Missing standards

The West Virginia Board of Education has proposed allowing counties to no longer offer the two-course path to learning U.S. history. Counties could instead just offer a one-course path. Here are some things high schoolers are supposed to learn in the two-course path that aren’t specifically required in the one-course one:

Connect responses to the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic -- estimated to have killed over 50 million people worldwide, second only to the medieval plague -- to modern global health concerns

Assess why Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and the consequences

Trace the spread of Soviet and Chinese communism to other nations

Explore America’s strategy to contain communism’s spread

Analyze why the United Nations began

Explain the concept of capitalism and compare the basic components of other economic systems

Analyze the rise of corporations through monopolies and mergers

Trace the rise of racist groups after Reconstruction

Explain the impact of the Spanish-American War

Research what started, and ended, Prohibition

Explain the effects of mechanized farming

Differentiate economic policy among different periods, including through taxation controversies

Investigate literary, musical and artistic movements (the standard provides the Harlem Renaissance, jazz and the Lost Generation as examples)

Aside from losing certain standards, like those, the single-course path generally condenses the standards it keeps. In doing so, it cuts these, and other, examples of what students should learn about: