Not quite like Frederick Jackson Turner announcing the closing of the frontier, but in a similar vein, David G. Smith, a high school principal in the suburbs of Washington, DC, felt it a necessity this spring to forewarn his 150-member faculty their academic freedom would soon be curtailed. “The day of teachers going into their own rooms and closing the door and doing their own thing is long gone,” said Smith to his faculty gathered at their April meeting.

Smith, a former history and government teacher, was prompted to make the remark by President George Bush’s plans to expand his No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law to include high schools. Only a few months earlier at a neighboring high school, the president told students “to ensure graduates are prepared, we need to be certain that high school students are learning every year.”

The fact that Smith aired his concern is not unusual. Similar comments are being heard with increasing frequency in high school teacher lounges across the country. While it is true the alarm may be premature for American history teachers because the NCLB does not yet include their subject, or any history for that matter, there is a genuine concern among American history teachers that the proposed expansion of federal legislation may yet become another restriction on their academic freedom. Already reeling from many new requirements, it is not hard to find teachers who believe their freedoms have been trimmed and may be shorn yet further.

“This is even more restrictive than when I grew up thirty years ago,” said Mari Jo Merrick-Lockett, a Minnesota high school American history teacher, commenting on her state’s new standards in 2003 (1).

On the other hand, there are many in this debate who argue that the new intrusions into schools is a two-sided coin. Standards may in fact preserve academic freedom while improving teaching. “The fear of curtailment of freedom has not happened in light of the standards movement,” said Michelle Davidson Ungurait, director of Social Studies, Division of Curriculum in the Texas Education Agency (2).

Like any debate, this one is complicated.

 “Academic freedom” is, of course, a Rorschach kind of term. People see in it a wide array of meanings. But if one takes as starting point the efforts of American university professors, beginning in 1915, to create guidelines, the most broadly accepted definition of academic freedom is a notion that both individual professors and institutions of higher learning should be able to conduct their work free from government interference.

Considering that government employees conduct nearly eighty-five percent of precollege instruction in the United States and that the students in these institutions are almost all below the age of adulthood, the term has a more limited meaning in high school settings. Indeed, high school American history teachers have never enjoyed the liberty that university professors possess in being able to offer courses on unusual topics of their choice--such as the more than three hundred offered on Elvis in American colleges and universities. Further, high school teachers are considered purveyor of “facts” and are not accorded the protection that comes from conducting scholarly work. Nonetheless, teachers have enjoyed historically some degree of freedom in selecting the specific content of their course and how they conduct it.

Until now the restrictions on this freedom in the high school setting have come generally from three directions. The first is censorship. The more direct cases are rare and newsworthy when they occur. The media, which glom onto these cases as a First Amendment issue, are quick to publicize occurrences, such as the one in New Mexico in 2003 (3). Most teachers experience subtler forms of censorship. Knowing they are not as free as their university colleagues in expressing divergent views in a classroom, they are mindful of prevailing community views.

The second limitation has come through textbooks. Textbooks play a leading, though diminishing, role in the instruction of American history in high school. Writers from Frances Fitzgerald to James Loewen already have provided lengthy critics of the book’s shortcomings (4). The power of Texas and California to pressure sales-hungry New York publishers into changing the content is also well known. Teachers often overcome these problems by using supplemental reading such as that by Howard Zinn, although in many communities the selection of that particular author would raise some hackles.

The third limitation on the profession’s freedom has been growing pressure from state--and now federal--politicians to dictate curriculum. In the past this was usually a specific demand aimed at pleasing a constituency. In New York, for instance, the law that required the teaching of the “inhumanity of genocide, slavery and the Holocaust” was amended to include the “mass starvation of Ireland from 1845 to 1850” (5).

