The National Association of Scholars’ Civics Alliance coalition released a comprehensive report critiquing Connecticut’s social studies standards, which is the state’s guide for teachers detailing what students should be learning from Pre-K through 12th grade.
The 34-page report, titled “Disowned Yankees: How Connecticut’s Social Studies Standards Shortchange Students,” details how the Connecticut State Department of Education (CSDE) produced the curriculum, the result of implementing the curriculum, as well as “recommendations for how to fix the adoption process and the substance of Connecticut’s social studies instruction, by substantive revision of the Standards.”
Connecticut’s Social Studies Standards fail to achieve the fundamental goal of American social studies education.
Read more: https://t.co/cmtoDTuWt8
— National Association of Scholars (@NASorg) February 21, 2024
The report found that the state’s social studies curriculum for students was produced by “bureaucratic means, drafted in a difficult-to-read format, suffused in radical jargon, and pedagogy, and teach a tattered caricature of history and civics, which will produce radical activists who hate their country rather than self-reliant citizens who love it.”
“Connecticut will suffer in many ways from these Standards’ degradation of K-12 social studies instruction,” the report said.
“The Standards does not teach Connecticut’s children what freedom is,” David Randall, report author and Executive Director of the Civics Alliance said in a statement. “Nor does the Standards teach where America’s ideas of freedom come from in the long history of Western civilization, nor how our ancestors achieved their freedom, nor how our laws and republican institutions limit the scope of government to preserve our freedom, nor what is necessary to preserve that liberty.”
“Connecticut’s citizens deserve excellent social studies standards,” Randall added. “Connecticut citizens and policymakers should work at once to make all the statutory and administrative changes necessary to make sure that CSDE crafts proper social studies standards for their children—standards that educate Connecticut’s children to know and to love their birthright of liberty.”
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Connecticut Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
