JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:

In the last decade, at least 20 states have enacted laws or policies that restrict how history can be taught. And some politicians have claimed that history teachers are politicizing their coursework, telling students not just how to think but what to think. So the American Historical Association took a deeper look. They examined U.S. history curricula across the nation and surveyed and interviewed more than 3,000 middle and high school history teachers. Their new report is called American Lesson Plan, and they presented it to Congress this week. Nick Kryczka was the research coordinator and a former high school history teacher. Welcome.

NICK KRYCZKA: Hi, Juana. Thank you.

SUMMERS: So, Nick, I just want to start with the top line here. Tell us what you guys found. What did you learn about whether educators are teaching history with a political bent?

KRYCZKA: Well, I think what we found out is that some of the declarations of panic or crisis that a lot of commentators might have been throwing around about two years ago are without basis, that most history teachers teach history in a way that is consistent with some pretty strong principles of balance and neutrality in terms of the way that they teach and that the materials that they use come from a pretty common ground of trusted resources.

SUMMERS: From my understanding, you all found that teachers weren’t just sticking to history textbooks when they present their lessons. Can you give us some examples of the other types of resources that they’re drawing on there in the classroom?

KRYCZKA: Sure. The – I mean, one of the things that’s happened over the past decade or more is a tech revolution in education. And so the traditional textbook as, you know, we might have understood it has moved to the margins of a lot of history instruction. And so teachers pull from a vast, decentralized, online universe of no-cost and low-cost sources.

Some of the most popular ones are actually federal archives, libraries, institutions and museums, places like the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian. There are YouTube videos galore about American history that teachers use in their classroom, one of the more popular ones being John Green’s Crash Course U.S. History. Teachers Pay Teachers is a pretty popular but also polarizing resource that teachers use to share and sell materials to each other.

SUMMERS: Listening to you describe the array of resources that are out there, whether it be YouTube or elsewhere, it does raise the question of whether there’s a danger that, when instructors go outside the textbook, there’s more opportunity for a teacher to introduce materials into the curriculum that some may say are biased.

KRYCZKA: I think the risk of bias is actually not as strong as one might think. Teachers generally have a very strong professional bedrock about their need to keep ideological bent out of what they’re teaching. So their radar with regard to materials that may have an ideological position is pretty sharp, and they flag and avoid those resources that they see as coming at history from a particularly partisan or ideological perspective. So that isn’t nearly as great a concern as maybe some people might think.

SUMMERS: You and your team briefed Congress on your findings on Tuesday. What did you hear? How were the findings received?

KRYCZKA: I think the audience in the room were, I hope, reassured to hear that much of what we found in American classrooms is perfectly defensible against charges of either liberal indoctrination or nationalist chauvinism. There is an understanding that teachers need quite a bit more support when it comes to reinforcing their expertise in certain historical content areas. And in the end, it’s teachers’ sense of themselves as authentic experts in history that really makes them able to fend off the more unproductive, politicized approaches to history that might come their way, whether it’s from a parent or an administrator or a curriculum provider.

SUMMERS: That was Nick Kryczka, research coordinator for American Lesson Plan. It’s a report by the American Historical Association about history instruction in the United States. Nick, thank you.

KRYCZKA: Thank you.

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