The standards-based movement begun in the 1980s broadened that use of state power. Since reaching its apex, it is this movement that may represent the newest challenge to academic freedom. The movement has spawned a raft of standard creation and test making in an attempt to dictate from September to June what children will learn and how a teacher’s success in delivering that content will be assessed. From Florida’s Sunshine State Standards (SSS) to Texas’ Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS), from Indiana’s Statewide Testing for Education Progress (ISTEP+) to Georgia’s Criterion Referenced Competency Tests (CRCT), a new pedagogical jargon has also emerged. As Nancy Schroeder, a social studies teacher at Leander High School, in Leander, Texas, put it, “We teach the TEKS so they can pass the TAKS” (6).

But aside from being a major new demand on teachers or just a nuisance, do these standards represent a threat to academic freedom to teachers of American history in high school?

It is impossible to gauge by simply asking teachers. The standards vary so widely that teachers in different states, even different localities, are not under the same yoke. But, even when odious, standards may not limit a teacher’s academic freedom. “Good teachers find a way to bring in good material,” said Lesley S. Herrmann, executive director of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History (7). In fact, standards--well written or not--may offer protection. A standard, said Ungurait, “gives you protection as a teacher to teach possible controversial subjects like religion because it’s in the standards” (8). This certainly is true in developing lesson plans. I can attest to that. When I developed lesson plans for public broadcasting documentaries tackling controversial topics from Indian rights to 9/11, I found that one could link almost any lesson to a standard thereby offering a nervous teacher an acceptable rationale when confronted by an autocratic supervisor or close-minded parents.

It may be then that the challenge to academic freedom does not seem to come from the standards themselves, even when badly written. “In my view there is nothing wrong with developing standards in American history,” said Dan Gregg, a social studies consultant at the Connecticut Department of Education (9). One might argue that it is easier for Gregg to say this working in a state that may be an exception to restrictive standards and has gained considerable publicity for the lessons its pupils were learning about the state’s ties to slavery (10). But Gregg, and others, do not see the standards themselves as the threat. “Standards as guidance for instruction is useful and should not restrict academic freedom,” he said. “Standards that turn into tests specifications are another matter.” Ungurait, who worked in Tennessee for five years before assuming her post in Texas, agrees. “Assessment standards are the new story,” she said.

Testing has and will alter the environment for American history teachers. Test anxiety is no longer reserved to students, and many teachers have abandoned teaching a particular historical subject they loved because “it is not on the test.” In one school, a teacher’s well-developed unit on American Indians was dropped and another teacher’s penchant of dressing up as historical characters to the students’ delight was curtailed because of the pressure to raise test scores. Creative teaching of this sort was derogatorily referred to as “hobby teaching.”

In the end, the major danger to academic freedom is not the standards or even the test themselves. Rather it is when the process of creating these standards and tests are surrendered to those outside of the profession, as happened in round one of Minnesota’s efforts to create new standards in the teaching of history (11). If the creation of the standards and assessments are controlled by the profession then whatever measure of academic freedom high school history teachers have enjoyed in the past will remain, perhaps even improve.

Endnotes

1. Norman Draper, “Your yore, or Mine?” Star Tribune, Minneapolis, MN. December 14, 2003.

2. Interview with author.

3. Two New Mexico teachers were suspended in separate incidents involving student activities that were related to the Iraq War. The media are not always an ally. See Social Studies and the Press: Keeping the Beast at Bay. Greenwich, CT: Information Age Publishing, 2005. (Disclosure: I contributed one of the pieces in this reader.)

4. Frances FitzGerald, America Revised: History Schoolbooks in the Twentieth Century, Boston: Little Brown & Co. 1979; James W. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, New York: New Press, 1995.

5. Kate Zernike, “Using the Irish Famine to explore Current Events,” New York Times, March 21, 2001.

6. Interview with author.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid.

10. For information on the instruction regarding slavery, see Abigail Sullivan Moore, “A Second Look at History,” New York Times, April 3, 2005.

11. See Sara Evans and Lisa Norling, “What Happened in Minnesota ,” OAH Newsletter 32 (November 2004).