Here is AHA Executive Director Jim Grossman:
The Florida Board of Education approved new standards of instruction in African American history on July 19, 2023. A firestorm of protest erupted immediately from a range of public figures (including the vice president of the United States), a wide and deep set of voices in African American communities, and a broad swath of K–12 teachers and professional historians.
It is important to read the standards themselves before considering the essay below, a version of which was published in the Miami Herald (with slight editing differences) and endorsed by the AHA Council as an official statement of the Association. There is much to debate in the standards; there is likely much to debate in the AHA’s response.
The loudest and most frequent objections to the Florida Board of Education document targeted standard SS.68.AA.2.3, which asks 6th to 8th graders to “examine the various duties and trades performed by slaves (e.g., agricultural work, painting, carpentry, tailoring, domestic service, blacksmithing, transportation).” This instruction might seem unobjectionable as an isolated statement of fact; enslaved people did perform such work. But then comes what the document categorizes as a “Benchmark Clarification”: “Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”
Critical focus on this clarification—and the implication that enslaved people benefited personally from a system that commodified, brutalized, and sought to dehumanize them—left to the margins the document’s other major flaws, which also lay largely within the realm of selection, contextualization, and emphasis. Even the “skills” debate has a glaring omission: Africans brought skills to the Americas that historians have written about for a half century, most notably rice cultivation.
The controversy over the Florida document raises broader issues about state K–12 social studies standards. Until recently, these standards have been developed largely through an extended process of consultation with teachers, parents, academic experts, curriculum developers, and other stakeholders—procedures largely consistent with the AHA’s Criteria for Standards in History/Social Studies/Social Sciences. The op-ed below focuses on the current controversy in Florida. But the AHA has been keeping close track of educational standards for over a year, has intervened directly in three states, and is now seeking the resources to extend this vital work more broadly. Please help us in this effort by donating to the AHA’s new Advocacy Fund.
Florida schoolchildren learn a definition of antisemitism in the 5th grade as part of the state’s Holocaust Education curriculum. State standards for high school recognize that to learn about the Holocaust, students must understand the meaning, breadth, and implications of antisemitism. The term itself appears a dozen times in eight pages.
This is as it should be. It is not possible to learn about what happened to European Jews without understanding the concepts of antisemitism and racism and reckoning with their impact.
And yet, according to the Florida Department of Education (FLDOE), the state’s young people can learn about slavery, sharecropping, lynching, Jim Crow segregation, disfranchisement, and ongoing systems and practices of racial discrimination without confronting the concept of racism. The word doesn’t appear in the new African American history standards until high school, and then only once in 14 pages.
Read the rest here.