geography standards in the united states: past influences and future prospects

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Geography standards in the UnitedStates: past influences and futureprospectsSarah Witham Bednarza, Susan Gallagher Heffronb & MichaelSolemb

a Department of Geography, Texas A&M University, CollegeStation, TX, USAb Association of American Geographers, Washington, DC, USAPublished online: 02 Dec 2013.

To cite this article: Sarah Witham Bednarz, Susan Gallagher Heffron & Michael Solem(2014) Geography standards in the United States: past influences and future prospects,International Research in Geographical and Environmental Education, 23:1, 79-89, DOI:10.1080/10382046.2013.858455

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Geography standards in the United States: past influences

and future prospects

Sarah Witham Bednarza*, Susan Gallagher Heffronb and Michael Solemb

aDepartment of Geography, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA; bAssociationof American Geographers, Washington, DC, USA

The purpose of this article is to examine how geography is represented and positionedin primary and secondary (referred to here as K-12) education in the United Statesthrough a critical analysis of the content and implementation of the NationalGeography Standards, Geography for Life. We begin by providing context on theorganization of education in the United States and offering a brief account of changesin geography in this complex system over the past three decades. Next, we describethe Standards, originally published in 1994 and recently revised, highlighting theforces driving innovations in both documents, both within the geography communityand outside. The institutionalization of the Standards is discussed in the context ofstate and local adoption of their key features, framing a discussion on the strugglesgeography has claiming space in an already crowded curriculum. Finally, we concludeby offering ideas on where we think Geography for Life – and geography education –may go in the near and far future.

Keywords: United States; National Geography Standards; educational change;educational policy; states

Context: the United States education system

The US educational system is complex spatially, politically, economically, and socially. In

our federal system, each of the 50 states retains the primary educational decision-making

authority. This reflects the fundamental American belief, embedded in the US Constitution,

that education is best controlled at the local level. Despite the attempts in the last two deca-

des to impose more federal oversight (discussed later), the organization remains dispersed

and spatially fragmented with more than 130,000 schools, both public and private, in

approximately 14,000 local administrative districts in 50 states and the District of Columbia.

This is the labyrinthian setting in which geography education is placed in the United States.

The result is that the United States does not have a single, federal curriculum in any

discipline or at any grade level and no national system of assuring educational quality

through examinations. Adoption, implementation, and assessment of any curricula are

still determined by each state. Within some states, “local control” places the responsibil-

ity of determining what is to be taught at the school district level (a regional designation

of varying size) and results in even more variations of curricula. Therefore, an analysis of

geography education – what is taught, where, and how – in the United States can only be

provided by a summary of the potentially unique conditions in each state or other admin-

istrative unit.

A second notable aspect of context is the position of geography within the curriculum.

In the United States, geography is taught primarily as a strand or component of the

*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]

� 2013 Taylor & Francis

International Research in Geographical and Environmental Education, 2014

Vol. 23, No. 1, 79–89, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10382046.2013.858455

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mailto:[email protected]

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10382046.2013.858455

broader social studies curriculum. This is especially true at the primary grade levels, typi-

cally from kindergarten to grade 5 (students aged 10). This practice of including geogra-

phy as a strand within social studies continues through most middle school (grades 6–8)

curricula in the most states. At this time, only five states have separate standards for geog-

raphy. These standards are typically tied to a specific geography course taught at the mid-

dle school level. The remaining states have either a strand within social studies or a

combination of both strand and geography course standards (Geography Education

National Implementation Project 2012). At the high school level (grades 9–12), 10 states

have a separate set of geography standards that are typically tied to a specific course.

Twenty-eight states have an identified geography strand within the social studies stand-

ards. Two states have no geography strand or standards in the high school curriculum

(Geography Education National Implementation Project 2012).

