Taken for a Ride: How Rhode Island's Social Studies Standards Shortchange Students

This study explores the history of Americans' birthright of liberty. The goal of education is to teach our children social studies, above all history and civics, so they can know what liberty is, where America's ideas of liberty originate in the long history of Western civilization, how our ancestors achieved their freedom, how our laws, republican institutions, and limitation of the scope of government preserve our liberty, and what they need to do to preserve their country's freedom. The author believes that Rhode Island's "Social Studies Standards" (2023) (hereafter, "Standards") fail entirely to achieve these fundamental goals. The "Standards" will be so destructive in good measure because Rhode Island's government recently passed several laws that give the Rhode Island Department of Education (RIDE) the power to impose academic standards, with no possibility of check by elected officials or of opt-out by local school districts. This report outlines both how RIDE produced these "Standards" and the substantive result. The "Standards" were produced by undemocratic means, drafted in an unreadable format, suffused in radical jargon, and teach a tattered caricature of history and civics, which will produce a generation of students who are taught not to be patriotic about their country rather than self-reliant citizens who love it. The report concludes with recommendations for how to fix the adoption process and the substance of Rhode Island's social studies instruction, by means of statutory reform and fundamental revision of the "Standards." [This report was created by the Civics Alliance from the National Association of Scholars and the Rhode Island Center for Freedom and Prosperity.]