Teaching about history in Georgia is tougher now than ever, say those who do it.
In an environment full of touchy topics such as race, religion and politics, where facts and the interpretation of facts are bitterly debated, teachers’ tools or tactics can explode into a national controversy with a few tweets.
Georgians’ vocal views in the nationwide battle over a high school history course and a recent protest in Fulton County over a middle school lesson on the Civil War show that parents are paying more attention to the subject — and speaking out when they don’t like what’s being taught.
For teachers, that requires a degree of balance that’s not always easy.
“You are always on a tightrope,” said Eddie Bennett, executive director of the Georgia Council for the Social Studies, a 700-member group of teachers, administrators and others. In recent years, some Georgia educators have lost their jobs as a result of a lesson plan gone bad.
Bennett said he learned just how high emotions run on some topics around the year 2000 when he accepted a position at the state Education Department.
A parent grilled him about how contentious changes to the state flag, which previously included the Confederate battle emblem, would affect curriculum. A couple of years later, after 9-11, Bennett was leading the Cobb County social studies department and he got questions from parents on why were they teaching about Islam.
In some cases, educators have brought the difficulty on themselves.
Criticism of the latest Advanced Placement U.S. History class, for example, stems from changes made by its provider, the College Board. Conservative lawmakers, like tea party favorite William Ligon of Brunswick, say the course now diminishes the accomplishments of the Founding Fathers and takes a liberal viewpoint on some aspects of American history. The Georgia Senate passed a resolution this month, as the Republican National Committee had done earlier, outlining its opposition to the revised course.
A day after that resolution passed, some parents at Fulton County’s River Trail Middle School complained — among other things — about their children being shown a 19th-century political cartoon that included a Ku Klux Klansman and an African-American hanging from a tree. School district officials conceded it was a mistake to show students that age the cartoon without the proper context.
The problem is two-pronged, educators and parents say. The national political divide has some paying closer attention and voicing their displeasure about what is being taught in social studies and history classes. Then, educators say, there are the times lessons veer from the Georgia Performance Standards, which guide teachers how to teach about history and other subjects.
There is history of such missteps in some Georgia school districts.
In 2010, a Lumpkin County high school teacher was suspended for allowing four students to dress as Klansmen as part of a film project for her AP U.S. History class. Two years later, a Gwinnett County elementary school teacher resigned after asking questions about slave beatings and picking cotton to teach about math. The teacher was trying to explain what abolitionist Frederick Douglass had to overcome.
In the incident this month in Fulton County, about two dozen African-American parents at River Trail Middle School kept their children from watching a Civil War lesson taught on school grounds that they found racially insensitive. Besides the cartoon, the lesson included flags with the Confederate battle emblem.
Jeff Royster, a parent at River Trail who is African-American, said the Civil War lesson was done well, but he wonders why there aren’t similar types of lessons about, say, the March on Washington.
“You have to be able to teach about both sides,” said Royster, who recently met with school officials. “Why not teach the whole picture?”
It’s hard, though, to find consensus about history. Bennett noted there’s dispute even over what kind of government the United States is: a democracy or a republic?
People define the nation and view the past through the lens of their own experiences and values, history educators say. That’s why disagreements abound on history’s most important lessons.
On the Civil War, for example, “One hundred and fifty years later, we’re still fighting with many of the same questions,” such as race relations and the role of the federal government, said Andrew T. Mink, the director of outreach and education at the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia, in a recent Education Week article. Mink has administered a series of federal Teaching American History grants. “People bring a certain cultural understanding of the Civil War, of the Confederacy, of the Union,” he said. “If teachers don’t address that, it gets addressed somewhere else.”
Georgia’s high school social studies performance standards include guides for teaching about European settlement of North America, the westward expansion of America and the Civil War, along with websites the state education department believes are useful.
AP U.S. History course supporters and critics debated some points about the interpretation of history during a state education committee hearing last month. The uproar over the course changes has been noisy in Gwinnett, the state’s largest school district, where a half-dozen residents have spoken against it at nearly each school board meeting in recent months. They’ve complained, for example, that the revised course guidelines omit key moments such as D-Day and describe Ronald Reagan’s Cold War strategy as “bellicose.”
“Stop this indoctrination! … Take back local control of (AP U.S. History) now,” Gwinnett resident Bruce Duncil wrote school board members last month.
Some critics of how history is taught are teachers or former teachers. Former Gwinnett teacher Marc Urbach said he left the district, in part, because he wanted to teach more about the role of religion in American history.
Getting some educators to discuss the issue is difficult. Some school districts either did not return telephone calls to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution or declined to comment about it.
“Social studies contains a lot of sensitive topics,” said Fayette County social studies coordinator Becky Ryckeley.
Ryckeley said she fielded any complaints about the AP U.S. History course. Occasionally, she said, they get some questions or concerns about some of the county’s curriculum. Fayette teachers follow the Georgia performance standards and teach through historical documents, she said.
Ryckeley said teachers will contact parents beforehand to clearly explain coursework that could be misunderstood to try to avoid the type of controversy that causes backlashes.
“The relationship between parents and teachers is vital,” she said. “Sometimes things will go home and it’s not in the classroom context.”
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