Alaska’s new social studies standards don’t mention the Nome Gold Rush. They don’t mention the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System. They don’t mention William Egan, the state of Alaska’s first governor, and they don’t mention Sarah Palin, who ran for Vice President of the United States. There’s a lot more that’s missing in the Alaska social studies standards, but you can tell right away that something is wrong when Alaska’s social studies standards leave Alaska’s children ignorant of the headlines of Alaska’s history and the most famous Alaskans.
Education departments in every state are on radical autopilot when they make social studies standards. Americans expect blue states to use their state social studies standards to impose identity politics ideology and action civics (vocational training in progressive activism) on schools and students, strip out factual content, and ignore or slander the history of Western civilization and America, and call it “social studies instruction” — that’s what you get in states such as Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Minnesota. But radical activists embedded in state education departments do the same thing in red states whenever policymakers and citizens aren’t looking. That’s what just happened in Alaska.
The Alaska Social Studies Standards (2024), produced by Alaska’s Department of Education and Early Development, avoided the worst of the blue-state social studies standards’ extreme politicization, unprofessional vocabulary, and ideologically extreme content. That’s because there’s hardly any historical content. The standards’ absences include basic facts of American history, much of how our government works, and our foundational documents of liberty. The standards also introduced substantial new amounts of politicized material.
How did Alaska’s Department get its curriculum so badly wrong?
The department outsourced much of the standards to the radical activists who have captured the national social studies establishment. Alaska’s standards take their structure and emphases from the National Council for the Social Studies’ (NCSS) ideologically extreme definition of social studies, as well as from its College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework for Social Studies State Standards. The C3 Framework replaces content knowledge with insubstantial and opaque “inquiry”; lards social studies with identity politics ideologies such as Critical Race Theory; and inserts ideologically extreme activism pedagogies such as Action Civics.
The department also used a racially discriminatory drafting process. The standards state that:
The AHWG [Alaska History Workgroup] was composed of 8 individuals, including educators, education leaders, and representatives of Alaska tribes. This included representation from the Sitka Tribe of Alaska, Goldbelt Heritage Foundation, and Alaska Native Heritage Center. The function of the AHWG was to develop guidance for the inclusion of state history, Tribal government, and Indigenous histories. (p. 7)
The standards further note that, “one of the AHWG members shared the guiding principles with the Sitka Tribe of Alaska’s Education Committee for feedback.” (p. 8) The department used race categories to discriminate among its content advisors and so engaged in illegal racial discrimination in creating its standards.
The department’s use of NCSS, compounded by a racially discriminatory drafting process, produced standards that are bureaucratic, politicized, and possess virtually no content.
The standards are so difficult to read that scarcely anyone knows what they say or what they mean. The standards present content by a complicated framework of Anchor Standards, Grade-Band Standards, and Leveled Content Standards, rather than a simple list format. The standards have to include a nine-page section on “How to Read the Standards.”
Because the standards follow the NCSS’ C3 Framework and use an “Inquiry-Based Learning” framework (p. 9), they have virtually no factual content. It’s not just the history of Alaska that’s missing. While there is some substance in the Economics strand, and limited substance in the Civics strand, the standards possess virtually no historical content. The names of Christopher Columbus, George Washington, and Abraham Lincoln are absent. But so are words like Christianity, Protestantism, and Catholicism; any hint that technological advance might have improved Americans’ standard of living; and virtually all of the narrative, events, and heroes of America’s wars.
The standards’ subordinate social studies education throughout to “action civics,” also known as “protest civics,” which uses the pedagogy of “service-learning” to substitute vocational training in progressive activism for classroom civics education. They push the narrative that an “engaged citizen” can only effect change through “demonstration” (p. 100) and protest, and they also conflate action civics with progressive advocacy: “Recognize historic inequalities in the United States and Alaska and evaluate proposed solutions to correct them.” (p. 100)
The standards distort much of what content they possess to suit progressive and radical ideology. The geography section’s constant focus on “cultural and environmental characteristics of places or regions” (SS. p. 31) replaces geographical knowledge with progressive activism. A substantial portion on Alaska Natives and their history focuses on identity politics, “land acknowledgments” (a phrase intended to delegitimize the United States) (p. 47), and “Indigenous resistance efforts” (p. 114).
The department should start over and create new social studies standards, along fundamentally different lines. The revised structure should include studying documents of liberty, factual knowledge of Alaska’s geography (not climate change), patriotic content, America’s colonial history, America’s and Alaska’s shared culture, and Western civilization. And it should all be presented in a straightforward, content-rich format.
The department’s regular personnel have failed so completely to provide adequate social studies standards that Alaska’s policymakers should step in and appoint an independent commission to draft depoliticized, content-rich social studies standards.
That’s what needs to happen in Alaska — and in most states of the union, red, purple, or blue. Radical bureaucrats staff virtually every state education department. They impose radical social studies standards where they can, and they sabotage education reform efforts to the best of their ability. Alaska’s citizens and policymakers need to reassert control of their state education departments — and so do their fellow Americans, in every state of our great nation.
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