Questions about EAD & The Roadmap Questions about EAD & The Roadmap

EAD proposes a new “inquiry-based” approach that integrates history and civics together and inspires students to learn by asking difficult questions, then seeking answers in the classroom through facts and discussion.

The EAD Roadmap details seven themes and related questions that a large and diverse group of experts and practitioners think that students should encounter over the course of their K-12 education in history and civics to be prepared and engaged citizens. These themes are:

• Civic Participation
• Our Changing Landscapes
• We the People
• A New Government and Constitution
• Institutional and Social Transformation–A Series of Refoundings?
• A People in the World
• A People with Contemporary Debates and Possibilities.

It is not a scope of curriculum or lessons. It is not standards.

It is a broad framework of questions that states, districts and educators can use to generate their own standards, curricula and lessons that they believe are best suited for their own students.

While the EAD Roadmap embraces the process of inquiry, it does not embrace a specific model. Rather, the EAD inquiry process is compatible with many models–and is something that state and local entities will decide. 

In its purest form, the process we propose has students asking and investigating historical, civic, geographic and economic questions; using primary and secondary sources; making evidence-based claims, defending those claims; and communicating their conclusions.

Taking informed action can be, but is not always a part of this—in fact, you can do inquiry without it. For example, students in science, math, English & Language Arts and other disciplines conduct inquiry all the time when they solve math and engineering problems or conduct a science experiment and write a lab.  

One really important distinction of the Roadmap that differentiates our initiative from the National History Standards is that the Roadmap is neither national standards nor a national curriculum.

EAD instead proposes an inquiry-based approach that reflects multiple perspectives and focuses first on what unites Americans, while acknowledging the many diversities across our nation as both a historical fact AND a civic strength.

To be clear, those debates around history are actually a part of our history–and have literally occurred since our nation was born: the American Revolution was both a struggle for freedom and also a rebellion.

Our view is that debate is a healthy feature, not a flaw of our constitutional democracy and its history. The Roadmap leans into this by baking debate into the way students and teachers can embrace the past. It doesn’t mean that all answers are equally valid, but that students and their teachers can use Roadmap themes, questions and design challenges to do the hard work of evaluating these debates themselves–thereby promoting critical thinking. We are also fortunate to now have access to superb and authoritative primary source material, freely available online, which teachers can use to teach the debates that constitute our shared American history.

The Common Core provided standards that states could choose to adopt. By contrast, the EAD initiative provides guiding principles, but each state will decide whether to align with EAD and, if so, would drive the design of its own standards-revision process. Unlike Common Core, there is no role for the federal government to incentivize adoption of EAD.

Additionally, while Common Core was originally intended to provide standards in English & Language Arts, Math and Science, and Social Studies, the National Governors’ Association (which drove the Common Core process) did not complete the Social Studies standards. While there is support for nonfiction and history/civics-related content in the English & Language Arts standards of Common Core, it is extremely limited and insufficient.

The EAD initiative does not take a specific stance on critical race theory.

EAD is proposing a new, integrative approach that includes looking at all individuals’ experiences with civic institutions throughout our nation’s history. As such, it articulates a strong consensus on the importance of diversity, inclusion and unity when it comes to race and other forms of identity.

The EAD approach is based on the premise that, if we want to inspire students to be civic-minded, we need to make the content relevant to them, which means understanding the perspectives of those who came before them and of those who look like them. Of necessity, this includes consideration of topics related to racial discrimination and oppression, both throughout our history and currently.

The aspiration of the EAD initiative is that the Roadmap will be found useful and usable by a wide array of educators and practitioners in addressing these challenging topics, despite diverse intellectual backgrounds and perspectives. The Roadmap introduces “design challenges” to establish the guardrails within which excellent history and civic learning takes places. Successful examples of EAD instruction will produce solutions to these design challenges. These include, for instance:

• How can we integrate the perspectives of Americans from all different backgrounds when narrating a history of the U.S. and explicating the content of the philosophical foundations of American constitutional democracy?
• How do we simultaneously teach the value and the danger of compromise for a free, diverse, and self-governing people?
• How can we offer an account of U.S. constitutional democracy that is simultaneously honest about the past without falling into cynicism, and appreciative of the founding without tipping into adulation?

Disagreement is a feature, not a bug of democracy; the question is whether we can learn to disagree productively. One of the goals of the EAD Initiative is to teach young people about our disagreements in ways that can help them productively engage in those debates.

The Roadmap promotes reckoning with hard histories in the United States AND shared recognition of the unique achievements of American democracy. This includes directly addressing issues of our country’s founding. For example, Theme 5 in the Roadmap explores how social arrangements and conflicts have combined with political institutions to shape American life from the earliest colonial period to the present. This includes investigating which moments of change have most defined the country and building understanding of how American political institutions and society change.

We believe EAD provides a sound path to navigate controversial aspects of our history.

We have also seen that educators and parents are hungry for the training and support that will allow them to teach controversial topics with the knowledge and sensitivity required.

We hope that state legislation and administrative action will move to incorporate the principles and approach presented in EAD, and that they do not shy away from aspects of our nation’s history that are difficult, such as enslavement, religious conflict, political violence, or profound disagreements over government responsibilities and individual opportunity.

The aspiration of the EAD initiative is that the Roadmap will be found useful and usable by a wide array of educators and practitioners in addressing these challenging topics, despite diverse intellectual backgrounds and perspectives.

The EAD Roadmap released on March 2 is our first deliverable under the original 2019 grant from the National Endowment for Humanities and the US Department of Education to support this project.

Through the fall, our next steps will support initial implementation at the state and local level through:

• Ongoing curation of EAD-aligned sample content
• The fielding of three pilot projects that will illustrate high-quality history and civics learning that aligns with EAD
• Initial work to develop and sustain a community of practice to support states, districts, schools and educators who seek to implement the Roadmap. We have set-up several events and opportunities for these conversations to begin. Those are published on the EAD website.

While we anticipate that funding would be needed from states, the federal government and/or philanthropy to support implementation of the EAD approach at the state and local levels, we have not developed or provided budget targets; rather, we want to prompt a conversation about what it will take to prioritize and invest in history and civics education.

Our goal has been to ensure that policy-makers know what to invest in. If we can close the gap between the $50 we spend on STEM and the $0.05 cents we spend on civics per student each year, we would be in a much better position as a country. But, it’s important to note, this is not an either/or. We believe the investment needs to be in both STEM and civics.

The legislation you are reference (The Civics Secures Democracy Act of 2021) calls for 60% of the proposed $1B funding for civic learning to be distributed to states so that they can invest in educator and administrator training, diversify the educator pipeline, and invest in innovation and research. States can also invest in curricular solutions that they or publishers will build. The bill is not a mandate and prohibits the establishment of a national curriculum.

The EAD initiative hopes that a whole ecosystem of civic education providers will be strengthened as a result of our work. Similarly, passage of this bill would also strengthen the whole ecosystem of civic education providers.