This situation is problematic because the nature, function, and purpose of the social

studies are highly contested and often unclear to both practitioners and the public. Does

the social studies represent the collection of social science disciplines including econom-

ics, history, political science, and geography? Or is it an integrated hybrid of these with

the purpose of social and citizenship education? The seesaw debate between the two pur-

poses has caused tension and controversy, especially in relation to the development of

and use of standards (Thornton, 2005). In the first round of government sanctioned,

national but voluntary standards development in the early 1990s, separate standards were

developed in history, economics, civics (the surrogate for political science), as well as

geography. Independently, standards were developed in social studies reflecting common

and widely accepted curricula and classroom practices. This had a limiting effect on the

implementation of the separate discipline-based standards in all the subjects. The current

and ongoing attempt at developing a common core of standards for the social studies is a

framework document entitled College, Career, and Civic Life (C-3) Framework for

Social Studies State Standards (in press), and there are attempts to blend both the social

sciences and social education perspectives as well. The purpose of the document, in addi-

tion to student preparation for higher education and the workplace, is preparation for civic

life, a variant of social education. However, the subtitle of the framework signals a clear

alignment with the social sciences: State guidance for enhancing the rigor of K-12 civics,

economics, geography, and history.

The position of geography within the social studies also signals the generally low

esteem the public holds for the discipline in the United States. Geography has long

struggled to gain the academic respect that it holds in other countries (Murphy, de Blij,

Turner, Gilmore, & Gregory, 2005). We geographers have failed to excite the public

imagination or to contribute in significantly open and transparent ways to public policy.

While there is wide support and affection for institutions with a geographic identity

such as the esteemed National Geographic Society, there is no charismatic geographer

to champion the discipline or present a public face to establish its worth and value. Cur-

rently, membership in the key professional organization, the Association of American

Geographers (AAG), is strong and the number of departments of geography is relatively

stable, however, this follows nearly 30 years of retrenchment in universities and the

closing of a substantial number of prestigious departments in major research institutions.

Even books in which “geography” appears in the title such as the Geography of Bliss

(Weiner, 2008) or the Revenge of Geography (Kaplan, 2012) are not written by geogra-

phers and are often embarrassingly na€ıve about space, place, and other core geography

concepts. These examples help explain the diminished role for geography in US

education.

80 S.W. Bednarz et al.

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Changes in geography education

The geography education community has long characterized the discipline in the progres-

sive rhetoric of renaissance and reform (Bednarz, Downs, & Vender, 2003). Certainly,

geography education has seen a renaissance or marked improvement since a low point in

the late 1970s. Here we discuss the benchmarks of improvement by decade with a particu-

lar focus on curricular reform.

The post oil crisis economic malaise of the mid and late 1970s and consequent turn to

the right in politics that led to the election of Ronald Reagan as president precipitated a

massive re-examination of national prospects and a series of reports that alerted the public

to the need for education reform. Probably, most influential was the report of the National

Commission on Excellence in Education (1983) entitled A Nation at Risk: The Imperative

for Educational Reform. The report characterized the curriculum as an “incoherent, out-

dated patchwork quilt” (p. 118) and recommended “that schools, colleges, and universi-

ties adopt more rigorous and measurable standards, and higher expectations, for

academic performance and student conduct” (p. 125). A major thrust underlying the

report was a concern over America’s human capital and the threat of losing competitive

edge in the global economy. In this context, A Nation at Risk is a reflection of neoliberal

economic values in assessing the purposes and values of American education. Thirty

years later, many attribute the standards currently in place to this widely respected report

(Graham, 2013). A Nation at Risk applauded reform efforts in science and mathematics,

stating, “This movement is but a start on what we believe is a larger and more educational

encompassing need to improve teaching and learning in fields such as English, history,

geography, economics, and foreign languages” (117).

To address the incoherent state of geography education and growing geographic illit-

eracy evidenced by the 1979 National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) report,

a group of geographers under the shared auspices of the AAG and the National Council

for Geographic Education (NCGE) published Guidelines for Geographic Education: Ele-

mentary and Secondary Schools (Joint Committee on Geographic Education, 1984). This

slim document presented geography as a unified scientific discipline that teachers and the

public could understand via five core themes: (1) location, (2) place, (3) relationships

within places: humans and environments, (4) movement, and (5) regions. It laid the foun-

dation for and initiated the campaign to improve geography education in the United States

largely through the concerted dissemination efforts of the National Geographic Society’s

state alliances for geography begun in 1986 (Dulli, 1994; Grosvenor, 1995).

