News Topic

From the Executive Director's Desk

AHA Topics

K–12 Education, Teaching & Learning

The January 29 “Executive Order Ending Radical Indoctrination in K–12 Schooling” rests on—and even promotes—a misleading caricature of history education in the United States. This shaky premise undergirds a set of policy mandates that threaten the integrity and utility of history education in our nation.

The American Historical Association’s carefully researched American Lesson Plan thoroughly refutes the executive order’s cynical and unsubstantiated depiction of the landscape of American education. After two years of rigorous research and analysis, the AHA definitively concluded, “Secondary US history teachers are professionals who are concerned mostly with helping their students learn central elements of our nation’s history. Teachers want students to read and understand founding documents to prepare them for informed civic engagement. They also want students to grapple with the complex history and legacies of racism and slavery. These goals are entirely compatible. We did not find indoctrination, politicization, or deliberate classroom malpractice.”

These evidence-based conclusions stand in stark contrast to baseless, divisive, and inflammatory warnings about teachers and schools “imprinting anti-American, subversive, harmful, and false ideologies on our Nation’s children.”   

The AHA’s members and their colleagues teach students how to think, not what to think. Preparing future generations to read, think, and analyze provides a much stronger foundation for informed patriotism and civic participation. This executive order does just the opposite, providing a blueprint for widespread historical illiteracy. It requires teachers to rely on discredited conclusions that lack professional credibility or even to ignore the work of historians entirely. This includes the notorious 1776 Report, whose factual deficiencies render it little more than ideological polemic.

This executive order embraces a politicized playbook of radical education reform that supports policies that will fail to prepare students to live and work in the 21st-century United States. The AHA has worked to combat that playbook, offering expert analysis on dozens of proposed bills and social studies standards revisions at the state level that would restrict history education. We have partnered with members and educators across the country to promote policies that support teachers in preparing the next generation of students. We will continue to advocate for teaching history with integrity at the federal, state, and local levels.

I encourage our members and the public to inform themselves about these issues and review the AHA’s related resources:

~James Grossman