Virginia Deletes Martin Luther King Jr. From History Standards, But It Was An ACCIDENT!

Lasting legacies of slavery? Why would anyone teach that?

Virginia's state Board of Education will meet today to discuss new state standards for history and social studies that have been revised under the administration of Gov. Glenn Younkgkin and Superintendent of Public Instruction Jillian Barlow. The new "standards of learning," with the unfortunate abbreviation 'SOLs,' have drawn harsh criticism from historians and educators, who warn that the standards miss a lot of historical context and reflect political interference by rightwing culture warriors. In fact, one of the critics' concerns is that the revisions to the standards lacked transparency, so it's not at all clear who rewrote the standards, or what exactly the process was. But the new standards are quite different from those developed in partnership with educators and historians under the Ralph Northam administration.

In the initial version of the standards released November 11, in fact, the elementary school curriculum contained no mention at all of "Martin Luther King Jr." or "Juneteenth" until the sixth grade, which struck a lot of educators as kind of a gigantic red flag about what might be in the rest of the standards. The state Department of Education issued a hurried apology for the "inadvertent" omissions and added Martin Luther King Day and Juneteenth into the standards for earlier grades as part of the holidays discussed in kindergarten and up. Problem solved!

Except not so much, since the other problems identified in a letter from "Concerned Educators of the Commonwealth" remain. Just adding the King Day holiday doesn't put discussions of King himself back in the curricula for first and second grade, and the letter argues that "This significant reduction is still unacceptable, and it not only shows how much this process was rushed in isolation with an outside consultant, but it now seems to be a paternalistic attempt to placate and mollify."

Among other problems that remain, the letter notes, the revision refers to Native Americans as "America’s 'first immigrants'" without any discussion of the fact that indigenous people had been in the Americas for millennia before Europeans showed up. Hey, we're all immigrants, stop fretting. At least the standards replaced "Indian" with " Native American," although there's no mention of why "Columbus Day" was replaced by Indigenous People's Day.

Critics of the new standards have also focused on the involvement of rightwing educational institutions like the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative think tank, and Hillsdale College, the Christian private college whose faculty helped spit out Donald Trump's awful "1776 Commission Report," which insisted slavery should be taught only as an unfortunate deviation from America's true values of equality and opportunity for all.

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Charles Pyle, a spokesperson for the Department of Education, declined to tell Richmond.com what the role of such institutions was in revising the standards, but said it was pretty nifty that Superindendent Barlow reached out to them, noting that she had "wanted the agency to reach out to a broader set of academics with expertise in the content and in the development of curriculum" — presumably because real historians are all dangerous leftists.

The revised standards do discuss the existence of slavery in colonial Virginia, but have been criticized for taking a similar view as that in the Trump commission's report, calling slavery "the 'antithesis of freedom.'” (They're not wrong about that!) There's also no mention of the ongoing legacy of slavery, and the word "racism" is completely missing from the new standards.

“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.”

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.

Also, in a huge departure from the Northam history standards, which frequently stated that slavery was at the root of the US Civil War, the Youngkin administration draft doesn't say that at all. Instead, the seventh-grade standards vaguely mention curricular goals like

explaining the basic causes for the Civil War; [and]

evaluating the major events and the differences between northern and southern states that divided Virginians and led to secession, war, and the creation of West Virginia;

At least there's nothing about the "War of Northern Aggression," so count your blessings.

Beyond those rightward shifts in emphasis, the standards also appear to have have tons of historical facts shoveled into them, without much context, which the critics worry — with justification — will lead to teaching that emphasizes rote memorization of names and dates, not critical thinking and understanding of history. But then, you wouldn't want too much critical thinking anyway, since that will just make students hate America and rebel against authority, the end.

[ Richmond.com / Virginia Mercury ]

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