The most significant outcome of “A Nation at Risk” was the development of the

National Education Goals, a non-partisan and broadly popular initiative of the nation’s

governors, including the rising governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton, supported by President

George Bush in 1989. The document established six goals for educational improvement

and identified a “core” of five academic subjects to provide curricular coherence; notably,

geography was included. One of the six goals was that “American students will leave

grades four, eight, and twelve having demonstrated competency in challenging subject

matter, including English, mathematics, science, history, and geography”. To achieve this

goal, “world class” national content and student performance standards were to be devel-

oped in the core subject areas. To measure achievement in the subjects and progress

toward the six goals, a national voluntary assessment system (NAEP) was established.

While many of these ideas became lost in ensuing partisan political battles that pitted

federal versus state authority in education (Nash, Crabtree, & Dunn, 1997; Ravitch,

1995), the presence of geography in the National Goals (passed into Public Law 103-227

International Research in Geographical and Environmental Education 81

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as Goals 2000: The Educate America Act) led to the next key events: the development of

the NAEP assessment in geography and the National Geography Standards.

NAEP is an ongoing, nationally representative assessment of student achievement in

various subject areas, including geography, mandated by Goals 2000. In an ideal world,

the NAEP assessment would have used national standards as its test framework to provide

baseline data measuring student attainment of the standards (Bettis, 1997). However, the

NAEP process began before the work on developing national standards in geography.

The NAEP development committee included a number of prominent geographers as well

as geography educators and teachers. A clear goal for many was to ensure the assessment

aligned with contemporary academic geography. While some in the geography education

community called for the familiar five-theme framework to serve as the basis of the test

framework (Boehm, 1997), it worked poorly for assessment purposes; the themes were so

closely interrelated that it was too difficult to develop assessment items that measured

knowledge in just one content dimension. The test development committee also perceived

the framework to be overly simple and not representative of the breadth, depth, and per-

haps, most importantly, the language of contemporary geography. Instead, a framework

was developed around three content dimensions: (1) space and place: knowledge of geog-

raphy as it relates to particular places on Earth, to spatial patterns on Earth’s surface, and

to physical and human processes that shape such spatial patterns; (2) environment and

society: knowledge of geography as it relates to interactions between environment and

society; and (3) spatial dynamics and connections: knowledge of geography as it relates

to spatial connections among people, places, and regions (NAEP Geography Consensus

Project, 1992). This represented a dramatic change in geography education by moving

school geography closer to key constructs of academic geography, including a richer

emphasis on physical geography and recognition of space as a core geographic idea, both

largely absent from the five-theme framework.

Assessments in geography were conducted in 1994, 2001, and 2010; it is scheduled

again for 2014. The NAEP geography assessment remains very important as a national

measure of student performance at key grade levels despite the great variety of curricula

taught in school districts and states across the country. The 2010 results show that only

4th-grade students improved over the two previous assessment years, while the scores for

both 8th- and 12th-grade students were not significantly different from scores in 2001.

However, the 2010 12th-grade scores were lower than in 1994 (US Department of Educa-

tion, 2010). Today, future NAEP tests may be vulnerable to cancellation due to con-

strained federal education budgets and a politically motivated reduced emphasis on

national curriculum efforts.

The National Geography Standards, 1994 and 2012

Immediately after the NAEP framework was completed, a new group was assembled with

many of the key players from the previous process to begin work on developing National

Geography Standards as part of the Goals 2000 initiative under the auspices of the US

Department of Education and the four professional geography associations. The charge

was to specify “what every young American should know and be able to do in geo-

graphy”, and to identify the “challenging subject matter” that required to meet the

National Education Goals. It was developed through a broad national (and international)

consensus process as a voluntary set of content standards (Geography for Life, 1994:

p. 243; de Souza & Munroe, 1994). The project leadership acknowledged the call for

“world class” standards by establishing an international review subcommittee and sought


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input from leading academic geographers through a content advisory board to ensure the

subject matter aligned with disciplinary expectations. The final product consisted of 18

ideas or “standards”, which were organized under six “essential elements”. Statements

related to each standard clarified what the “geographically informed person” at three

benchmark grade levels should know, understand, and be able to do as a result of their

knowledge and understanding. The National Geography Standards presented a strong

case for the relevance of geography to contemporary society that geography is for life

throughout the school year, across all subjects, K-12, and beyond.

In 1994, Geography for Life introduced seven significant reforms in geography educa-

tion displayed in Figure 1. Several of these reforms are of special note to this discussion.

