Michigan Conservatives Don’t Want to Teach Kids America Is a Democracy

On Tuesday, the Michigan State Board of Education will vote on a plan to reform the state’s standards for social studies, the rubric that determines how teachers cover history, civics, economics, and geography in their classrooms. The new standards, first developed by former Republican State Senator Patrick Colbeck and a group of like-minded conservatives, propose a few right-turns in the lesson plans of Michigan teachers from kindergarten through 12th grade.

According to the local nonprofit Bridge magazine, Colbeck and company’s plan would remove from the standards all LGBT references in the section dealing with civil rights, all references to Roe v. Wade, and would severely limit teachers’ ability to discuss climate change. Colbeck told Bridge that he personally added a zero-sum proposal about “how the expansion of rights for some groups [including immigrants, people with disabilities, and LGBTQ Americans] can be viewed as an infringement of rights and freedoms of others.”

This is more or less standard fare for conservative education advocates: altering lesson plans or textbooks to make them more friendly to small-government ideas, or less critical of the country’s most egregious human rights violations. In Texas in 2010, the state board of education approved a new set of textbooks that corrected a perceived left-leaning bias within the school system. “Academia is skewed too far to the left,” said Dr. Don McLeroy, the leading conservative advocate on Texas’ education board. Among other attempts to provide what McLeroy called “balance” was a rewrite of history book chapters on slavery, which glossed over the atrocities of centuries of bondage and included feel-good passages like “Some slaves reported that their masters treated ​them kindly,” and “many enslaved Africans found comfort in ​their community and culture. They made time ​for social activity, even after exhausting workdays, in order to relieve the hardship of their ​lives.” In Oklahoma in 2015, state Republicans drew up a bill that would ban public schools from using state money to teach the AP U.S. history course, because it emphasizes “what is bad about America” and doesn’t teach “American exceptionalism,” according to State Representative Dan Fisher.