Nebraska Curriculum Standards

While looking at various states’ Nebraska's Social Studies/History curriculum standards caught my eye. I was very baffled to see that their lists of standards are more or less a broad list of things students should be familiarized with by certain time period/grade level. Beginning in the 2006-2007 school year, Nebraska has enforced the Social Studies Star Standards which stands for “Standards That Are Reported.” The first thing one reads on this page is, “In order to reduce the amount of time and effort needed to assess and report social studies standards, a subset of social studies standards have been designated as STAR Standards for grade levels 2-4, 5-8, and 9-12.” What stuck out to me in this defining sentence were two words: TIME and EFFORT. It specifically states that these standards were set up to “reduce the amount of time and effort needed to assess and report standards.” This is baffling because it treats standards as such a small detail in student learning. To me it almost seemed as if social studies standards were not important and tedious to accomplish but since it is something required, they will list a few broad requirement for students so that they are getting some relevant material but not specifics.

As I continued reading through the list of standards for differing grade levels I realized that standards were not specifically listed for each individual grade level rather they were implemented for grade groups such as standards for grades 2-4, 5-8 and 9-12. There were no specifics stating that 9^th grade students will be required to take such and such history class focusing on American History from 1876 to the present for example. Rather, the standards presented as bullet points with topic headlines. Headlines consist of topics such as United States History, Civics/Government and Economy, Geography, Historical Analysis etc. and listed under each one were short bullet points stating what students should know by the end up 5^th grade, 8^th grade and 12^th grade respectively. I was surprised though to read that the bullet points were so open. For example one of the bullet points stated under what students will develop about historical analysis by the end of 12^th grade stated:

· Analyze documents, records, and data, e.g., artifacts, diaries, letters, photographs, journals, newspapers, and historical accounts.

I though this was good and that students should definitely have introductions to all of these things BUT, I was appalled at how non-specific this list was. I believe that there are a list of specific documents, data, letters etc. that students SHOULD be familiarized with in addition to whatever else a teacher wants to present to her students. If a teacher has this open criteria and is able to present any ole documents he/she wants, they could present some irrelevant piece that he/she may have found interesting but in all reality will not help student’s knowledge in knowing the important/significant pieces of history. Some students could potentially go through all of their schooling and not know what the Declaration of Independence is or who helped to write it etc.

This assignment motivates me to look at other, especially our own to see the differences in standards. Are the standards of other states similar to this and I just never realized it or is Nebraska an exception?