Michigan
Reconstruction Vignette
Pictured here is Fannie Richards, a teacher who fought against school segregation in Detroit during Reconstruction. In the late 1860s, a local school prohibited a Black man named Joseph Workman from enrolling his son — even though they lived in the neighborhood and paid school taxes. Richards helped bring Workman v. Detroit Board of Education to the Michigan Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of Workman and school desegregation. In 1871, Richards became the first kindergarten teacher at Everett Elementary School, the city’s first integrated school, where she worked for the next four decades.
Source: Michigan Radio
Michigan
Standards Overview
Coverage of Reconstruction: Partial
ZEP Standards Rubric Score: 3.5 out of 10
The coverage of Reconstruction in Michigan’s standards is partial, and their content is subpar. The Michigan Department of Education adopted the current social studies standards in 2019. Reconstruction is covered in grade 8. Although the high school history course begins in the late 19th century, Reconstruction is not included in the standards as a topic to cover.
Grade 8
Reconstruction is part of the final unit of the grade 8 U.S. history course. Broadly, the standards ask students to “develop an argument regarding the character and consequences of Reconstruction” and emphasizes “how various Reconstruction plans succeeded or failed.”
The standards include Black people as one of the groups/individuals whose “different positions” on reconstructing Southern society students should learn. They also contain specific references to the Freedmen’s Bureau, Black participation in government, the Reconstruction Amendments, and racial segregation, the Black Codes, and the KKK.
However, the standards do not mention white supremacy, framing the actions of the KKK and other groups opposing Reconstruction as part of an undefined “national and regional resistance” to the “change” of Black people’s political rights. The narrative of Reconstruction concludes with the Compromise of 1877, with students tasked with explaining “the decision to remove Union troops from the South in 1877 and investigate its impact on Americans.”
Educator Experiences
Michigan teachers who responded to our survey generally reported that the standards themselves did not present a barrier to effectively teaching Reconstruction. Rather, the overwhelming consensus was that because Reconstruction is “the last unit of 8th grade,” Ann Arbor middle school teacher Rachel Toon explained, “many, many teachers just ‘don’t get to it.’”
Monica Bisha, a teacher in Warren, wrote to us, “Having taught history and civics for over 20 years, with three sets of standards, what is the most disheartening is that in 8th grade, it’s expected that we’ll barely have time to cover the standard (and it’s not assessed on the state test, so why bother). Then, in high school, it’s expected that we pick up at the Gilded Age (maybe) and just keep going. It’s only in AP U.S. History that any possible depth is given, and even that is a reach.”
Beverly Hills high school teacher Geoff Wickersham noted, “It's supposed to be covered in 8th grade, but most classes don't get past the Civil War. Tenth grade is supposed to start AFTER Reconstruction, so it gets missed unless 10th grade teachers review Reconstruction.”
Nearly every survey response mentioned the timing problem. With so much content to teach during the year, teacher after teacher explained that “it can be a struggle to give Reconstruction the time and dedication it deserves.” While some teachers reported that they were able to speed up other units and use primary sources to delve deeply into Reconstruction, all were frustrated by what they viewed as a course that seeks to cover too many topics in too short a time.
Wickersham shared the resources he uses when he has been able to make the time, “I taught with a Reconstruction Stations Activity that I adapted from an APUSH Facebook group. It included stations on Presidential / Congressional Reconstruction, Land and Sharecropping, Building the Black Community, Reconstruction Governments and Black Office Holders, Black Codes and Convict Leasing, and White Supremacist Terrorism. I also used episode two of Amend from Netflix, in conjunction with a close reading of the 14th Amendment. Combined, these resources really helped my students understand the Reconstruction era.”
Toon added, “Frankly, at this particular moment in time, Reconstruction is the single most important era for students to understand. Everything that is happening in their world today can be traced back to the way Reconstruction happened — and how it was thwarted.”
Assessment
Michigan’s social studies standards provide a minimal level of coverage of Reconstruction. The greatest weakness in Michigan’s educational standards is the placement of Reconstruction as the last unit of the grade 8 U.S. history course. As the teacher survey responses demonstrate, the timing of Reconstruction at the tail end of grade 8 means that no matter how strong the state standards are, teachers will continue to struggle to effectively investigate Reconstruction with their students. The Michigan Department of Education should consider reducing the number of topics covered by the grade 8 course, or adding Reconstruction to the high school U.S. history course to increase the chance that students will learn about the period in at least one class.
Content is focused mostly on national politics: Reconstruction plans, constitutional amendments, and the Compromise of 1877. Although these are important topics to cover, the other elements mentioned in the standards — the Freedmen’s Bureau, the KKK, and the rise and destruction of Black political rights — receive less systematic attention. Michigan’s standards would better reflect modern scholarship on Reconstruction if they incorporated the economic transformations of the era and directly contended with white supremacy. Black claims on landholding, the rise of sharecropping, and the effects of emigration movements would all be important topics to cover.
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 2021, Republican legislators in the state Senate introduced SB0460, a bill that would prohibit the inclusion of “anti-American and racist theories” in curricula. They identified the 1619 Project and critical race theory among these prohibited subjects. Later that year, the House introduced HB5097, a law designed to ban “any form of race or gender stereotyping or anything that could be understood as implicit race or gender stereotyping” in classrooms. Neither bill has become law, but their introduction is still 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.