Kansas
Reconstruction Vignette
This photo from the early 1880s shows the Summer family posed in front of their new house in Kansas. In the 1870s and 1880s, many Black “Exodusters” left the South for Kansas, where abolitionist John Brown once lived. Exodusters found some security and success in urban and rural areas alike, but Northern industrialists had already seized vast tracts of the best farmland and left them with few opportunities in agriculture. These land claims were made possible by policies that had recently, and often in violation of federal treaties, forcibly removed Native people from the land.
Source: Kansas Historical Society
Kansas
Standards Overview
Coverage of Reconstruction: Nonexistent
ZEP Standards Rubric Score: 1 out of 10
The coverage of Reconstruction in Kansas’ standards is effectively nonexistent. The Kansas State Department of Education adopted new social studies standards in 2020, replacing standards from 2013.
According to these standards, Reconstruction is taught in “middle-level” and “upper-level” grades. The middle-level grades are 7–8 and the upper level grades are 9–12. Kansas specifically avoids imposing a “state mandated curriculum.” Specific content for social studies courses is included in an appendix to the standard, but these content areas are only suggested, not required. However, Kansas scored higher than 0 on our standards rubric due to the specific content areas outlined in the state’s suggested standards.
The suggested topics describe the end of Reconstruction: “the withdrawal of troops from the former Confederate states following the election of 1876 led to the undermining of progress made by former enslaved persons.” They also note that “the economic and social changes brought about by Reconstruction and their impact on contemporary America are important for students to understand” and include emancipation and racism as critical ideas. Notably, they do not mention white supremacy or terrorism. A later section focused on industrialization recommends that “students will evaluate the United States’ recovery from the period of the Civil War and Reconstruction.”
Because Kansas’ standards provide so little information about whether and how districts and schools should teach Reconstruction, we chose to investigate curricula at the district level. The Local Snapshot below is not meant as a judgment of these districts’ approach to Reconstruction. They were chosen largely at random and are not factored into the grade the state standards receive. The brief analysis of district-level curricula that follows is intended to simply provide a snapshot into how state standards, or lack thereof, can shape Reconstruction pedagogy in the classroom.
Local Snapshot
Blue Valley Schools (Overland Park)
The Blue Valley Schools grade 8 U.S. history course contains an entire unit on Reconstruction titled “Can America Heal Its Wounds?” Notably, it is not the last unit of the course. Students are expected to be able to:
Evaluate America’s pursuit of the five founding ideals.
Debate the successes and failures of the federal and state government(s) in Reconstruction, recognize the civil rights gained and rights denied for African Americans.
The unit is shaped by detailed and excellent “guiding questions.” They include political elements (Freedmen’s Bureau, Reconstruction Amendments, enforcement acts), expansion of Black rights and efforts to gain equality (“citizenship, right to vote — men, political office — men, education, family reunification”), and extensive sections on the rise of white supremacy, disenfranchisement, and segregation, as well as resistance to those trends. The “reflective” questions for the unit ask, among other things:
How does the legacy of the system of enslavement impact America today?
How does institutional racism still impact America today?
High School
The high school U.S. history courses do not revisit Reconstruction in depth. The regular course focuses on the 20th and 21st centuries, and while the opening unit mentions Plessy v. Ferguson and the NAACP, it does not recap Reconstruction. The AP U.S. History course, which covers all of U.S. history from 1491 to the present, only briefly mentions Reconstruction, asking “To what extent did Reconstruction succeed; to what extent did Reconstruction fail?” and how did the Reconstruction Amendments “empower people to exercise their constitutional rights.”
Reconstruction is a standalone unit in the grade 8 U.S. history course in the Topeka Public Schools, it is the eighth of 10 units in the course. Reconstruction is not covered in high school.
The “Essential Questions” of the course are:
What are motivating factors that lead to conflict and its impact?
What rights, roles, and responsibilities do governments and individuals have?
What causes social change and what are the impacts?
The course description emphasizes that students will analyze “the political and social conflicts over how to rebuild the South after the Civil War” and “how African Americans were treated during the Reconstruction Period.”
Key content topics include the effect on Reconstruction policy of Lincoln’s assassination, the conflict between Congress and Pres. Johnson, and the Reconstruction Amendments. There is also extensive content about how Reconstruction, the Reconstruction Amendments, the KKK, Black Codes, and sharecropping impacted or limited the rights of Black people.
Educator Experiences
One teacher who responded to our survey emphasized that the state standards provided “very little indication of ‘what’ to teach.” This lack of guidance meant that it was entirely “left up to districts to make the call” as to whether, when, or how to teach Reconstruction. In the absence of explicit state standards on the topic, Kansas teachers reported using outside resources, including the Zinn Education Project Reconstruction Mixer and Role Play and learning modules from Facing History to deepen discussions and connect the themes of Reconstruction to contemporary issues.
Iric Mawhirter, a high school social studies teacher from Cimarron found that the Reconstruction role plays were particularly useful in teaching students about the contested and contingent nature of Reconstruction. Students dove into discussions “over issues like who would protect the freedmen and women from hostile groups like the White League and the rise of the KKK.” They also learned about elements of Reconstruction history that are included in our suggested standards rubric but are often left out of state standards, including “the focus on land and property ownership, and the political influence it brings.”
Assessment
Kansas’s state standards on Reconstruction are overly broad and inadequate. They offer little guidance to districts and teachers on how to cover the era or how much time to devote to it. As the district-level analysis indicates, the lack of detailed state standards leads to wide variation in what districts teach about Reconstruction. School systems like Blue Valley in Overland Park include excellent “guiding” and “reflective” questions that center Black efforts to achieve multiracial democracy, the rise of white supremacy, and the legacies of institutional racism in their curricula. However, a lack of guidance from the state means that Kansas students will likely encounter inconsistent amounts of time devoted to this critical moment in U.S. history depending on their district, school, and teacher.
Without guidance around key Reconstruction-era history, many students will not learn about the intensification of white supremacy, the Black Codes, the KKK, debates over who would control land and labor, and Black agency and political organizing. Teaching Reconstruction effectively requires centering Black people’s struggles to redefine freedom and equality and gain control of their own land and labor during and after the Civil War. Any discussion of Reconstruction must also grapple with the role of white supremacist terrorism in the defeat of Reconstruction and the negative and positive legacies of the era that persist to this day.
In March 2022, Republican lawmakers introduced SB496 and SB515, two bills designed to restrict teaching about racism, sexism, and other “inherently divisive concepts” in schools. They also would grant parents the right to legally object to any material they disagree with in school. One bill died in committee, and the other was vetoed by Gov. Laura Kelly. Still, their introduction is troubling. Several respondents to our survey expressed concern about the possible chilling effects on classroom education that such bills can have around the country, particularly on discussions of the history and legacies of Reconstruction.