ABSTRACT
For decades preceding the president election, social studies educators, researchers, and leaders have rejected powerful and critical social studies learning efforts in favor of superficial standards setting and accountability talk. In this chapter, the author begins to address the prompt about the usefulness of social studies standards. The most commonly agreed upon goal in social studies education is the formation of an active, participatory citizenry; and yet, via the standards movement, the social studies were sucked into arguments about what counts as knowledge and how one measure it. If social studies scholars and policymakers had paid attention to long-term shifts in the political macro-milieu, they might have recognized the standards and accountability movement as the antithesis of powerful teaching and learning. It is the only subject matter in the K–12 curriculum that overtly advocates moral imperatives and a never-ending quest for justice. By contrast, standards, accountability, and testing regimes demo.
