From the OAH President

Teaching American History: The Promise and Perils of Public Education

James O. Horton

The number of books, articles, museum exhibitions, and films on the fiftieth anniversary of the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education have led some to dub this the “Brown Year.” Meanwhile, far fewer of us have reflected on another education anniversary, less dramatic, but significant nonetheless. Ten years ago President William J. Clinton signed into law the Educate America Act, also known as Goals 2000. As a profession, we need to be more aware of legislation such as this that affects history education and need to recognize the political and economic context of efforts to improve history teaching. As individuals, many more of us should realize the personal and professional benefits of promoting history outside of the walls of our colleges and universities (1).

Goals 2000 aimed to establish academic standards, to measure student progress, and to devise programs to ensure that student performance met the standards. As prescribed in Section 102, by 2000, the act aimed to produce literate adult Americans who could demonstrate “competency over challenging subject matter including English, mathematics, science, foreign languages, civics and government, economics, arts, history, and geography.” This plan sought to revolutionize the education system through ensuring that all students would “learn to use their minds well, so they may be prepared for responsible citizenship, further learning, and productive employment in our Nation’s modern economy” (2).

This laudable and ambitious goal drew the attention of many public school teachers and administrators, but surveys conducted throughout the 1990s confirm the fact that students in our public schools remained sadly undereducated in the basic history of their nation. Two years ago, Ira Berlin made this point in his OAH Newsletter presidential column (see <http://www.oah.org/pubs/nl/2002aug/berlin.html>). At the time, he pointed to the National Center for Education Statistics’s study of what the nation’s fourth, eighth, and twelfth graders knew about American history. This national report card, as it is often called, was deeply troubling. It confirmed what is all too apparent to most educators. While there has been some slight and spotty improvement in history test scores in the last decade, more than a third of the fourth graders, nearly 40 percent of eighth graders, and more than half of high schools seniors did not demonstrate even an elementary understanding of the subject.

History as a discipline has undergone exciting and significant changes in its interpretation, its research techniques and in the availability of a wide range of source material, but much of the best and latest scholarship has never reached the high school classroom. This is partly a result of financial deficiencies that many schools suffer. When textbook shortages limit even basic readings for classroom use, the prospect of schools being willing to purchase the latest history monograph is unlikely. In addition, the current federal government has backed away from the earlier focus during the Clinton years seeking to create broadly grounded, thoughtful citizens and has narrowed its concentration to basic reading and mathematical skills. Meanwhile, it has failed to adequately fund even this reduced level of educational reform.

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 imposed what its advocates described as rigorous testing as a means of insuring better education. The idea is to impose penalties on schools that do not produce students who perform well on standardized tests and that are not staffed with high qualified teachers. At first glance this would seem to be an important step forward, but implementation of the plan is seriously flawed. So far, it has focused exclusively on math and reading skills to the exclusion of almost all else, and Congress has not authorized the promised increase in funding to enable schools to implement the changes necessary to meet program expectations. The National Education Association, for example, is concerned that increased testing has not resulted in improved classroom learning. “It will be impossible for our public schools to meet the strict federal demands of the ‘No Child Left Behind Act,’” the Association fears, “if vital school services continue to be cut” (3).

Although the supporters of the new federal initiative argue that rigorous testing will create a significantly improved education for primary and secondary school students, history, literature, or even government are not yet included as subjects of testing. Thus, as former OAH president Jacquelyn Hall has argued, even if this method of testing succeeds in improving the critical areas of reading and mathematics, students may derive little benefit unless they learn to interpret and make use of what they read or count. Strategies of “teaching to the test” are not inherently bad if passing the test requires more than rote memorization, but many teachers believe that the pressure to show positive test scores overwhelms efforts to prepare students to be able to think about what they are learning. Furthermore, because No Child Left Behind does not test for history knowledge, some history courses have been abbreviated or removed from curricula entirely.

The emphasis on testing is even more alarming when combined with the fact that content knowledge has not been a priority in teacher education programs. Most high school history courses, for instance, are taught by teachers with inadequate training in history. In some states, this situation has reached shocking proportions. In Louisiana, 88 percent of the students who take history in high school are taught by teachers who do not have even a college minor in history. In Minnesota, the proportion is 83 percent, and in Oklahoma 81 percent (4). No wonder that graduates of high school are likely to know little about the national past.

