ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author talks about J. Passe's response to Steve Thornton's commentary. He agrees with Thornton about how teachers serve as curricular gatekeepers. The author fears that social studies teachers are falling into the same trap as his children. One might take pride in the gatekeeping autonomy when one gets to choose how to teach social studies minutiae, such as the various qualifications to hold office. Consider elementary schools, where the marginalization of social studies continues. Research conducted during the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) era discovered that the teachers themselves were making that gatekeeping decision to marginalize social studies. This is not because of some higher-level edict, but because they bought into the harsh system of accountability that NCLB authorized. Scholars have a greater role to play than merely serving as "mirrors that reveal to teachers what classroom life looks like from the other side of the teacher's desk".
