Missouri
Reconstruction Vignette
On Dec. 27, 1873, The Weekly Caucasian in Lexington, Missouri, published this announcement on behalf of a local Black Baptist church pastor. The notice described an ongoing festival organized by the congregation to raise money for their church.
Missouri
Standards Overview
Coverage of Reconstruction: Partial
ZEP Standards Rubric Score: 1 out of 10
The coverage of Reconstruction in Missouri’s standards is partial, and their content is dreadful. The Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education adopted the current state social studies standards in 2016. Students are supposed to learn about Reconstruction in grade 5 and in varied grades in middle and high school.
Grade 5
The grade 5 standards are broad and provide minimal coverage of Reconstruction. The standards expect students to: “Identify political, economic and social causes and consequences of the Civil War and Reconstruction” and “Explain the causes and consequences of major political developments and reform in U.S. history from c. 1800–2000 including… Reconstruction.” However, Reconstruction is not even included in the glossary of key terms.
Middle School
Reconstruction is part of the last unit — “Conflict and Crisis” — of the middle school American history course. Overall, students are required to “notice the extent of change, both social and political, encountered by the nation as a result of the conflict,” which presumably encompasses Reconstruction. The “Key Concepts and Understandings” of the unit largely focus on the causes and course of the Civil War with little discussion of Reconstruction. The standards do include a requirement that students “Trace the development of African American culture in nonslave states and in the context of slavery,” but that standard seems to be focused on the preemancipation era.
An optional section in the standards lists 20 primary sources for the “Conflict and Crisis” that teachers could use in class. Of those 20 sources, only two (the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments and Sarah Bradford’s 1869 Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman) are from the Reconstruction period.
High School
The grade 9–12 course primarily focuses on reunification, electoral politics, and the constitutional and policy debates of Reconstruction. Students are required to “Compare and contrast the plans for and results of political reintegration of Southern states after the Civil War” and “Analyze the period of Reconstruction to determine its effect on separation of powers, checks and balances, power of the central government.”
Optional primary sources again include the Reconstruction Amendments, along with the Plessy v. Ferguson decision, and Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery. The optional secondary sources are more extensive and include excellent if not especially recent scholarship on slavery and Reconstruction by Eric Foner, Ira Berlin, and C. Vann Woodward.
Educator Experiences
Missouri teachers responding to our survey expressed particular concern over the current legislative effort to ban teaching “critical race theory” and the 1619 Project in classrooms. This “Rejection of fact-based curriculum,” as one Kansas City educator explained, could prevent teachers from covering Reconstruction in any depth. This proposed law is particularly threatening, teachers explained, as it targets the use of allegedly controversial outside resources.
With limited time devoted to the topic in the state standards, teachers reported needing “additional curriculum modules that can be used to supplement existing mandated curriculum.” Teachers used outside resources they found on their own initiative to fill in gaps in the state standards on Reconstruction. Making that process more difficult will only decrease coverage of the topic.
Assessment
Missouri’s social studies standards provide relatively extensive coverage of Reconstruction, but altogether inadequate content. On the positive side, Reconstruction is mentioned explicitly in state standards for grade 5, middle school, and high school. The themes and topics that are covered in each grade, however, do not reflect modern scholarship on Reconstruction.
The standards describe Reconstruction as an entirely political matter over the reintegration of southern states into the Union. Although that is an important element of the era, the standards fail to engage with critical topics and themes, including Black people’s struggles for freedom and autonomy, the profound social and political changes of the era, and the white supremacist violence that destroyed that promise. If teachers follow Missouri state standards, students may gain a basic understanding of how Reconstruction shaped the laws and borders of the nation, but they will not understand how Reconstruction and its destruction shaped Americans’ lives at the time and to this day.
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.
Coverage of Reconstruction in the standards for the optional Mississippi Studies, Problems in American Democracy, and African American Studies courses is far stronger than in the required history courses. Transferring elements of the standards from these courses into the core elementary and middle school history courses would go a long way toward improving Mississippi’s coverage of Reconstruction in the classroom.
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 January 2021, Rep. Brian Seitz introduced HB952, a bill designed to prohibit the use of materials from the 1619 Project in classrooms, as well as “any components of critical race theory.” In the 2022 session, Republican lawmakers filed 20 related bills, including four designed to prohibit “curriculum implementing critical race theory” and specific materials that discuss systemic racism, such as the 1619 Project, and two that would allow parents to opt their children out of using curricular materials that could be considered controversial. They filed similar bills in 2023, but all have failed to pass. 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.