The longstanding battle over how to teach America’s past has been particularly contentious over the past few years.
Conservative commentators have accused history teachers of rampant left-wing bias, “indoctrinating” students into hating their country and rejecting its founding ideals. In more than a dozen states, Republican lawmakers have passed laws prohibiting discussion of potentially “divisive” topics in the classroom, claiming that teachers had steered conversations about race and racism into overt political advocacy.
But this portrait of American classrooms as ideological incubators is largely a fiction, according to a new, sweeping report on the state of secondary history education.
Instead, the research, from the American Historical Association, finds that teachers overwhelmingly say they aim to develop students’ historical thinking skills—teaching them how to think, not what to think—and value presenting multiple sides of every story. Their most popular resources come from nonpartisan sources, including those developed by federal institutions like the Library of Congress.
“People should not be panicking about the state of the American curriculum,” said Nicholas Kryczka, the research coordinator on the project.
“Most of the curriculum in the United States that is typically used by most teachers is perfectly defensible against charges of either liberal indoctrination or conservative chauvinism,” he said.
People should not be panicking about the state of the American curriculum.
The finding echoes history teachers’ responses to attacks on their work over the past few years.
“We are professionals who are trying to teach our students,” said Janell Cinquini, a social studies teacher at Lakeridge High School in the Lake Oswego school district in Oregon. “There’s not really an evil plan behind that.”
History researchers combed curriculum and interviewed teachers
Researchers at the AHA examined state standards and legislation across 50 states, surveyed about 3,000 middle and high school history educators across nine states, conducted more than 200 in-depth interviews with teachers and administrators, and reviewed thousands of pages of instructional materials.
While the report didn’t find evidence of widespread politicization, some teachers did say they fear being accused of bias. Still, it wasn’t a constant threat for most. Only 2 percent of educators surveyed said they “frequently” faced objections or criticisms to the way they teach history.
“Those pressures and those problems are real, but they’re not ubiquitous,” said Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor of the history of education at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, who reviewed the report.
More pressing, teachers said, was what they viewed as the deprioritization of the subject in K-12 schooling—and the need for more subject-specific professional development that would help them deepen their content expertise.
“What they’re frustrated with, or what they need help working through, is not often the political dynamic,” said Kryczka.
Teachers prefer nonpartisan resources for teaching history and historical inquiry
History is a mostly decentralized discipline, the report finds—only 4 percent of teachers said their district requires anything more than following a pacing guide. Eighty-five percent of teachers write and design at least some of their own materials. Three-quarters report using free online resources, and about half use a hard copy of a textbook.
Those findings of a deeply variable landscape stand in stark contrast to the often-intense interest that accompanies the drafting of states’ content standards in history and their selection of textbooks.
Despite this variation, some materials are ubiquitous. Eighty-two percent of those surveyed report using resources from federal museums, archives, and institutions, while 80 percent said they use PBS materials. Also popular is the YouTube series Crash Course U.S. History, created by the young adult author John Green—80 percent of teachers say they use these.
Far less widely used are resources that have become flashpoints in debates over how to tell the American story.
Only 17 percent of teachers had used the 1619 Project Education Network, a suite of resources hosted by the Pulitzer Center, developed around The New York Times Magazine’s special issue of the same name. The series of essays, which aimed to examine U.S. history through the lens of the legacy of slavery, drew ire from Republican lawmakers who sought to ban its use in classrooms.
About the same share of teachers—18 percent—purposefully avoided the resource. Teachers were also likely to say that they avoided the Hillsdale 1776 Curriculum, an offering from the Christian liberalarts school Hillsdale College, which emphasizes American exceptionalism. Eight percent of teachers said they avoided Hillsdale’s materials, and only 4 percent had ever used them.
“Curricular products that come pre-coated with politicized associations can expect a cool reception from teachers,” the report concludes.
When politics does enter commonly used materials, the report argues, it’s via overly simplistic questions that ask students to judge the morality of historical actors or decisions. For example, some materials the researchers reviewed asked students to argue whether figures such as Andrew Carnegie or Andrew Jackson were heroes or villains.
These assignments are often well-intentioned, designed to engage students in the topics at hand, said Kryczka. But, he said, they ask history to provide a “moral handbook” for the present, rather than help students more deeply understand the past in its own context.
“If we’re in the business of teaching history and civics as either vindicating or condemning, of saying guilty or innocent, we’re short circuiting the learning process,” said David Bobb, the president of the civics education organization the Bill of Rights Institute, and the former director of the Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship at Hillsdale College.
Political climate produces a chilling effect, some educators say
Still, in interviews with AHA researchers, teachers explained that it was important for them to remain neutral and nonpartisan.
“[I am] going to teach the good, the bad, and the ugly. I’m going to tell it like it is and how it happened,” one teacher from Texas told the researchers.
Another, from Illinois, said they didn’t want “students knowing my views.”
Overall, most teachers didn’t face much criticism of the way they taught. Forty-five percent said they never had, while 40 percent said they had only experienced it once or twice.
Even though they didn’t experience direct criticism, some teachers interviewed mentioned that the political climate had led to a chilling effect on their classroom decisionmaking. Teachers raised concerns about “divisive concepts” laws—but some also worried about what they saw as progressive-leaning materials with “moralistic” overtones.
The findings align with previous research, including from the RAND Corporation, finding that many teachers limited discussions of social and political issues in class—even in states without laws prohibiting teaching of these topics.
Cinquini, the Oregon teacher, is familiar with the phenomenon. She recently saw a fellow teacher in a social studies Facebook group write that they were avoiding even discussing the 2024 presidential election in class.
“That actually made me really sad,” Cinquini said. “We’re trying to create engaged citizens and we can’t talk about what’s going on right now?”
She understands the fear, but she thinks that tying history to current events is integral to engaging teenagers.
Instead of avoiding topics completely, she has started “slowing down” and picking her words more carefully, she said: “I want to make sure that what I say honestly reflects my desire to stay middle of the road.”