First, Geography for Life brought school geography closer to contemporary academic

geography and positioned geography as both a human and a physical science. This

allowed for a new focus on environment–society links, providing a depth and breadth to

the familiar “five” themes’ human–environment interaction component. Repositioning as

a science (as well as a social science) was perceived as advantageous in order to compete

for time in a full curriculum given broad public belief in and support for science in the

United States. Second, the Standards aligned geography education with other academic

disciplines pedagogically by integrating knowledge with skills in statements specifying

student performance expectations – what students should know and be able to do. This

made the connection between knowing and doing geography clear in order to emphasize

its value to society. The geography skills featured in the Standards, supported by geospa-

tial technologies such as geographic information systems, highlighted the importance of

inquiry and problem solving. Finally, seeking to strengthen geography’s role in the social

studies, the Standards clarified the tenuous relationship between history and geography

by providing a framework of three principles to approach their intersection. The princi-

ples were that students need to understand (1) the nature of change in places as well as

over time; (2) that everything takes place in a geographic context; and (3) how humans

perceive their geographic context plays a role in history.

The process through which the National Geography Standards were developed was

intensely political. The social studies, of which geography is a part as discussed previously

in this article, is a particularly volatile area, vulnerable to controversy, debate, and cultural

misunderstanding. Developing consensus required producing a number of drafts, revisions,

edits, and changes in a highly contested process. Geography for Life was released in 1994

Figure 1. Reforms introduced in Geography for Life (1994).


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at the same time as the controversial National History Standards which came under attack

by conservatives in an incendiary culture war (Nash et al., 1997). The campaign against

the history standards deflected the attention of the politicized education community away

from geography’s efforts. Unfortunately, it may also have dampened initial efforts to dis-

seminate the National Geography Standards. Some educationists have criticized Geography

for Life as developmentally inappropriate (Seefeldt, 1995) and confusing to individuals

charged with using them to develop state-level curriculum standards (Munroe & Smith,

1998). Geographers themselves did not discuss or critically evaluate the quality and utility

of the standards. Despite this, the National Geography Standards have influenced the devel-

opment of state-level social studies standards that include geography content and skills

notably in New York, Florida, Arizona, Indiana, and Texas. They have been used success-

fully in multiple contexts such as national curriculum development projects like Path

toward World Literacy: a standards-based guide to K-12 geography published in 2001

(Boehm, 2001), Mission Geography, NASA’s project to support and disseminate the Stand-

ards, and the Partnership for 21st Century Skills (http://www.p21.org/storage/documents/

21stcskillsmap_geog.pdf) in which the Standards are aligned to the Partnership’s frame-

work for student learning and preparation for work in the twenty-first century. The real

value of the National Geography Standards may lie in their use in such initiatives that are

supported by industry and high-level education decision makers.

The updated second edition of Geography for Life: National Geography Standards

published in 2012 (Heffron & Downs, 2012) reflects changes in both education and geog-

raphy. It maintains continuity with the first edition featuring the broad goal of a

“geographically informed person” as well as a focus on the geographic perspectives, con-

tent knowledge, and skills outlined in the 1994 edition. The successful adoption of

Geography for Life by many states and school districts resulted in a desire to maintain the

basic structure of the six essential elements and 18 standards used in the first edition.

Only 2 of the 18 standards were changed to reflect new disciplinary knowledge.

The new title of Geography Standard 1 is “How to use maps and other geographic representa-tions, geospatial technologies, and spatial thinking to understand and communicateinformation.” This replaces tools in the original version with geospatial technologies, addsthe idea of spatial thinking, and simplifies the objective to that of understanding and commu-nicating information. The development of geospatial technologies and the recognition thatspatial thinking is central to geography are two of the major changes in geography since1994. The new title for Geography Standard 8 is “The characteristics and spatial distributionsof ecosystems and biomes on Earth’s surface.” The addition of biomes reflects the increasingattention being paid to those regional-scale biophysical communities under threat from globalenvironmental change.

Geography for Life: National Geography Standards, Second Edition (Heffron & Downs,2012, p. 10)

The second edition emphasizes even more than the first edition the use of geographic

perspectives, content knowledge, and skills to “do geography” as an active inquiry or

study. A separate section on “Doing Geography” conveys the many practical values of

geography for employment in business, government, and non-profit organizations, as

well as for doing scientific research. Three illustrative vignettes were included as age-

appropriate models for how a teacher might do geography in the classroom.

