The Biden Administration Could Usher In A New Era Of Teaching American History

There’s little question that the four-year term of President Donald Trump has inflamed the debate about how we teach American history and most notably, how we teach students about slavery. His 1776 Commission, established by executive order signed on November 2, 2020 calls for the teaching of “patriotic” history. Designed to discredit The New York Times’ 1619 Project, this new order had a chilling effect on efforts of teachers to teach an accurate history of America. 

Yesterday, on the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, the Commission released its report.

I expect President-elect Biden will overturn most, if not all, Trump did in this area if the appointment of Miguel Cardona as Secretary of Education is any indication. Cardona holds a masters’ degree in bilingual and bicultural education and has been a vocal proponent of a new Connecticut law that will require all high schools in the state to offer courses on African-American, Black, Puerto Rican and Latino contributions to U.S. history. Many educators will welcome this shift.

Teaching Critical Race Theory

The executive order required all federal agencies to immediately stop funding any training that “teaches or suggests” that the US is racist and condemned critical race theory as “anti-American” propaganda. The new administration will almost certainly quickly reverse that executive order that sought to outlaw the teaching of history based on “critical race theory.” Critical race theory acknowledges the existence of white supremacy and its impact on our legal and cultural systems. 

I hope we can now get away from a debate about when American history began and instead have a full discussion about history that includes the contributions of all the people who contributed to and occupy this land. Dates are markers in time, and are useful, but should not be used to obscure or limit our understanding of history. 

The sooner the new administration can reverse this order, the less severe the damage will be. Even though Cardona’s confirmation by the Senate is not certain, we can expect he will push for more inclusiveness in education, based on his record. 

Teaching history is not political

Even once the executive order is overturned, we will have much work to do. We were just beginning to address the history of America including all of its peoples. In 2018, Texas became the first state to offer an elective in Mexican American Studies. Likewise, in September 2020, Texas’s State Board of Education became the first state board to approve this one-credit course now titled, “Ethnic Studies: Mexican American Studies.” The push for an African American elective has also occurred in Texas with a pilot program hosted by the Dallas Independent School District in 2019 and additional districts in 2020 such as Killeen I.S.D. Other states, including New Jersey, Arkansas, Florida, Illinois, Mississippi, New York and Rhode Island have state laws requiring that Black history be included in history curricula. But it is difficult to measure how educators are doing so, and whether there is an established curriculum. Leadership on the issue at the federal level could help teachers, public officials and students embrace the idea of learning a full history  of the United States including the history of the marginalized and oppressed. 

A complete history of our land will include the stories of the lives of the Native Americans who were already here when the first colonizers and enslavers arrived from Europe. It will include an accounting of the crimes that were perpetrated against them. And it will include an accurate portrayal of the sacrifices and contributions of the enslaved. Anything less than that simply isn’t history. It’s propaganda. 

The future of history

Former Attorney General Bill Barr famously quipped in the last months of his reign: “history is written by the winners, so it largely depends on who’s writing the history.” The outgoing administration has systematically attempted to rewrite American history from the vantage point of the white founders, many of whom were enslavers. 

They have championed Confederate monuments as key pieces of valuable history, despite the fact that they were almost without exception erected decades later in the Jim Crow era to intimidate African American citizens. If the Trump Administration had been true to its premise, however, it wouldn’t have championed this pro-Confederate version of history. It was, after all, the Union, not the Confederacy, that won the Civil War. 

And so, I hope that Biden’s victory, with the largest ever popular vote and its nominee for education secretary, will not only sweep in a new framework for the study of history, but will allow the history of all Americans to be told – not just the “winners.”