Editor’s Note: The following is the prepared text of a speech delivered by NAS Director of Research David Randall to the School Board Member Alliance of Virginia on November 14. In it, Randall outlines practical steps Virginia school boards can take to restore rigorous, liberty-focused civics and social studies instruction. We publish the speech here in full for the benefit of readers interested in the future of civic education in the Commonwealth and beyond.
Thank you so much to the School Board Member Alliance for inviting me to speak about what Virginia school boards can do to get good social studies and civics instruction into the classroom. My job is easier coming here, because you could get half of a good course on the American Founding just talking about Virginians. It’s not just George Washington coming from Mount Vernon to lead our ragged armies to victory and independence, or Thomas Jefferson drafting the Declaration of Independence. Generation after generation, Virginians have been among the stoutest champions of American liberty—and the fight for what gets taught in the classroom is our generation’s fight for the future of our republic. Your vital and necessary work to restore public education instruction rooted in liberty, parental rights, and truth continues Virginia’s proud legacy of duty to country and dedication to freedom.
I’m also particularly delighted to get a chance to come to Richmond, which itself is the center of much of what American students should learn in their social studies classes. Richmond is where Patrick Henry gave his speech to the Second Virginia Revolutionary Convention in 1775, culminating in the immortal challenge, Give me liberty or give me death! Richmond, of course, was the fulcrum of the War Between the States—or as I learned about it in my social studies class up north, the Civil War. Richmond is the birthplace of sportsman and civil rights icon Arthur Ashe, who has now been memorialized on Richmond’s Monument Avenue. Richmond’s history is America’s history—and a good part of my job is making sure that America’s ideals and institutions of liberty, republican self-government, and civic virtue get taught in America’s classrooms.
Why Civics Matters
That last phrase also serves as a good definition of “civics.” It isn’t just learning about the machinery of how the American government works. It’s teaching students about the ideals of our Founders that inspired them as they drafted the Declaration of Independence and crafted our Constitution—the why of American government, the ghost in the machine. The practical route to teaching good civics is making sure that public schools adopt good social studies curricula and textbooks. Good civics instruction also requires dedicated work to remove anti-civic instruction from our schools, such as Critical Race Theory and Action Civics. School boards that want to restore good social studies and civics instruction should know that there is a well-marked path to lead us from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City.
I said my job is about civics instruction, but I actually have two jobs. One is as the Director of Research for the National Association of Scholars (NAS). The NAS focuses on reforming our colleges and universities to depoliticize instruction, restore a focus on Western civilization and the liberal arts, and refocus higher education on the search for truth. The other is as Executive Director of the Civics Alliance, which represents NAS and many other organizations and individuals. The Civics Alliance focuses more on reforming K-12 social studies instruction and related topics, not least to ensure that America’s high school graduates are prepared for a rigorous college education. These are overlapping missions: you can’t fix higher education if you haven’t fixed K-12 education and the preparation of the students who come into college, and you can’t fix K-12 education unless you fix higher education and the preparation of the teachers who come into the classroom. You have to fix everything from kindergarten to the education schools—and that’s what we work to do.
Mostly, we work at the state level. I can talk to you for hours about our range of model state legislation. But we do also have recommendations for what school boards can do—and we try to be careful to tailor what we say to the precise powers that school boards have in each state. Fortunately, what we have to say to school boards shouldn’t take more than 15 or 20 minutes.
What School Boards Can Do
The most important power that Virginia school boards have to forward social studies and civics reform is the power to set the curriculum and to oversee what is taught in the classroom. This is the practical means by which school boards can make sure that local authority and community values govern what gets taught to your children.
Virginia has the advantage that its state social studies standards were reformed to be fairly solid—although I also would recommend that school boards look at the Civics Alliance’s model American Birthright K-12 social studies standards, to consider whether you would want to adopt some of our material at the school district level. Virginia’s standards still use some unfortunate radical identity-politics ideology vocabulary, such as “Indigenous” and “enslaved,” and Virginia school districts should try to do better where the Virginia state standards fall short.
What Virginia school districts most need, of course, is model curricula and model lesson plans to translate Virginia’s state social studies standards into classroom instruction.
My first recommendation would be to look at Louisiana’s Bayou Bridges: K-8 Louisiana Social Studies Curriculum. Louisiana’s Department of Education created that jointly with the Core Knowledge Foundation, and it’s a pretty solid K-8 social studies curriculum. It fits Louisiana’s standards rather than Virginia’s, and it’s more of a compromise with the establishment than I would prefer, but it’s still good. School board members, in cooperation with mission-focused superintendents, principals, and teachers, realistically can adapt Bayou Bridges, which is available for public use, for Virginia classrooms. With Bayou Bridges, you don’t have to start from scratch.
