education last month, offering help with revisions and urging members to adopt the original Northam standards, which he said align with the association’s criteria.

In a letter on Wednesday, state Sen. Jennifer McClellan, D-Richmond, urged the board to reject the Youngkin administration’s draft of the standards. Citing her ancestors who endured slavery and Jim Crow and her own experience as a student in Virginia’s public schools, McClellan said she has seen how an incomplete history has fueled ignorance and even stoked racial tension.

McClellan said the revised standards state education officials released last week “appear to have been written with the heavy hand of a political appointee with an agenda, disregarding the guidance of educators, experts and relevant stakeholders over a nearly two-year period.”

Del. Glenn Davis, R-Virginia Beach, who chairs the House Education Committee, wrote off such criticism and said that the new Youngkin standards tell a fuller history than the original draft document.

“Unlike before, (the new draft) requires us to talk about the KKK … which was not required in the prior standards,” Davis said. “If they can’t understand that the conversation about racism is inherently implied in those conversations then they don’t understand those events and that part of American history because the Ku Klux Klan does not exist without racism.”

The new draft also contains subtle changes to the way slavery is described in relation to the Civil War. The original Northam administration draft references multiple times that slavery was the central cause of the Civil War, while the Youngkin administration draft does not.

The revision was about 350 pages shorter than the original Northam draft, partly because unlike the original, it does not include a “curriculum framework.”

The Standards of Learning curriculum framework is a more detailed document that the state Board of Education would typically approve 10 or 11 months after the standards are approved.

The “guiding principles” for the revisions states, “students will know our nation’s exceptional strengths, including individual innovation, moral character, ingenuity and adventure, while learning from terrible periods and actions in direct conflict with these ideals.”

Outside of Thursday’s meeting, the Hamkae Center — which says it organizes Asian Americans in Virginia for “social, racial and economic justice” — and Sikh Coalition are set to host a protest at 11:30 a.m. The organizations are urging the board to reject the Youngkin administration’s revisions and move forward with the original draft.

The two organizations along with about 20 others issued a news release on Tuesday expressing concern about “unexpected last-minute implications for involving new outside actors” in the creation of the new draft.

“The Youngkin administration purposefully blocked the process to introduce partisan bias and score political points,” said Sookyung Oh of the Hamkae Center in a statement. “And the results are disastrous — the standards are a dangerous step backwards in content and pedagogy ... This is especially alarming because the originally proposed (standards) took steps in the right direction to teach about U.S. and Virginia history from diverse perspectives from a wide range of communities.”