An important point but I think the author is too selective in his examples.

Even when he brings this up:

For educational malfeasance this year, look to the assignment given eighth graders in the Rialto, Calif., school district. Students were asked to consider whether the Holocaust was created for political gain or didn’t happen at all — a bit of homework the Simon Wiesenthal Center called “grotesque.”

I still don’t see why it is “educational malfeasance”. Making students dissect an assertion is a very important pedagogical goal.

There is a bigger issue here too - what is “history”? The author makes it sound like some objective quantity that we can measure, such as the mass of the Moon. But history is no such thing.