NCSS Statement on American Birthright: The Civics Alliance's Model K-12 Social Studies Standards

NCSS Statement on American Birthright: The Civics Alliance's Model K-12 Social Studies Standards

  1. Current Events Responses
  2. NCSS Statement on American Birthright: The Civics Alliance's Model K-12 Social Studies Standards

A Current Events Response by National Council for the Social Studies
September 2022

The National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) is the largest professional organization devoted exclusively to the teaching and learning of social studies, and we represent over 10,000 social studies educators. The Civics Alliance recently published American Birthright: The Civics Alliance's Model K-12 Social Studies Standards. NCSS has a clear position statement on the best practices when developing social studies standards. Using the best practices outlined in that 2021 position statement, NCSS has determined that the suggested social studies standards developed by the Civics Alliance do not align with best practices related to the development of social studies standards. If implemented in schools, these suggested standards would have damaging and lasting effects on the civic knowledge of students and their capacity to engage in civic reasoning and deliberation. NCSS does not endorse nor support the use of these standards.

In making this determination, NCSS relied upon its 102 years of experience in supporting the teaching and learning of social studies. Our position has remained consistent over the years that the standards that organizations, states, districts, and/or schools and teachers develop or adopt should be grounded in current scholarship, reflect best practices in social studies education, and be inclusive for all student backgrounds and ability levels. Although the Civics Alliance claims that its standards align with these expectations, they do not. Rather, we view these suggested standards as an attempt to return to a time when United States social studies classrooms presented a single narrative of U.S. and Western history that glorified selected aspects of history while minimizing the experiences, contributions, and perspectives of Indigenous peoples, people of color, women, the LGBTQIA+ community, the working class, and countless others. The writers of the suggested standards use outdated language, have a clear political motive, and promote content and approaches to social studies and history education that do not align with those recommended by experts in social studies content areas. 

In addition, NCSS takes issue with the Civics Alliance’s characterization of the College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework as a document that promotes generic reading skills and rejects the learning of content. The C3 Framework is grounded in disciplinary literacy skills that help students learn how to read, write, and think like historians, geographers, economists, and political and social scientists. These skills are rigorous and extend far beyond generic reading skills. The C3 Framework, by design, focuses on best practices in social studies pedagogy that can be applied to build meaningful learning of any content standards. Furthermore, the C3 Framework, as clearly explained in the introduction, “... does not include all that can or should be included in a set of robust social studies standards, and intentionally preserves the critical choices around the selection of curricular content taught at each grade level as a decision best made by each state.”

As organizations, states, districts, and/or schools and teachers develop or adopt social studies standards, NCSS supports the following documents as powerful guidelines to inform the development of social studies standards at the state and local level, and we recommend that these documents be used to center standards-development and adoption work:

For more information on the principles that the National Council for the Social Studies promotes related to social studies standards development, please see our statement found here.