New Jersey’s Learning Standards for Social Studies, Part II

In an early blog back in September, I examined the Learning Standards provided by the state of New Jersey for my subject matter. I was aware at the time that the latest round of revisions were being discussed and heard some good things about how the National Council For Social Studies College, Career, and Civic Life “C3” Framework was going to be incorporated. Unlike the New Jersey standards which painfully attempt to hit specific content, the C3 framework is more about skills and the approach to understanding the social studies writ large. Like Common Core and most other subjects, educational administrators have come to the understanding that listing every last bit of a content is a fool’s errand. Well, except for those who are responsible for writing the New Jersey standards.

It’s not hard to figure out what’s going on. While those who know better have convinced the powers that be to incorporate aspects of C3, what they’ve done is created a dual track system. The actual Learning Standards are almost unchanged. Separate to them is a list of “social studies practices” derived from C3. I probably would have some quibbles with how some of that is formulated, but the enormous rampaging elephant in the room remains the ludicrous standards.

My focus for now is on the US History and Active Citizenship standards as they parallel the two course I am currently teaching. I am relatively certain that the World History standards are just as bad, but I’m less conversant in that area at the moment, and I have enough to cover here. As it stands, the blog I wrote last time is the single longest one out of nearly 200 blogs I’ve published.

Let’s dispense with “Active Citizenship in the 21st Century” first. It’s a bizarre little afterthought that was created a number of years ago. The committee which revised the previous standards made absolutely no changes to this document’s SIX standards. Well, except now they are calling them “performance expectations.” Rebranding makes all the difference, eh? For those who didn’t read my previous blog, here is my favorite specific standard performance expectation:

Collaborate with students from other countries to develop possible solutions to an issue of environmental justice, including climate change, and present those solutions to relevant national and international governmental and/or nongovernmental organizations.

To meet this expectation, every student in the state of New Jersey will have collaborated with students from another country on this project. The way it is written they have to include climate change as part of an issue of environmental justice AND then present said solutions to governmental or nongovernmental organizations. Think about that for a second: even if the 600 students in the senior class at Hillsborough High School work in groups of 5, that’s 120 reports that are going to be sent to Greenpeace or the Department of Energy or whomever is deemed relevant. Let’s also think about the schools that don’t have the technology infrastructure to readily communicate with students from other countries. How long are they to take on this project, by the way? They would have to learn about aspects of environmental justice, research possible solutions, communicate with the other students, develop their solutions, create their final projects, and then present them. This is absurd.

But it also reveals something critical. This standard exists to appease whatever person on the committee (or outside interest group) that is insistent that our students be environmentalists. I think that’s a lovely goal, but why tie the hands of teachers with such a specifically prescribed lesson plan?

It also brings up the notion of “authentic assessment.” The gist of this jargon is that instead of preparing work for an audience of just the teacher, students should be creating work for a larger, broader audience. I suppose the notion is that they will be more highly motivated if they know some expert is going to read it. Frankly I find that somewhat patronizing. I’ve tried it a number of times over the years and I haven’t noticed any change in student attitude or effort. I’ve sent student work to elected officials and heard nothing back. But even if I were to get something back, I am reasonably sure it would be something like, “Wow, you students are going to take my job! Great work!” The reality is that some environmental expert isn’t all that interested in what a group of high school kids with inch deep understanding into an issue think. And that’s probably how it should be, at least insofar as their supposed solutions to complex problems that we don’t have time to fully explore… in part because there are other standards performance expectations to live up to.

Here is a table summary of the changes that they made from 2014 to 2020 for their Learning Standards in US History:

Era	# of 2014 Standards	# of 2020 Standards
Colonization and Settlement (1585-1763)	6	5
Revolution and New Nation (1754-1820s)	13	16
Expansion and Reform (1801-1861)	17	15
Civil War and Reconstruction (1850-1877)	13	12
The Development of the Industrial United States (1870-1900)	11	10
The Emergence of Modern America: Progressive Reforms	11	11
The Emergence of Modern America: World War I	9	7
The Emergence of Modern America: The Roaring Twenties	8	7
The Great Depression and World War II: The Great Depression	8	8
The Great Depression and World War II: The New Deal	10	9
The Great Depression and World War II: World War II	13	11
Postwar United States: Cold War	13	10
Postwar United States: Civil Rights and Social Change	15	23
Contemporary United States: Domestic Politics	22	27
Contemporary United States: International Politics	13	9
Contemporary United States: Interconnected Global Society	10	9
TOTAL	192	189

What was needed was wholesale change. Instead they shuffled the deck chairs around, eliminating a whopping three total standards (I’ll dispense with the running joke of referring to them as “performance expectations). They eliminated a few lame standards and padded a few units that they perceived as lacking.

