Hiding History: How North Carolina is Failing its High School Students

This tweet posted on the blog last night caught my eye.

And it caught my eye for a number of reasons, the first of which is that as a former social studies teacher in the state of North Carolina, this issue is near and dear to my heart. Having taught in North Carolina public schools and also having had a unique U.S. history experience at my own high school, this tweet and subsequent article brought back a flood of memories. It also brought back a sense of righteous anger, the likes of which had long lay dormant inside me in the five years since I left the classroom for good in 2014. Seeing this tweet and reading the article made me realize that there still burns a strong emotion inside me, especially for my former peers to have to deal with the fallout for what will inevitably be a disastrous decision.

Let's start with the basics. Public schools are guided by curricula. State standards for each grade or subject are provided to public school teachers and state-mandated tests are designed to reflect these standards. On the surface, this makes sense as it aims to ensure that students in rural, suburban, or urban areas all have access to the same content and material. The challenge becomes how an entire course on biology, algebra, English, and yes, American history, can be taught over the course of 180 school days. Depending on the school schedule, sometimes the course may have to be taught over a single semester if block classes of 90-minutes are used instead of traditional year-long classes of 45-minutes. Regardless of the school schedule, teachers find it tremendously difficult to meet these standards as they are forced to essentially provide survey courses rather than getting too in-depth in the material, despite having a love and passion for the subject they are teaching.

Traditionally, U.S. history is taught very much as a survey course. The problem starts on day 1 when teachers are expected to start teaching U.S. history "at the beginning." But what is the beginning of American history? Sure, the curriculum guide might say Jamestown and early colonization but what about early Spanish explorers that arrived in Florida? Do they not count? What about Native American history that isn't covered in a world history course? Shouldn't students know that there was already an entire continent full of culture and art and music and self-governance even before the first colonists set foot on what would become American soil? If you believe this to be true and spend time on early American history, then already you're altering the curriculum, putting yourself behind the eight ball. If you don't teach early American history, then your students are already learning history through the prism of White supremacy by completely ignoring the significant cultural impact of early Native Americans. These conflicts do not go away and history teachers are forced time and time again to compromise on their own personal values in order to make sure their students meet standards for the designated curriculum. After all, the last thing a history teacher wants to do is to be forced to explain to his or her principal that their students weren't passing year-end tests because they were teaching off-topic all year long.

Growing up in public school in New Hampshire, I had a unique American history experience. Whereas my peers took U.S. history as a year-long course during sophomore year, I signed up for A.P. U.S. history, an advanced placement course that was two years long instead of one, culminating in an A.P. exam that could potentially earn us college credit. Because the course was twice as long, my teacher had the opportunity to get more in-depth into the topics as the first year was U.S. history up until the Civil War and the second year was the Civil War up to the modern-day. This deep dive into learning presented us with the opportunity to work on what was called document-based questions, or DBQs. This was a learning strategy where we would look at a number of primary source documents and then defend or refute statements based on the evidence that the documents provided. The documents were designed to give us unique perspectives and to challenge our traditional way of thinking. For example, it was a lot harder to say how cut-and-dry opposition to slavery was when you read that Abraham Lincoln at one point had advocated for the Back-To-Africa Movement. Learning history this way and really getting into the weeds helped all of us develop our critical thinking skills. The fact that many of us also passed the A.P. exam and earned college credit was merely the icing on the cake.

Flash forward five years and I found myself as a student-teacher at a public high school in Clemmons, North Carolina. For three months, I was tasked with teaching 3 separate 45-minute classes of U.S. history to a total of 65 students on the college prep track. Having relearned a lot of American history, I was absolutely flummoxed as to how to best teach the material in such a short time frame. I mean, 6 days to teach all of World War II? I could have spent 6 days on a single campaign and here I was, expected to teach the causes of the war, American isolationism, Pearl Harbor, mobilization for war, the Pacific campaign, D-Day and the European campaign, the atomic bomb debate, and the reshuffling of the post-WWII political landscape all in 6 total class periods. To say I struggled would be an understatement as I not only felt poorly about how I was teaching the material but also what I was forced to leave out. Internally, I wondered if I was doing these students more harm than good and it was only after a couple of uplifting conversations with my adviser that I realized I wasn't doing as poorly as I imagined. Still, I saw how challenging it was to teach the material in a way that both met the state standards and that also challenged students to think critically about the material.

That was my North Carolina U.S. history experience. I would go on to teach 7th-grade social studies a year later and for 2 years my struggles were largely the same. But when I read articles like the one today that says that North Carolina high schools will be cutting half of their U.S. history curriculum to instead teach financial literacy, I can't help but scream internally as this goes against every instinct and sound practice that history teachers have. Not only will they be losing out on teaching half of what should be a year-long course, but students will now have a rudimentary understanding of their country's own history. The fact that students will be forced to choose whether to take American History 1 or American History 2 provides them with an incomplete picture of our nation. It would be like going to a movie and having to choose to see the first half of the movie, having no clue how it ends, or seeing the second half of the movie and having no idea how or why you got there. Either way, you'll leave the film with more questions than answers.

But perhaps, that's the point. After all, North Carolina has been devaluing education for well over two decades. When I left in 2009, my teaching peers were already aware that the state motto was being unofficially altered to "First in (Teacher) Flight." I left because I was teaching at a low-performing middle school where 90% of the students were of color and the school was set to be restructured by the district. But I also had peers that left for neighboring Tennessee where salaries and benefits were greatly improved. Over the next 10 years, North Carolina's Republican elected officials continued to devalue educators by creating a system where not only were salaries consistently low but that teachers who had advanced degrees also had their salaries maxed out in a way that did not justify their educational levels. For a state that barely went to Obama in 2008 to now being back in the red column, there can be seen a steady pattern of anti-intellectualism from Republican governors on down. Educators are feeling the brunt of this and the latest move to curtail the work of dedicated social studies teachers, some having taught for over 40 years, is just the latest blow to those attempting to do right and inspire the next generation. Republicans would love nothing better than for each and every graduating high school senior to have an incomplete view of American history because they, like Donald Trump, love the uneducated.

In the end, there are no winners with this decision. Sure, schools can now say they are teaching a financial literacy class that benefits students. But at what cost? How does it help a student if he or she can write a check but he or she doesn't understand the history as to why the rundown apartment they are renting is in a predominantly Latino neighborhood? How does it help a student if he or she can create a budget but doesn't understand how and why health care costs are so high in this country? How does it help a student if he or she can apply for a student loan but has never learned about the type of generational poverty that has made it difficult for their city's African-American populations to become the first in their families to go to college? The truth is that students need a whole year of American history to see all this and to learn to see these patterns in the real world. They need to put what they have learned to use by taking lessons of history and using those lessons to critically examine the modern world. Then, and only then, will teachers have created a generation of critical thinkers that the instruction of history is designed to create.

Until that happens, North Carolina will continue to do a tremendous disservice to its students and that is no accident.