To hear Chalkbeat reporter Ann Schimke tell the story of the Mesa County District 51 fight over fourth grade history materials, the bumbling conservatives on the school board, led by Barbara Evanson and Andrea Haitz, threw out teacher-preferred resources for political reasons. But the conservatives’ position is stronger than Schimke relates.
At issue is “The Colorado Story,” a textbook with supplemental resources published by Gibbs Smith Education and rejected by the board. The publisher graciously granted me access to the materials, and I read the entire student book plus some of the teacher materials.
The 2024 third edition of the book is based on the 2010 first edition by Thomas Jacob Noel and Debra B. Faulkner. I have no idea whether or to what degree those two authors contributed to new material in the third edition. (They didn’t offer a comment to Schimke; I tried to reach Noel but didn’t have any better luck.)
Noel is the Real Deal. Known as “Dr. Colorado,” he earned his PhD in history at the University of Colorado, Boulder, long taught at CU Denver, and in 2018 became Colorado’s official state historian. Faulkner is not as well-credentialed but still is a serious historian.
The book also has eleven “editors and reviewers,” plus another six “History Colorado contributors.” Once you realize that this textbook was written specifically to please the authors of Colorado’s education standards as well as school board members, and you see that the “review” process obviously was political (one of the reviewers is described as a “cultural activist”), you can begin to make some educated guesses about why the book might have ended up with some problems. But let’s get to specifics.
Christopher Columbus
As Schimke summarizes, Evanson was concerned that the book (and related materials) “portrayed historical figures such as Christopher Columbus in a negative light” and “wrongly portrayed Columbus as solely responsible for harm to indigenous people in the Americas.” Evanson told Schimke, “Were there people that were doing bad things? Were there people that were absolutely there with ill intention? Absolutely. Was it Christopher Columbus? No.” Evanson also said (reports Schimke), “It didn’t give the totality of Christopher Columbus. If we’re not going to teach the whole truth, why would we teach a portion of it?”
On this point, Evanson is completely wrong. True, the textbook does not “give the totality” of the man—it does not reveal the totality of Columbus’s evil. If you think Jeffrey Epstein is a horrible human being, then, rationally, you should conclude that Columbus is far worse. Columbus enslaved and brutalized Native people and sexually trafficked Native women. He was, bluntly, a mass-murderer, slaver, and rapist. These are the rationally undeniable facts of history. Yet the Gibbs Smith book vaguely says only that “Columbus and his crew” controlled Caribbean islands “by force.” The text does say that “the Spanish” “attacked” and “enslaved” Native people.
Evanson wrongly suggests that the textbook lays the blame solely at Columbus’s feet. It discusses the Spanish conquerors generally (Columbus was Genoan but sailed for Spain) and mentions two other men (Juan de Archuleta and Juan de Ulibarrí) who hunted down escaped slaves.
I’m not sure what Evanson means by teaching the “totality” of Columbus. (I contacted her by email but did not hear back.) A 2009 CBS News story discussed in the teacher edition (and noted by Schimke) mentions the “Columbian Exchange” of crops and goods
A better resource from the Bill of Rights Institute acknowledges that Columbus’ “acts are reprehensible by today’s standards” but presents as a possible stance that Columbus “simply used practices in most cases considered the status quo by many European and non-European cultures at the time.” Moreover, “many Native Americans benefited” through trade or by “using the Spanish to overthrow oppressive Native American overlords such as the Aztecs, ending their practices of human sacrifice and incessant warfare.” Finally, maybe the Spaniards were less-bad than other possible invaders, because at least many Spaniards married Indigenous women and so “continued and preserved much of” Indigenous culture. Okay, that’s an interesting discussion of unintended consequences of Columbus’s actions, but none of it changes the fact that Columbus was a mass-murderer, slaver, and rapist.
Black Lives Matter and Elijah McClain
In its chapter on “Modern Colorado,” the student text devotes two pages (out of 273 pages of the main text, not counting end material) to Black Lives Matter. The text on this begins, “The United States has a long history of unfair treatment toward Black people. Recently, a growing awareness of this led more people to question how US law enforcement works. . . . In 2019, a Black man named Elijah McClain was walking home in Aurora, Colorado, when police arrived. They restrained McClain in a way that made it hard for him to breathe. He died in the hospital a few days later.”
This text implies, but does not outright state, that law enforcement is racist in general and that the police action against McClain in particular was racist. There’s definitely concrete evidence of racism within specific departments (ChatGPT offers some examples; of course you always have to double-check Chat’s sources). The argument that policing in general is racist is much harder to make. Obviously most individual officers are not racist (although some people say that everyone is implicitly racist.) There’s no direct evidence that police targeted McClain because they were racist.
Notably absent from the text (published in 2024) is discussion of the 2022 police killing of Christian Glass, who was white. The officer who killed Glass went to prison for criminally negligent homicide; I think he got off easy. Watch the video yourself if you’re not convinced. I would describe the incident as police torturing and executing a man in a mental health crisis.
Having written about McClain’s death back in 2020, I can point to two other key omissions in the Gibbs Smith text. The key point is that police had no legal basis to detain McClain. And of course it also matters that medics forcibly drugged McClain.
On the next page, the text says, “The Black Lives Matter movement started in 2013, after the death of a Black teenager named Trayvon Martin. His death caught the world’s attention.” But Martin was not killed by police at all; he was killed by George Zimmerman after he physically assaulted Zimmerman, and a jury acquitted Zimmerman of murder. Yet, given the context, the Gibbs Smith text implies that the death was due to racist policing.
