The Virginia Board of Education delayed approving a new set of standards for social science education on Thursday, following public outcry criticizing the draft standards for “whitewashing” history and ignoring years of input from experts and educators.

The commonwealth’s Department of Education released the new draft a week ago with significant differences from the old version, particularly regarding the teaching of race in American history and people and cultures from outside of Europe and the U.S.

The Board delayed approval of the original draft standards in August – at the time, Superintendent of Public Instruction Jillian Balow asked for more time for five new board members, newly appointed by Gov. Glenn Youngkin, to review the standards.

Following hours of heated public comment, the Board directed the department and Balow to come up with a third version of the standards — one that merges the previous two drafts. They hope to review that document in early 2023, put it out for a final round of public engagement, and then vote to approve it.

The decision represented a hard-won consensus, with all nine members in favor, after a discussion that was by turns contentious and confusing.

Much of the confusion arose from a series of last-minute changes to the typical years-long process that goes into a new standards document.

“We are so far away from established process that I am concerned we have lost our way as a Board in terms of directing what is supposed to be going on,” Board President Daniel Gecker said.

By state law, Virginia’s standards of learning — the grade-by-grade guidelines for what students in public schools should learn in each subject area — must be reviewed at least once every seven years, in a multi-year process led by Department of Education staff that involves input from a wide array of academics, other experts, educators, and community members.

What and who makes it into state history standards is always a sensitive subject, but this year’s refresh has been particularly controversial, as education has become a spotlight issue in state politics.

Youngkin made education – and, specifically, the teaching of race and American history – a central tenet of his election campaign and the early days of his governorship. That included an early executive order banning “inherently divisive concepts” and directing his education department to retract resources that discuss racial equity in schools. And his fingerprints are clear in the new draft in language that reflects the executive order and notes concerns about student feelings of guilt over historical wrongs.

The August delay was further compounded in October, when the Board and Balow agreed to separate out the “curriculum frameworks,” which outline the skills and abilities students should learn as they progress through history content, from the standards document.

The new draft of the standards released by the department on Friday was just 53 pages long, having taken out much of that scaffolding material. And those weren’t the only changes: the new document reframes or edits the way the standards handle certain concepts — including the past and present of racism in America, the history and current lives of indigenous people, and people and cultures outside of the United States and Europe.

Condemnation of the new draft — and frustration over the eleventh-hour change in course — was swift. The Virginia Legislative Black Caucus, the Virginia Education Association, American Historical Association, the Virginia Holocaust Museum, the Virginia ACLU, local chapters of the NAACP, and the Hamkae Center, which organizes Asian American communities in Virginia, are among the many entities that have spoken out against the new standards.

During the public comment period on Thursday, teachers, parents, students, and historians told the Board that they were frustrated and disappointed with the content of the new draft. Some said the new document omitted Martin Luther King Jr. in the elementary school curriculum until a last-minute change over the weekend. Critics also argued that the standards erase important aspects of Latinx history, the Chinese Exclusion Act and other key parts of Asian-American experiences, and LGBTQ history and people. Some said the new standards leave out a round of edits from the state African American History Education Commission.

Separately, Anne Holton, a Board member and the former Virginia Secretary of Education, pointed out that Ronald Reagan appears multiple times in the new draft, while Barack Obama, the nation’s first Black president, doesn’t receive a single mention.

Others pointed out the new document leaves out ancient Mali and ancient China from a mini-world history unit in third grade, instead focusing on Greek and Rome. The two civilizations are included in the standards currently being used by Virginia schools.

“Our third graders will no longer learn about anything other than Europe,” said David Walrod, a teacher who leads the Fairfax County Federation of Teachers. “Is the world only Western Europe?”

Many, including members of the Sikh and Jewish communities, said they looked to the standards as a means to educate all students about their faith traditions and histories, which they see as an important inoculation against future prejudice.

“Working with thousands of students and teachers, I ask people why we study the Holocaust,” said Virginia Holocaust Museum director Megan Ferenczy. “The first answer, 100% of the time, is ‘so we learn from it and not repeat what happened.’ How can we learn from the event and the complexities of the Holocaust when the standards for the Holocaust are vague, incomplete and severely lacking?”

Multiple speakers, including members of indigenous tribes, said they were offended by the new standards’ framing of indigenous people as “America’s first ‘immigrants.’” The new draft also changes the name of “Indigenous People’s Day” back to “Columbus Day,” and appears to leave out language recommending that students learn about the lives of present-day indigenous people.

“To categorize these peoples as ‘first immigrants,’ effectively conjoining them with another group, entirely erases the ancient ties they have to this land, the sovereign nations they have built, and the continuous stewardship they have shown to this continent through time immemorial,” said Courtney Wynn, an enrolled member of the Chickahominy tribe.

