A journalist I have known for decades and have great respect for recently asked me a question that required me to think, click on a bunch of websites, and re-read the work of a popular historian who died in 2010.
The Washington Post‘s Jay Mathews has written about education for nearly a half-century.* He emailed me the following question:**
Hi Larry—I hope you are well. In any of your wonderful excursions into actual classrooms, have you ever tested the thesis that US history teaching has gotten kind of lefty in recent decades? I think it’s untrue but I have no data.—jay**
Here is my response to Mathews:
Hi Jay,
Hope you and your family are in good health.
When I got your query, Jay, I looked up the most obvious “lefty” influence insofar as textbooks and readings are concerned: Howard Zinn and his People’s History.
The Poynter Institute did a piece on Zinn’s influence on teaching U.S. history in 2015 (see: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2015/apr/15/rick-santorum/book-howard-zinn-most- [politifact.com] ). There is no data on how many teachers in U.S. public schools use the book, popular as it has been since CONTINUE READING: Are Social Studies Teachers Politically Biased? | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice