AHA director of teaching and learning Brendan Gillis and AHA member Katharina Matro (Walter Johnson High School) were featured in an Associated Press article about concerns that the planned White House review of content from the Smithsonian Institution will extend to materials used in K-12 classrooms. Gillis says that the reliability of resources from the Smithsonian has been “one of the most influential and profoundly important ways that the federal government has invested in social studies education over the last couple of decades,” but that reliability is now called into question. The article also cites the AHA’s American Lesson Plan: Teaching US History in Secondary Schools report, noting, “More than 80% of history teachers report using free resources from federal museums, archives and institutions including the Smithsonian, according to an American Historical Association survey last year.”
