This might be a whole lot clearer - maybe easier, maybe not - if both sides stood in their truths and clearly stated their actual purposes instead of cloaking their objectives in terms like 'standards' and 'rigor' and 'essential skills'.

If the Left has tried to turn the teaching of history into a moral exercise concerning equality and injustice, the Right is working to use history for patriotic and nationalistic effect. Neither of these are necesarily bad, nor are they inherently oppositional, but it's almost impossible to determine what might be harmful, dangerous, wrong, misguided, or erroneous if nobody can state their true intention.

What IS a mistake, however, is assuming there's some kind of Foundational Skill set universal to History (or ELA or Math, for that matter) that can somehow be divorced from the reasons we study the content in the first place. History does not contain sets of all-purpose tools, like 'analyzing evidence', that can be reduced to general principles and then assessed in some Standardized fashion. But this is where we keep ending up in what we're supposed to teach, because nobody creating these 'Standards' - Left or Right - will own up to their real intent.

It's a mess, and there's little to indicate this group of politicians and academics and education experts will be any more successful in 'teaching' history through yet another set of 'Standards' than those who came before.