President Trump’s call for  patriotic education, as reported by the media, may be turning this “into a culture-war wedge issue, now identified with Trumpy Republicanism,” writes Fordham’s Michael Petrilli.

He dreams of a national commission on teaching American history “in a balanced, clear-eyed way,” neither red nor blue but purple.

A 1776 Commission of people from the center-left to the center-right could find middle ground, a “demilitarized zone between the weaponized histories of the far left and the far right,” he writes.

I keep thinking of Rodney King. “Can’t we all get along?”

American history education has gone astray, but trying to impose a “national” curriculum is a mistake, argues Stanley Kurtz, senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, in National Review.  The right way to take back American history is to create a new curriculum that’s so good states and school districts will choose to use it, he writes.

American Achievement Testing (AAT), a new non-profit company, has allied with the historian Wilfred McClay and the National Association of Scholars (NAS) to design U.S. history materials using McClay’s “extraordinary” Land of Hope as the core text, writes Kurtz.

Improving civics education is a worthy cause, writes Fordham’s Checker Finn, but beware of federalizing civics teaching.

He cites the federally funded Education for American Democracy project, led by iCivics, and a billion-dollar bipartisan bill in the House to help schools choose civics and history curricula.

Finn wonders if the curricula will change with every new administration. (Do you want Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos choosing the best curricula? Would their successors be any better?)

Some favor “action civics” to engage students, while others want to teach students to understand “checks and balances,” Finn points out. Teachers can’t do it all.

Choices have to be made in teaching the unum and the pluribus of American history too, he writes. “Teachers don’t have time (or background knowledge) to try to harmonize the 1619 curriculum with the 1776 version, so either they’ll make a mishmash of it or someone downtown will end up deciding for them.”