Marc Basnight, president pro tempore of the North Carolina state Senate and “one of the most powerful political figures in the state” has circulated a letter opposing the proposed changes to the state’s U.S. history standards.
The current standards draft eliminates American history prior to 1877 from the history course taken by North Carolina 11th graders. Basnight is “absolutely opposed to any change that would limit the study to the years proposed….[N]o one should graduate from high school without a thorough understanding of the Declaration of Independence, the Founding Fathers, the writing of the Constitution, and the personalities involved. Furthermore, it is my belief that only high school students have the capacity to understand complex and awful parts of our nation’s history such as slavery and the Civil War.”
A relevant bit of North Carolina history: in 2006, the Fordham Institute concluded that North Carolina’s U.S. history standards “[do] not [constitute] a U.S. history education in any sense” and gave the standards an F. Now they’re trying to make them even worse!
James Elias
[...] In February, we criticized proposed changes to North Carolina’s social studies standards. The standards draft eliminated American history prior to 1877 from the history course taken by North Carolina’s 11th graders. NCDPI received over 7,000 letters protesting the proposed changes. [...]