Virginia school boards also ought to get in touch with three national charter school networks to see whether they have social studies curricula and lesson plans that Virginia school boards can adopt. The first is Hillsdale College’s Barney Charter School Initiative, which provides classical charter schools throughout the nation. Hillsdale also simply provides its social studies curriculum for free on the internet, in The Hillsdale 1776 Curriculum. The second is the Great Hearts Institute, which also provides classical charter schools and uses the What So Proudly We Hail curriculum. The third is BASIS Charter Schools, which focuses on academic rigor, rather than on classical education. They don’t have a named social studies curriculum, like Hillsdale and Great Hearts, but they’d be a great resource for school board members.
Virginia school boards also can reform a good deal of their high-school instruction by directing schools to use three particular textbooks from Encounter Books: Wilfred McClay’s Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story and the two volumes of James Hankins’s and Allen Guelzo’s The Golden Thread: A History of the Western Tradition. These solid textbooks can provide the spine for good high-school instruction in American and European history. There isn’t yet a proper equivalent textbook for high school civics instruction—but the civics curricula from Hillsdale, Great Hearts, and Basis ought to provide a good-enough substitute.
Virginia school boards also ought to integrate the U.S. Civics Test into social studies instruction. 19 states now require high school graduates to take the U.S. Civics Test, which immigrants have to pass to become citizens. It’s a really basic checklist of civics knowledge, and every high school graduate should know the answers. Actually, every sixth grader should know the answers. Virginia school boards should require Grade Six students, as a graduation requirement, to take the U.S. Civics Test and get 70 of the 100 answers correct. That’s a really simple way to ensure that K-6 social studies and civics instruction is being done right.
It matters more that K-6 instruction is done right than 7-12 instruction. It also matters more that K-2 instruction is done right than 3-6 instruction. What students learn earliest matters the most. School board members should focus above all on instruction in the earliest grades to make sure students get a solid foundation. Above all, they should make sure that K-2 instruction includes solid education in our national symbols and history. Students in the earliest grades can and should learn the national and the state anthems, listen to stories of our Founding Fathers, and be taught why we celebrate patriotic holidays such as Presidents’ Day, Columbus Day, and Veterans Day. School board members should explicitly reject the education-school progression, first we learn about the local community, then the state, then the nation. That’s a way to learn about the nation last or never. Our children should learn why we love our nation from the earliest grades.
Now, I’ve talked so far about what should be in the curriculum. It’s also important what shouldn’t be in curriculum—action civics, also known as “civic engagement” or “service learning,” the vocational training in progressive activism that pretends to be civics education. Action civics takes away scarce classroom time for actually learning about America’s history and government and captures children to habituate them to political organizing and being organized politically. We have model bills for state-level bans on action civics, including the Partisanship Out of Civics Act, the Politics Out of Schools Act, and the Classroom Learning Act. School boards can use these as models for school district policies that prohibit action civics. School boards should make sure that classroom time actually is spent in classroom instruction.
School boards also should detach their school districts from dependence on the National Council for Social Studies and other radicalized organizations focused on social studies instruction. NCSS’s very definition of social studies now requires action civics—and, indeed, the discriminatory “diversity, equity, and inclusion” ideology, otherwise known as “Critical Race Theory,” forbidden by Governor Youngkin’s executive order. School board members need to provide their own definitions of social studies and its disciplines, and ensure that schools and teachers follow those definitions rather than the NCSS’s.
How to Move Forward
I’ve talked a good deal about changes to the curriculum. At the end of the day, of course, you need teachers who are ready and willing to teach a proper social studies curriculum. That ultimately requires state-level reform of teacher requirements, teacher licensure requirements, and schools of education. For now, school districts just may have to choose from a body of teachers who are all unprepared for and unenthusiastic about teaching a proper social studies and civics curriculum. At the very least, however, they can alter the job advertisements to include a phrase like this: “Content Knowledge: We prefer applicants who have taken eight undergraduate courses in United States History, Western History, Western Political Philosophy, United States Government, and Economics.” That phrase will send a signal about what sort of teachers you prefer—and should help each school district to remake its body of social studies teachers so that they are capable of teaching reformed and rigorous social studies and civics instruction.
There’s no end to other reforms Virginia school boards should do. Social studies instruction needs to be reformed in tandem with instruction in science, mathematics, English, and every other school subject. But that’s the subject for a discussion on a different day.
Here’s what matters most. If we restore truth and liberty to the classroom, we secure both for the next generation. That’s the fight Virginia has always championed—and must continue to champion, as a leader of our states.
Image: “Thomas Jefferson High School, Richmond, VA” by Crazyale on Wikimedia Commons
