Two recent news articles point out how difficult and complex it is to provide a competent public high school education.

In the first article, a feature interview with South Butler Assistant Superintendent Mike Leitera, who becomes superintendent in July, Leitera discusses his progressive approach: internships and business partnerships, strategic alliances with other school districts via cyber school, video conferencing and in-service projects, and other outreach initiatives that take full advantage of emerging technologies.

The second article, appearing in Sunday’s Beaver County Times and picked up by the Associated Press news service, cites a nationwide study of state teaching standards that gives Pennsylvania a D grade in civil rights education.

The study, “Teaching the Movement 2014: The State of Civil Rights Education in the United States,” by the Southern Poverty Law Center, graded the states on what the SPLC “expected teachers to teach and students to learn.” It faults Pennsylvania’s Academic Standards for History for not even mentioning the civil right movement, and for a lack of emphasis on the Revolutionary War, the Great Depression and World War II as events that influenced and advanced civil rights.

Besides Pennsylvania, 13 other states received a D grade; 20 got an F.

Only three states, South Carolina, Georgia and Louisiana, received A grades. The pattern suggests a prevailing attitude that the civil rights movement was a regional history exclusive to the Deep South rather than the integral part of American history that it is.

The Times article quotes Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s introduction to the study. Gates writes that fewer than half the states include the history of Jim Crow laws — which separated Americans by color — in their curriculum. Gates wrote that without this basic knowledge, students won’t fully understand the contributions of the Rev. Martin L. King Jr., Brown v. Board of Education or the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965.

“All of us are aware of the pressures our teachers and children are under to keep pace with the world’s students in science and math,” Gates wrote, “but without a steep grounding in our history, what will rising generations have to pivot from? What will inspire them to remake their world with the confidence that comes from knowing it has been done before?”

Today’s high school graduate needs a fundamental grasp of technology, and Leitera’s focus on technology to open new doors to opportunity is noble.

However, there’s precious little time to teach all the topics students need to know. And we can’t forget history — our shared history. To truly appreciate our community and our culture, we must all be made aware of how we came to be the nation we are.

That’s good advice for any public school administrator, especially if he’s a recently promoted superintendent in Western Pennsylvania with a noble and appropriate vision for outreach beyond his district’s borders.