The text also mentions the murder of George Floyd by a police officer. Certainly this was bad policing. Was it racist policing? Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison told 60 Minutes that, although he saw “systemic racism” at work, “We don’t have any evidence that Derek Chauvin [the officer] factored in George Floyd’s race as he did what he did.”
Then there is the activism question. Black Lives Matter does not only advocate an end to violence against peaceable black people; it advocates hard-left political views
For example, the local group says it wants to abolish “extractive capitalism” (whatever that means). The national group advocates “a future fully divested from police, prisons, and all punishment.” Abolishing prisons and criminal punishments hardly is a mainstream position! It is indeed quite insane. But there’s no mention of any such context in the Gibbs Smith text for fourth graders.
Given all this, I am partly sympathetic with the concerns of Haitz and Evanson over this portion of the text.
Evanson said (see the April 15 meeting, 1:34:48 mark), “The Black Lives Matter section, I agree, let’s have a conversation about it. But it was literally shoved in in a section that made it appear that a death of a Coloradoan was the result of police brutality, and it’s three paragraphs, and there’s so much more to this. . . . Being prior law enforcement . . . I wanted to know, what happened, did these law enforcement officers do the right or wrong thing. But the only thing that’s in this, if my child read this, they’d be like, ‘Mom, cops are bad.’ And I don’t want us giving that perspective to our children.”
The police action against McClain absolutely was police brutality and worse; it rightly resulted in criminal convictions. But Evanson is right that the text in question does not provide enough details for a reader to independently evaluate the case, nor does it offer any accurate broader context about policing.
Haitz said (1:29:16 mark), “My son will be in fourth grade next year, and I was just looking at some of the material, and I’m thinking, this is probably a little bit heavy or over his head, for some of this stuff, especially the Black Lives Matter stuff. I don’t know that this activism stuff is really appropriate for him at fourth grade. As a parent, I’m not ready to have that conversation with him.”
I agree that the text promotes a sort of activism in a thoughtless way. But I’m skeptical of Haitz claim that her son is not ready to talk about some of the facts behind Black Lives Matter. (My son is going into fifth grade, so our children are of a similar age.) The alternative text that the board adopted is called “Exploring Social Studies: Colorado,” by Teacher Created Materials. Although this company was not cooperative in giving me access to its materials, snippets it provides online show that the materials cover the brutal Sand Creek Massacre (which I’ve also discussed), in which U.S. soldiers slaughtered Native men, women, and children. So is Haitz’s position really that her son can handle discussion of that horrific massacre but cannot handle discussion of the police killing of Elijah McClain? Come on now.
The problem with the Gibbs Smith text is not that it includes a discussion of Black Lives Matter but that its discussion of the topic is inept.
Comparing the two resources
All that said, overall I found the Gibbs Smith book to be pretty good, and I learned some things reading it. I do regard some other parts of the book as problematic, as with its partly misleading summary of Mexican land grants, its lavish and criticism-free praise of the New Deal, its oversimplification of conflicts between miners and mine owners, its unqualified and context-free endorsement of the Regional Transportation District (RTD), its conflation of tariffs and sales taxes, its incomplete discussion of taxation and government services, and its trivialization of democratic constitutionalism through its projects involving faux democracy. Oh, and the last two chapters are mostly irrelevant to Colorado history as such. Besides those things I loved the book!
I emphasize that the other company, Teacher Created Materials, didn’t even let me read their book, which is extremely Not Cool, Man. The company’s business model is selling textbooks to tax-funded schools, and taxpayers have a right to know what’s in the materials.
Based on the limited online preview, the materials seem okay. If I were the editor I’d make some changes. For example, the student text says, “At the start of the new (Nineteenth) century, the United States was eager to expand. People felt crowded. They wanted land to farm and call their own. They needed resources to build the growing nation.” This definitely puts the emphasis on the nation and people of the United States, not the people they displaced. A few pages later the book concedes that “most Indian nations were overrun and forced to move.”
The Gibbs Smith material offers more detail than TCM about the gold rush, including information about its environmental impacts.
The TCM book says, “Because he was Black, he [Barney Ford] was not allowed to mine.” That’s true in a sense, but, as the book “Barney Ford, Black Baron” points out, Ford had set up a mining claim but was chased out by white men threatening violence.
I didn’t find any big problems with the TCM material (based on my limited review), and the group that recommended materials to the board liked it, although it saw Gibbs Smith as better.
For what it’s worth, District 51 also considered “Discover Colorado,” from University Press of Colorado, which previews parts of its materials online. Offhand I liked that book more than the other two; I even bought a copy for my son.
A conservative agenda
Evanson and Haitz hardly are strangers to controversy. In running for school board Evanson made news for promoting the teaching of Creationism in science classrooms. Haitz ran against “political agendas [that] are being jammed down our kids’ throats,” and she aligned herself with the MAGA right on some transgender issues.
Evanson and Haitz think their political opponents are bringing politics into the classroom; their opponents think they are. Both groups are right. History and social studies, and even other subjects such as literature and biology and music, are inherently bound up with politics, at least to some degree. To me, that counts as a reason not to put politicians in charge of education. But we can save that larger discussion for another day.
Ari Armstrong writes regularly for Complete Colorado and is the author of books about Ayn Rand, Harry Potter, and classical liberalism. He can be reached at ari at ariarmstrong dot com.