On Thursday, Balow and Sheila Byrd Carmichael, a consultant brought on by the department, admitted that the process of putting together the new document had been, in Byrd Carmichael’s words, “hurried” and the final product “messy.”

Balow acknowledged the error in omitting Martin Luther King Jr., and said she had already had conversations with Jewish community leaders and planned to reach out to indigenous communities for their input.

She also emphasized that many of the things left out of the new draft would be replaced in the curriculum frameworks — and she argued that the new standards are more thorough and specific by including important moments in African American history in earlier grades and adding historical detail in later ones.

Board member Suparna Dutta was one of the few who offered substantial praise of the new document.

“They are, to me, clear and easy to read, and seemed to me factual,” she said. “I see diversity of content.”

Dutta also criticized what she said was a “culture of grievance” in education debates today. “These are tough times in America,” she said. “Nothing escapes being politicized.”

Many educators who testified were frustrated with the decision to separate the standards from the curriculum frameworks in the first place, which some felt put an overemphasis on memorization of content over critical thinking skills.

“I just want to reiterate as an educator, inquiry is not an afterthought,” said Brendan Gillis, a history professor and member of the American Historical Association. “It’s also a key principle about what history education is all about.”

Speakers during the public comment period at the Board meeting on Thursday also criticized what they perceived as a process lacking transparency and public input in creating the new draft, compared to the multiyear process that produced the previous version. Several Board members had similar questions about which outside experts had contributed feedback, and why Department of Education staff who had led the years-long process that resulted in the August draft appeared to be less involved in the new version.

“I think it’s critically important to be transparent about who was consulted and conferred with,” said Board member Tammy Mann, who pointed to the public comment period as evidence that “public trust” was at stake.

Balow said the department had worked with additional experts to create the new draft curriculum. Under repeated questioning from board member Anne Holton, a former Virginia Secretary of Education, Balow and Byrd Carmichael offered a list of organizations that they had consulted. They included the Core Knowledge Foundation, a Charlottesville nonprofit publisher of books and education materials; the Fordham Institute, an education reform-minded think tank; the National Association of Scholars, a group that aims to counter what it perceives as progressive bias in education; and scholars from American University, Princeton University, and the University of Virginia, which Byrd Carmichael did not name. Holton pointed out that several of the people and organizations on the list are curriculum vendors who could have a vested interest in Virginia’s standards matching their offerings.

In the public meeting, Byrd Carmichael also listed Susan Wise Bauer, a professor at the College of William and Mary who has also published homeschooling curricula, as one of the experts consulted on the new draft standards. Wise Bauer has since said she had no substantive part of the standards review process.

“Ms. Byrd Carmichael sent me the draft standards with very little time to review them. I expressed that I found them developmentally inappropriate and lacking in many ways, but that the time frame did not allow me to suggest revisions,” she wrote on Twitter. “To express PUBLICLY that I was consulted is an out and out falsehood.”

Wise Bauer shared a response from Byrd Carmichael retracting her statement to the Board and offering her “deep regret” and “sincere apology” for suggesting that Wise Bauer had been involved in creating the “deeply flawed standards.”

“Sadly and ironically, it was because of my admiration for you that I hoped to get your thoughts on the draft, which was very hastily and irresponsibly prepared,” Byrd Carmichael wrote in a letter. “I deeply regret not pushing harder for more time and/or not removing myself from the process altogether.”

“I was trying to convey only whom we had reached out to for comment. I was exhausted and flustered. I was deeply frustrated by the organized political attack,” Byrd Carmichael wrote.

The Department of Education has not yet responded to WAMU/DCist’s request for a complete list of the people who weighed in on the new standards.

During the discussion, several Board members said they wanted to digest the public comment they had heard during the meeting, and hundreds of letters from the public offering further feedback and concerns.

“We’ve created the conditions for confusion,” Seibert said. “Earning the [public] trust back is absolutely essential.”

In the final vote, on a consensus motion from Board member Andy Rotherham, the body directed Balow and the Department of Education to create a third version of the standards that merges the November standards with the August standards and curriculum framework, fixes errors and omissions, and includes a clear comparison between all three 2022 standards drafts and the 2015 standards that are currently in use in Virginia schools. They also directed the department to post the new document in a timely manner for the public to see, and to use the public comment gathered thus far to inform the third draft.

Balow said the “path forward” was “somewhere in the middle of the August and November documents.”

“That is maybe where we need to be,” she said.

This story has been updated to clarify Susan Wise Bauer’s role in the review of the new standards.