The second edition also benefitted from the work in the first edition by allowing for a

different approach to be used in reviewing and updating the content knowledge of the


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18 standards. The new three-column format of Geography for Life allows educators to

view each standard in terms of geography content for all three grade bands on the same

page. A scaffolding approach was used to ensure that concepts and skills increased in

complexity as well as built on prior knowledge among the grade bands and alignment

worked to be sure that the content knowledge was clearly specified within a grade band

for each standard. This aligns the Standards with growing interest in research on learning

progressions. The revised content knowledge was also standardized by the consistent use

of seven verbs defined with an order of intellectual challenge.

The work on the national standards has not been the only significant change in geogra-

phy education in the United States. Another major change in geography education has been

the development of an Advanced Placement Human Geography (APHG) course that offers

high school students the opportunity to engage in college-level work and take an examina-

tion to possibly earn college credit. This key partnership between the powerful non-profit

college board and the geography education community shows growth for geography and

wider acceptance of the value of the discipline. This course, if available to students, is an

addition to most high school curricula. The importance of the APHG course at the high

school level is significant as the number of students taking the examination has increased

from 3272 in 2001 to more than 115,000 in 2013. Further, the course has created a new

cadre of educators with a deeper interest in and sophisticated understanding of geography.

Challenges of institutionalizing and implementing the National

Geography Standards

Having a summary of what students should know and be able to do to be geographically

literate is a useful tool in the campaign to survive and thrive in a competitive educational

milieu. This is essential because geography has struggled with recognition in the last

decade. Still rebounding from A Nation at Risk, standards were found not to be the pana-

cea thought to help make the US education system stronger and more rigorous. The intent

of the National Education Goals to develop a coherent national set of student expectations

was lost in the variations of state standards. The nature, structure, and format of the state

standards varied tremendously. There was no uniformity making it extremely difficult to

evaluate or compare implementation or measure progress to goals. With the enactment of

No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation in 2001, the system shifted to an essential con-

cern for assessment, accountability, and high-stakes testing in mathematics and reading,

marginalizing geography and the other social studies. While Geography for Life found

life in state and local standards and through curriculum projects like 21st Century Skills

Partnership, geography education has battled to maintain its position in an overcrowded

curriculum since then.

Despite the continuing lack of any type of K-12 national curriculum requiring the

teaching of geography, there are positive developments taking place in US geography

education. In 2010, the National Research Council (NRC) published a report,

“Understanding the Changing Planet: Strategic Directions for the Geographical Sciences”,

which outlined 11 research questions that geographers would significantly contribute to

solving or understanding. The connection between these topics of geographic investiga-

tion and study have been connected to the secondary school geography courses by the

development of online student-centered investigations that illustrate the approaches,

geospatial tools, and techniques geographers employ to analyze and answer geographic

questions. This is one example of how inquiry-based geographic investigations for stu-

dents can be connected more closely to the issues professional and academic geographers


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work on. Including this content is not only beneficial to students, but also broadens the

public understanding of geography and its value.

Additionally, a 2013 emerging social studies framework document entitled College,

Career and Civic Life (C-3): Framework for Social Studies State Standards is based on

using an inquiry approach to study civics, economics, geography, and history from disci-

plinary perspectives. This shift from a previous emphasis on conceptual ideas for social

studies standards and assessments offers a new approach that has the potential to set the

stage for teachers to use geographic perspectives, content knowledge, and skills to teach

geography. This social studies framework connects to and draws upon the content in

Geography for Life. Teachers will require support in learning how to conduct geographic

investigations with their students in the classroom. This challenge should not be taken

lightly and the geography education community would benefit from the past experience

of the science education community when it advocated inquiry-based instruction for learn-

ing the “practices” and process of doing science in K-12 schools (Duschl, Schweingruber,

& Shouse, 2007; NRC, 2000). Teacher preparation will need to change to align with the

goals of inquiry-based instruction as well as professional development support for in-

service teachers adopting new inquiry-based teaching strategies in their classrooms.

