Editor’s Note: The National Association of Scholars (NAS) and the Civics Alliance work to ensure that every state has academic standards that promote first-rate education and protect school children from political indoctrination. We promote reform of content standards in every state, along the lines modeled by the Civics Alliance’s American Birthright: The Civics Alliance’s Model K-12 Social Studies Standards, and we have been asked by Virginia citizens to comment on the Proposed History and Social Science Standards of Learning (November 2022). We conclude that the Virginia Board of Education has provided excellent social studies standards—although we provide a series of suggestions in detail for how to further improve these fine Standards.
We have sent the following letter to the Virginia Board of Education. We include below the initial 7-page letter. The PDF also includes three appendices: Appendix 1: Suggested Revisions: Annotations, an outline of our revisions, explaining our reasons for the suggested changes in each revised item, which is 17 pages; Appendix 2: Suggested Revisions: Redline Draft, a complete text of the Standards with our suggested revisions, showing deleted text and added text, which is 70 pages; and Appendix 3: Suggested Revisions: Clean Draft, a complete text of Standards with our revisions, showing how it would appear if all suggested revisions were accepted, which is 61 pages.
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