COLORADO
Reconstruction Vignette
On Jan. 3, 1878, the Georgetown Courier in Colorado reported that a local group of Black Masons had visited an opera house with friends to ring in the new year.
Colorado
Standards Overview
Coverage of Reconstruction: Nonexistent
ZEP Standards Rubric Score: 0 out of 10
The coverage of Reconstruction in Colorado’s standards is nonexistent. The Colorado Department of Education implemented the current state social studies standards in 2020. The history standards focus on getting students to “investigate and evaluate primary and secondary sources.” Reconstruction is covered in grade 8 and high school social studies courses.
Grade 8
Grade 8 history spans the American Revolution to Reconstruction. The standards are written very broadly, focusing on outcomes of how students should understand the broad arc of history. They include “inquiry questions” that focus on the American Revolution and Constitution.
The standards mention Black people under the Civics disciplinary standards, although not in relation to Reconstruction. Students are expected to “Describe examples of citizens and groups who have influenced change in United States government and politics.” Examples include “Women, American Indians, African Americans, and people in the unsettled territories.” The last category, “people in unsettled territories,” presumably encompasses Native Americans.
High School
The high school course spans Reconstruction to the present. Although the title of the course mentions Reconstruction, it is not explicitly mentioned in the standards. The standards require students to “analyze continuity and change in eras over the course of United States history,” which could include a discussion of the legacies of Reconstruction.
Because Colorado’s 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
We analyzed a sampling of Colorado school districts to determine if and how Reconstruction is covered in classrooms. Though we were unable to locate detailed curricula, the course descriptions we found indicated that districts generally do cover Reconstruction in their middle school but not in their high school social studies courses.
Poudre School District (Ft. Collins)
Grade 8
The United States history course groups Reconstruction into a unit with the Civil War.
Grade 8
A class on the study of the principles of the U.S. Constitution separates Reconstruction from the Civil War into its own unit. The possible conceptual themes for the Reconstruction unit include “continuity and change, power, and governance.”
Educator Experiences
Teachers responding to our survey emphasized that the primary barriers to teaching Reconstruction effectively are course pacing and time. One middle school teacher described how the placement of Reconstruction “at the end of the 8th-grade year” made it difficult to teach the topic. This placement led many teachers to teach a “whitewashed” and “basic” version of Reconstruction. High school teachers noted the lack of student understanding of Reconstruction, with one mentioning “based on what my students know about the Civil War I have to assume there are gaps in the district’s curriculum.” This gap is particularly troubling, one Colorado Springs middle school teacher explained, because “students need to know what happened during Reconstruction in order to understand the present.”
Brandy Chance, a Denver high school teacher, explained that this problem persists in high school: “The greatest obstacle is time — it is only given a two- to three-week unit at the beginning of high school.”
Steamboat Springs high school teacher Deirdre Boyd described why she is committed to teaching about Reconstruction, “It was a time when freedpeople were finally able to engage with the world as equals, and when the government recognized and acted upon its responsibility towards them, but it was also a time where white supremacy ultimately won out over justice. A deep dive into Reconstruction allows students to visualize how revolutionary change can still be possible with government support and commitment, but also to make sense of the continuing backlash against any hard won progress that has been made by communities of color today.”
Boyd, who is the 2018 Gilder Lehrman Colorado History Teacher of the Year, notes that she is able to dedicate significant time to the era: “I've been incredibly lucky to work in a district that supports the teaching of true history, and that has allowed me to develop curriculum that teaches my students, who live in a mostly white and relatively affluent resort town, the history behind the headlines. I have been able to build a very progressive curriculum where I spend an entire semester on the African American experience (and of course, it is still not enough time.)”
In general, teachers found the flexibility of the state standards to be a benefit, allowing districts and teachers to bring in outside resources and emphasize key themes when needed. Many took advantage of materials from Facing History and Learning for Justice.
Assessment
Colorado’s standards on Reconstruction are nonexistent. Overall, the state standards emphasize a narrative of progress and U.S. exceptionalism with little focus on marginalized people, the history of violence, colonialism, or slavery. They use troubling phrases, such as “people in unsettled territories”: How can territories be unsettled if there are people in them? This phrasing implies that only certain types of people are capable of settling land properly while other types of people are incapable of correctly settling territory, no matter how long they have inhabited a place.
The standards omit Reconstruction entirely as an era of study, leading to wide variation in the coverage of the topic between districts. The timing of Reconstruction as a unit often at the tail end of middle school and, if it is covered at all, at the beginning of high school, also reduces the classroom coverage of the topic.
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 February 2022, Republican lawmakers introduced HB1206, a bill designed to prohibit schools from discussions about racism and sexism. It would specifically ban them from using any instructional materials that “promote discrimination,” and mandates a $25,000 fine for any school that violates it. In March 2022, the bill was postponed indefinitely, but its introduction is still troubling. Several respondents to our survey expressed concern about the possible chilling effects on classroom education that such bills can have, particularly on discussions of the history and legacies of Reconstruction.