Teachers who are assigned to teach geography are typically prepared with education

courses and methods courses in social studies rather than courses in geography, science,

field work, or geographic techniques. Only students majoring in geography rather than

social sciences would be confident in using and teaching geographic techniques. Without

multiple, university-level geography courses, secondary-level teachers are rarely ade-

quately prepared to teach the use of geographic perspectives, contents, and skills. They

lack basic knowledge of conducting a systematic geographic inquiry or applying geospa-

tial analysis tools (Baker & Kerski, 2014). Given the unified nature of a state-by-state (or

district) level curriculum, there appears to be little chance of a unified approach to prepar-

ing teachers to teach geography.

As noted previously, in a trend similar to that identified by Marsden (1997), geogra-

phy education in the United States was subsumed into the social studies and has struggled

to emerge as a stand-alone discipline in the K-12 system. As a result, US institutions that

prepare teachers certify mostly social studies teachers and far fewer geography teachers

at the secondary level. Further evidence of this identity crisis is the much larger number

of members in the National Council for Social Studies as compared to the membership of

the NCGE in the United States. There has also been a similar movement of academic

geographers away from geography education in the United States and is evidenced by

comparing the membership roles of the AAG (11,000 members) versus NCGE (1000

members). Academic geographers are often not rewarded for participation in geography

education research as it is often regarded as education or soft science and not well

received by promotion and tenure-granting committees. Challenges will remain for aca-

demic geographers who wish to conduct research in geography education unless the

reward and recognition structures change to support work in this field.

Conclusion: toward a road map for long-term improvement in geography education

Against this backdrop, the National Geographic Society recently completed a broad-

based initiative known as the Road Map for 21st Century Geography Education. Funded

by a grant from the US National Science Foundation, the Road Map project convened

blue-ribbon committees of geographers, cognitive scientists, assessment experts, teachers,

and practitioners to develop three landmark reports with recommendations for securing


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the long-term health of geography in American education. Each report addresses a critical

area of need if geography education is ever to assume a position of significance in the

American K-12 education system (Edelson & Pitts, 2013, p. 3).

� The Instructional Materials and Professional Development Committee considered

the current state of the instructional materials for teaching geography and the pre-

service and in-service education that teachers who are responsible for geography

education received. Based on this analysis and a review of the literatures on the

design of instructional material and the design of teacher professional development,

the committee formulated recommendations and guidelines for both instructional

materials and professional development that will lead to improvements in instruc-

tion and in learning outcomes.

� The Assessment Committee studied the current state of assessment in geography and

reviewed its history. Based on their analysis of existing assessment practices and a

review of the literature on assessment as a support for improving educational out-

comes, the committee formulated guidelines for developing assessment instruments

and for conducting assessment that will lead to improvements in instruction and

outcomes.

� The Geography Education Research Committee reviewed the existing education

and cognitive science research literatures to identify gaps in our ability to answer

significant questions about geography education based on research. Drawing on this

analysis, the committee formulated recommendations for research questions and

approaches that will build a knowledge base to guide improvement efforts for geog-

raphy education in the future.

The Road Map project can be seen as the latest chapter in the ongoing saga of state and

national efforts to improve the geographic literacy and proficiency of American youth. As a

national initiative led by a consortium of geography’s professional associations, the Road

Map project was designed to build upon the foundation of progress set by the National

Geography Standards, NAEP, the Geographic Alliance Network, and the APHG program.

All three Road Map reports are based on Geography for Life as the definition of geographic

perspectives, content knowledge, and skills for K-12 education. Moving forward, the chal-

lenge for the US geography education community will be taking action in a manner that is

consistent with the Road Map project’s twofold strategy for progress:

First, to make future efforts to improve geography education more strategic, focused, andcoherent, so they can have greater and more enduring impact; and second, to provide a ratio-nale for establishing requirements for geography education and allocating resources toimprove geography education that accurately reflect its importance for our society. (Edelson& Pitts, 2013, p. 3)

Successful attainment of this vision will all but certainly require the securement of

resources, both financial and human, at a level that K-12 geography has never experi-

enced. Yet the arc of the story presented in this article shows that, despite numerous

obstacles and the often painfully slow pace of progress, geography has reached a point

where awareness of its significance has never been more appreciated in the minds of the

American public, the business and corporate sector, and most crucially, the policy makers

at the district, state, and federal levels whose voices and votes will be relied upon to

secure the discipline’s rightful place in school curricula. The foundation for change has


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been laid and the path forward is clear. Where will US geography education be 10 years

from now? Stay tuned.

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