For decades, public education in America has been underfunded, and starting salaries for teachers have fallen below the livable wage line in many states. Social studies education, in particular, has long been deprioritized. Federal funding for curricular experimentation in the field ended in the 1970s, when religious conservatives succeeded in slandering a cross-cultural anthropology course for fifth graders as un-American. According to familiar-sounding reporting from about fifty years ago, the groups feared that introducing young people to international cultural practices could contribute to “the breakdown of our traditional values.”
With the move toward standardization in education in the 1990s, states began developing social studies standards, but many did not implement standardized testing in the subject. According to the latest data from the National Center for Education Statistics, only about half of states nationwide administer social studies or civics assessments at some point before a student graduates from high school. With little funding or support for curriculum development and a stronger focus on English language arts and math, which are tested regularly across all fifty states and Washington, D.C., Kryczka said social studies has been “put on a back burner.” When asked to comment on the social studies standards in their states, teachers interviewed for the American Lesson Plan report offered responses ranging from lukewarm to outright negative, calling the materials “garbage,” “stupid,” and “impossible to use.”
When Kryczka and his colleagues sat down to draw up their conclusions for that report in 2022, at the height of Rufo-mania, they argued that the whole culture war schtick was a bit overblown. Instead, they wrote, “A lack of resources, instructional time, and professional respect represent far clearer threats to the integrity of history education across the United States.” If our schools succumb to the erasure of the American past in all its diversity and come to resemble, instead, babysitting programs where students in uniforms imbibe “patriotic education,” we won’t have just MAGA to blame.
The good news is that we are not yet living in a future where America’s children are taught that Barron Trump invented space travel. Today’s students remain hungry for the truth. One high school history teacher in Louisianna told me the most challenging part of her job these days is fielding student questions about why President Trump’s actions seem to violate the limits of executive power they just learned about in class. “We’ll be talking about how the president should not be a king, and then someone raises their hand and they’re like ‘What about this meme I saw from the president?’”