Although US History is taught over the course of two years in New Jersey, these standards are so numerous that on average, teaches would have two days to address each one. That doesn’t include the Citizenship standards I addressed earlier. While it’s true that some standards would take a handful of minutes to cover, others are worthy of days of deeper examination. Take this one, for example:

Compare and contrast historians’ interpretations of the impact of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments on African American’s [sic] ability to participate in influencing governmental policies.

Let’s unpack that for a moment: we are having students read multiple historians here, after evidently having taught them the history behind the Reconstruction amendments as well as the aftermath which logically extends until the present day. I have trouble covering the material in two weeks adequately, let alone taking the time to have students read historians’ takes on it AND comparing and contrasting. (Let’s also address that particular bugaboo: the multiple historians, is that so we can get “both” sides? Should I find a historian who says that racism ended in 1870?)

Here’s another beaut:

Compare and contrast the impact of the American Civil War with the impact of a past or current civil war in another country in terms of the consequences of costs, reconstruction, people’s lives, and work.”

Really? We’re going to teach the history of the American Civil War and then take a detour to China, Syria, or Lebanon and teach those super-easy-to-understand conflicts in ten minutes or so?

There is this weird obsession with creating what amounts to lesson plan dictates throughout these standards, but worse still is the need to please various constituencies that is littered throughout the document. This, I suspect, is the primary reason that they cannot make any substantive changes: the whole process is politicized and someone will get angry if their perceived Precious is eliminated.

There are literally dozens of standards related to racial minorities, women, and New Jersey history. There are endless economic and geographic standards as well. All of these subjects are important, but the standards are overly prescriptive and extremely redundant. It all begins with the structure, which attempts to focus on listing everything deemed critical for students to understand. That’s a fool’s errand doomed to failure. Any teacher who made an honest effort to cover every one of these standards would guarantee that their students understand next to nothing and remembered even less.

To be clear, some of the standards offer some wonderful suggestions. When teaching industrialization, why not focus on the Paterson silk strike? The students may have heard of Paterson, and might even be intrigued enough to convince their parents to take them to the delightful Paterson Museum. But when some standards start with the ridiculously specific “Construct a claim…” or “Craft an argument” and others with “Explore the context” and “Relate,” you’re clearly seeing work by a loosely constructed committee.

Craft an argument as to the effectiveness of the New Jersey Constitution of 1947, New Jersey Supreme Court decisions, and New Jersey’s laws in eliminating segregation and discrimination.

That would be a really cool idea for a lesson plan, but is it necessary? Does any student really need to know anything about the 1947 Constitution? That last new constitution was drafted at the Rutgers University gym on College Avenue, the place I used to go to sign up for my classes. Kind of neat. The circumstances behind why they wrote a new document are interesting. And I just learned about them from Wikipedia, because until now I’ve never even thought about actually finding out about the document. If I were to take the time to teach about New Jersey’s constitution, I’d have to cut something from the civil rights unit. Which is least important to understanding the material, the NJ document, Little Rock High School, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and so forth?

Here’s a crazy idea: adopt the C3 framework, or some version of it. Create a document of principals of what types of information needs to be covered. Provide a list of key terms and concepts (basically the things they put in parenthetical statements within the standards), and then GET. OUT. OF. THE. WAY. Let schools develop curricula that reflect these core concepts and practices based on the teachers’ training in their subject matter. Give us the chance to make difficult decisions about what to include and what to gloss over because of time. I mean, we do that anyway, but surreptitiously. Anyone who thinks social studies teachers can adequately teach 189 standards in two years — and students can learn them — cannot be someone who has created and taught a lesson plan aligned to these standards within the last decade. In other words, a non-educator or an administrator who has lost touch.