TAH Programs and Tenure Track Applicants in U.S. History

Russell Olwell and Richard Nation

While the U.S. Department of Education’s Teaching American History (TAH) grant program has cost taxpayers over $350,000,000 since its start in 2001, the impact of the program on student learning, teacher competence and the interaction of the K-12 and university history communities has not yet been documented (For an outline of the plan to document this, see <http://www.ed.gov/programs/teachinghistory/performance.html>, and for a survey of historians involvement in TAH programs, see <http://www.oah.org/pubs/nl/2005may/mcarthur.html>.

The program, which requires local school districts to partner with a museum, non-profit or college/university department of history in order to provide professional development to teachers of history, gives the most extensive opening in the dialogue between K-12 and university history teachers ever. Recipients include programs that train future historians: a substantial number of the grants (28 percent of the 2001 awards) have been given to partner universities that have PhD programs in history. Even if cancelled tomorrow, the already funded three-year projects, which now number over 400, should provide the framework for future partnerships in history education for the next decade.

How has this program affected the new generation of graduate students and others coming onto the history job market? In the best case scenario, graduate students and other young historians would be involved in K-12 projects throughout their education and see service to K-12 schools as part of their job as a professional historian. In the worst case scenario, graduate students would be steered away from such projects, in order to focus exclusively on the research training that has dominated professional training in history since the 1960s.

The answer, according to some initial evidence, may fall between the two extremes outlined above. In Eastern Michigan University’s three recent job searches for new historians in History Methods for Secondary Education, Early American History, and Civil War and Reconstruction, many job applicants, particularly top applicants, brought with them significant Teaching American History grant experience or other K-12 school outreach experience. While this was not the deciding factor in any hiring or other decision, it did come up in discussions of the pool and of changes in the history profession over the last decade. It was an interesting enough issue to merit digging through the files and seeing just how many historians who applied for positions brought TAH and other K-12 outreach experience to our attention in their materials, and whether it fell uniformly across the three searches.

It may not be surprising that applicants in the methods search brought the most K-12 and TAH experience to our attention. Of methods applicants, 17 percent had direct TAH experience, and 44 percent of the methods applicants mentioned K-12 experience in their applications. This experience ranged from writing and evaluating TAH grants to delivering professional development or running National Endowment for the Humanities seminars. Many of these applicants had developed wide-ranging projects in difficult urban settings, an achievement that graduate students in history did not aspire to a decade ago.

The applicants in the Early American history position search also brought a range of TAH and school experience to the table, with 4 percent mentioning TAH experience, and 14 percent of applicants mentioning some form of K-12 outreach. Moreover, such participation often occurred among candidates who were strong in traditional research and collegiate teaching. Among Early Americanists, their outreach experience was substantial and ranged from grant writing and administering to leading seminars for teachers. The TAH program’s emphasis on “traditional” American History and the founding period certainly would be likely to draw more Early Americanists.

While the Civil War and Reconstruction periods are central to understanding U.S. history, the job pool in that area had the least contact with teachers and schools. No Civil War applicants highlighted TAH experience, and while the percentage of applicants with K-12 experiences was only slightly less than the Early Americanists (9 percent), this outreach was typically less substantial and included working with urban teachers and working with a single elementary classroom.

What accounts for the difference in rates of mentioning TAH and other school outreach activity? Some of the stark difference had to come from the nature of these positions—the teaching methods position would entail at least some work with schools, making any such work worth emphasizing. What is most startling is how fewer than half the methods candidates had any such experience to claim. The other two positions, with greater emphasis on research, would not necessarily bring forth candidates with full experience in school and grant-related activities.

The emphasis of the grant program on “traditional” U.S. history may also have skewed the results, as historians of early American history seem to have been called upon more often to be a part of programs than other periods. If this is the case, it indicates that this aspect of the program needs to be rethought, as there is no period richer for the professional development of teachers than the Civil War and Reconstruction.

Clearly, the access of newly minted PhDs to participation in these programs may explain the fairly low numbers. In their PhD institutions, the emphasis is on production of traditional research; once the PhD is in hand, if they do not get a job immediately, they may find themselves in adjunct positions, excluded from the formal programs like TAH administered by their employer. Graduate research universities which participate in TAH or other K-12 outreach programs may look to tapping into the talent pool that is their graduate students to help develop these programs, thus providing useful training for these graduate students as they enter the highly competitive marketplace. Many of the nation’s regional universities have a strong emphasis on developing K-12 teachers.

Ultimately, it may be up to hiring committees and departments how much TAH and other school outreach activity will be encouraged or discouraged in our profession.

Is the “scholarship of outreach,” as Edward Lynton has termed it, to merit its own area of the c.v.? Or do historians, as a profession, still place sole and primary value on what Ernest Boyer termed the “scholarship of discovery,” whether or not the knowledge uncovered ever makes it into the K-12 classroom?