The Michigan Social Studies Task Force meets Tuesday in Lansing. The group is sorting through thousands of comments gathered over a series of public hearings this year. WKAR Education Reporter Kevin Lavery talks with social studies consultant Jim Cameron about the work behind the scenes.
JIM CAMERON:
When you’re talking about social studies, my bumper sticker is, “Social studies is not rocket science. It’s much more difficult.” There aren’t the absolutes. In a state like Michigan, we have some very conservative people, some very liberal people and a lot of people in between. With the political bias one way or the other, there’s going to be disagreement. It is going to be contentious. The good news is, people feel strongly. The bad news is, they feel strongly enough that it’s hard to reach a compromise.
KEVIN LAVERY:
One of the main points of contention for some of the people who gave public comments over the summer was the term “core democratic values.” It had been struck through; it had been deleted. I think your group took great pains to say, this is not a final decision; this is where we stand now. What’s changed since then?
CAMERON:
We’ve had “core democratic values” as part of our social studies for many years. A lot of teachers are used to that and have a lot of good materials, resources, units, lessons dealing with that. It was proposed to delete “democratic” so they’re just “core values.” We’ve gotten past it, but there was one argument that, well…if they’re “core democratic values,” then people might think that Republicans don’t have them. But that was dismissed by most people and I think we’re in a better place now. The term we’re using now is “democratic values,” and we’re identifying the fundamental principles in the founding documents that are the source of those values and constitutional principles.
LAVERY:
There was also a lot of controversy over removing certain events: the March on Washington, the Little Rock desegregation, the Ku Klux Klan. That ruffled a few feathers. Is that being talked about as we speak, as the committees plow through this?
CAMERON:
Yes. What you have to realize is that there are six committees, and the sixth is the Bias Review Committee. They will look at all of the work the five committees have done, and they represent a variety of cultural and ethnic groups. When we have our meetings, they have the perspective of, OK; if this is written, what kind of bias is involved in it? Then that work will be taken back to each of the committees so that we get it right.
LAVERY:
Is the task force writing down some rationales for certain decisions or certain opinions as they go through this? That was another issue over the summer; people were seeing this draft, but the everyday person wasn’t seeing an explanation for why certain things were highlighted or removed.
CAMERON:
And that’s one of the mistakes, quite frankly, that we made the first time around. We actually started the updating process on April 15, 2014 and it was a one-year attempt to simply update (the standards) and make them ‘fewer, clearer and higher.’ We realized that whatever change we made, we had to explain why we made the change we did, and in some cases, rationales for why we didn’t change things.
LAVERY:
I think there’s probably a lot of people in Michigan who are watching this and are afraid that we may go down the same road we saw Texas go down several months ago, where their state board of education eliminated references to people like Helen Keller and Hillary Clinton. What might you say to Michiganders who are worried because they’ve seen the Texas model?
CAMERON:
I have more faith in our state board of education than that. I think they’re reasonable people and they have strong opinions too. But I don’t expect them to do anything like the Texas thing.
