History a Flash Point as States Debate Standards

As debate continues around the development and adoption of common standards in English and mathematics, several states are independently wrestling with rewrites of standards in a content area largely absent from that national discussion—social studies—and encountering their own shares of controversy.

Flash points in the social studies debates tend to occur in the teaching of history, from what should be taught to when and how much .

History, in fact, appears to be repeating itself. Many of the issues are throwbacks to the squabbles that enmeshed the voluntary national standards in that subject a decade and a half ago, when critics complained about an ideological bias and contended that the standards omitted key historical symbols and figures. (They were there, in the elementary school document, though not repeated in the...