Studies Weekly, a Utah-based curriculum company founded in 1984, sells social studies curriculum for grades K-8 and science curriculum for grades K-5. “Since that time, we have made improvements, replaced identified publications, and reprinted revisions of others for the 2019-2020 school year.” Finding Inaccuracies “Many of our products had gone to press while our diversity board was reviewing them,” the statement reads. “All of these issues are a concern for history and social studies publishers because social awareness is an evolving mindset,” the company said in a statement emailed to Education Week, attributed to the executive team. Other articles that included these issues, such as the Arkansas 4th grade and Kentucky 4th grade curricula, were pulled from the online store only after Education Week inquired about the review process. The company says that it has changed and reprinted some of these materials and removed offending articles online. “We start laying down these false narratives in elementary school.” “We have a tendency to either erase or whitewash our difficult history, and this seems to be an excellent example of the way that starts,” said Maureen Costello, the director of Teaching Tolerance, a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center, who reviewed examples of flagged issues at Education Week’s request. Examples in other lessons include describing Native Americans as “troublemakers,” saying that they “seemed savage,” and stating that tribes agreed to trade away their lands to white colonists. Some lessons asked students to espouse the views of plantation owners, or write from the perspectives of slaves. Many of the issues identified in that review concern Native Americans or enslaved people. This board reviewed incidents flagged as high-priority and made suggestions as to whether changes needed to be made, according to internal documents. The review took place during the 2018 calendar year.Īs part of the process, the company convened a diversity board, made up of K-12 administrators and social studies directors, education and history professors, and advocates, all but one of whom did not work for the company. The staff review team flagged about 100 as high-priority fixes, which included biased language or age-inappropriate content, such as descriptions of graphic violence, according to these documents. An internal review of Studies Weekly’s widely used materials found more than 400 examples of racial or ethnic bias, historical inaccuracies, age-inappropriate content, and other errors in the materials, according to internal documents that were presented to the company’s executive board, which were recently provided to Education Week. The article Walker identified wasn’t an isolated incident.
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