The good news in all of this may be the significant funding ($50 million) made available to public education by the omnibus appropriations bill (H.R. 4577) signed into law by President Clinton in 2001 and augmented in 2002 by Senator Robert Byrd’s amendment, bringing the funding to $100 million through the Teaching American History grant program. Although a U.S. House of Representatives committee has recently opposed continuing funding for this program, there is reason to hope that Senator Byrd working through the Senate, can reverse that decision. Other government sponsored grant programs through agencies like the National Endowment for the Humanities continue to be important. In the last decade, a significant private effort sponsored by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History has funded summer seminars for public school teachers and provided significant assistance in the creation of History High Schools. Teacher history seminars are extremely promising, but with the narrow focus and adverse unintended consequences of federal programs like No Child Left Behind, funding and time devoted to general history education in the public schools is declining dramatically.

This past summer, I spent several weeks in Denver, Washington, New Haven, and Boston working with primary and secondary education teachers in a number of history seminars. Although I have taught these seminars for several years, this summer proved especially interesting, as teachers were even more anxious for content to broaden their history classes. I was particularly impressed to learn about the innovative methods employed by many of these teachers, who spend their personal funds to supply their students with needed classroom resources.

All this makes the OAH’s effort to bring more public school teachers into the organization and to encourage our members to participate in teacher summer seminars timely, and even more critical to the future of history education nationally. If, as Jefferson believed (and on this point I heartily agree with him) a democracy needs an educated electorate to function, historians have a critical role to play. Some of us can work with public school teachers, some of us can help as advisers to education associations and governmental agencies, with the National Park Service or with local museums and historical societies. Others of us can work to make our research and writing more readily available to public educators. All of us can encourage these efforts and work to provide rewards within the tenure system for our colleagues who devote time to this important effort. If departments and college administrations do not provide incentives, young untenured scholars will not be able to engage in this important work without putting their careers at risk. Ultimately, this may require a change in the culture of higher education so that we place greater value on public involvement by our colleagues.

This public history service should never become a substitute for scholarship and teaching, but it surely should be an important part of tenure decision making. Regardless of the avenue we pursue in making our research and historical analysis available to the wider American public, we should all recognize the critical importance of that task. This is especially true as Americans prepare to engage in our most essential role as members of a democratic system. For our people to understand contemporary issues well enough to be able to make intelligent political decisions at the polls, they must have a sense of historical context. Here is where research historians play a most critical role. They can work with those teaching history wherever they teach to help provide the education for responsible citizenship promised by the Educate America Act of 1994. Surely citizens must know how to read and count, but unless they can also reason and think clearly about their nation and understand enough about their history to understand their place in it, America will not have the informed electorate that Jefferson knew that we needed. Historians understand the importance of historical substance for contemporary debates, and thus they have the responsibility to provide it to our citizens.

James O. Horton is Benjamin Banneker Professor of American Civilization and History at The George Washington University.

Endnotes

1. The author thanks Abigail Constantino of the George Washington University Gelman library, Cynthia Stout and the teachers and staff of the Denver public schools history teachers’ seminar for their wise counsel.

2. Goals 2000: Educate America Act, H.R. 1804, Sec. 102, 103rd Congress, 2nd sess., <http://www.ed.gov/legislation/GOALS2000/TheAct/intro.html>.

3. “No Child Left Behind and the States” National Education Association website, posted July 7, 2004, <http://www.nea.org/esea/eseastates.html>.

4. Richard M. Ingersoll and Kerry Gruber, Out-of-Field Teaching and Educational Equality (National Center for Education Statistics, United States Department of Education, October, 1996), 24. Other states with high percentages of non-history trained high school history teachers include West Virginia (82 percent), Pennsylvania (73 percent), Maryland and Kansas (72 percent), Arizona (71 percent), South Dakota (70 percent), and Mississippi (70 percent). New York and Wisconsin had the lowest percentages, with 32 percent each.