Beachwood High School *John Carroll University
Politics and pedagogy! Any teacher or student of education in the United States knows that it always comes down to politics and pedagogy. John Dewey long ago recognized that efforts to improve education are inherently political. Plans to change schools carry an implied vision of whet America should be. Though interconnected, any teacher can tell you that it is the political, not the pedagogical, that always attracts the most attention.
The battle over voluntary national history standards is a dramatic demonstration of the primacy of politics. Though part of a bipartisan effort to establish educational benchmarks, political acrimony enveloped the standards even before the National Center for History in the Schools (NCHS) formally released National Standards for United States History and World History. In hindsight, no one should have been surprised at the contentious reception. Achieving national consensus on what American children should know about the past is ridden with controversy. After all, defining our past defines our present.
The sound and fury obscured the pedagogical discourse. This was unfortunate. Release of national standards offered the chance to talk about learning history and the instructional relationships between students, teachers and content. When the political debate fades and pundits lose interest, the real educational questions will remain. What is good history teaching? How should students study history? How do they learn history? What activities best capture the discipline of history? Teachers, not politicians or columnists, have to translate standards into practice. History teachers must walk the standards talk. Yet the politicization of the standards made pedagogical discussions improbable, if not impossible.
This essay seeks to move beyond the culture wars to reveal educational issues hidden by the political battles. It argues that while the National Standards United States History and World History are rich and valuable resources for teachers, crucial pedagogical issues were lost in the political controversy. The months of debate and revision only partially addressed important questions about the nature of historical thinking and instruction, assessment, and the difficulties of addressing groups in history.
In the past year, I have been situated at the intersection of the pedagogical and political issues. As a high school history teacher for 24 years, I naturally looked at the standards with a practitioner's eye. Then last spring, the Council of Basic Education (CBE) asked me to participate in an independent review of the Standards and the criticism. The CBE's eight month review culminated in a report that guided the revision of the Standards. Subsequently, the NCHS released a new edition to more favorable reviews (National Center for History in the Schools 1996). So, not only did I use the documents in my classroom, I also played a modest role in the national controversy. I will begin with a brief review of the controversy before turning to the pedagogical questions.
National history standards were part of a larger vision for improving American education' In 1990, President Bush and the governors of the states outlined national goals for American education. Central to those goals was an effort to produce voluntary national content standards - broad-based statements defining what all students should master by the end of the secondary school. These standards were to capture the best thinking within a discipline while respecting the local autonomy that marks American education (National Center for History in the Schools 1994; Council for Basic Education 1996).
In December, 1991, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the U.S. Department of Education awarded a $1.6 million contract to the National Center for History in the Schools (NCHS) at UCLA to develop world and U.S. history standards. The NCHS was a teacher center noted for its workshops and teacher created lessons. The Center and its director Charlotte Crabtree had worked on NEH projects before and impressed NEH director Lynne Cheney. Further, Crabtree and Diane Ravitch, then assistant secretary of education, had worked together on the California Social Studies Framework in the late 1980s (Diegmueller Debra Viadero 1995). Ironically, both Cheney and Ravitch became critics of the final product.
The NCHS worked for nearly three years on creating the standards in U.S. and world history. They solicited and received wide range of support, creating numerous focus groups and enlisting thousands of historians and teachers in this process. Thirty three professional or civic organizations and almost four hundred people participated in one capacity or another (National Center for History in the Schools 1994). This consensus building process cost nearly $2 million in federal grants, and involved reviewing and revising over 6,000 drafts of the standards (Diegmueller and Viadero 1996).
On the eve of the 1994 fall election, the NCHS released standards in three volumes U.S. history, world history and K4 history. They delivered more than requested as the books included thousands of teaching examples to put flesh on the standards' frame. Exemplars proved a critical addition and depending upon your perspective either a most helpful or harmful bonus.
Before the formal release, Lynne Cheney fired a devastating shot at them in the Wall Street Journal(Cheney 1994). She charged that the Standards were multicultural, politically correct, leftist history portraying only the underbelly of our past. Cheney supported her claims by simply counting the number of times people were mentioned throughout the book. Without differentiating between the exemplars and the standards themselves, Cheney bemoaned the omission of Robert E. Lee and the inclusion of Ghengis Khan. Pointing to extensive mentioning of the Klan and McCarthyism, Cheney railed against the omissions of Thomas Edison and George Washington.
Cheney's column framed the discussion. Scholars and pundits, such as Diane Ravitch, Arthur Schlessinger, John Fonte, Paul Gagnon and George Will, filled op-ed pages with similar criticism. They criticized the Standards for sins of omission and commission. Cheney's method of evaluating by name-counting yielded perfect sound bites for talk shows. Rush Limbaugh told his listeners to flush the Standards back to UCLA. Politicians joined the attack, culminating in the 99 U.S. Senators denouncing the Standards in a non-binding sense of the Senate resolution. The Clinton administration distanced themselves when Secretary of Education Riley called the Standards a "setback and a disappointment," claiming that the entire standards movement was threatened by the history project (Council for Basic Education 1996, ii).
Of course, the Standards had extensive support. Wide-ranging and important professional organizations and historians endorsed the books. During the controversy, all thirteen past presidents of the AHA and OAH signed a letter endorsing the standards. The most compelling vote of support came from teachers who purchased the books by the thousands, and rallied to the defense by piloting the standards in their classes.
However, calm and dispassionate discussion of the pedagogical value of the books was difficult in the midst of partisan shouting. Hysteria swept aside the thoughtful criticism. The Center's plan to implement the Standards disappeared under an avalanche of condemnation. In part, the Center itself became untouchable. Who would be willing to fund such a controversial organization? The Senate resolution, in fact, would have invalidated any history project associated with the NCHS.
In the Spring of 1995, The Pew Charitable Trusts joined with The Ford Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and The Spencer Foundations to step into the fray. They funded the Council of Basic Education to convene two independent review panels to analyze the Standards in light of the controversy. CBE asked me to participate. Serving on the CBE review team was one of the most wonderful experiences of my academic life. I worked with historians I studied in graduate school such as Phillip Curtain, John Voll, Joan Scott, Ramsay MacMullin, David Hollinger, Steven Thernstrom, Diane Ravitch, and Maris Vinovskis. Al Quie, former governor and long time congressman from Minnesota, chaired the US. history panel and Steve Muller, past president and professor emeritus of John Hopkins, chaired the world panel (National Center for History in the Schools 1994).(1) Gary Nash and Ross Dunn of NCHS agreed to cooperate with CBE panels.
CBE panelists disagreed about many things, yet shared a central belief about the value and need for voluntary national standards in history. This unwavering faith saw us through a number of potentially crucial issues during eight months of meetings and writing. Though acutely aware of the politics involved, the CBE panels tried to follow "accepted principles of historical scholarship."
The panels' interest was not so much a matter of counting heads or of balancing positive and negative images, majorities and minorities, liberal and conservative perspectives. Rather, the relationships sought were between historical integrity and civic purpose, integrating and fragmenting forces, individuality and group identity, and political ideas and socioeconomic changes. Also considered were the feasibility of using the standards as a framework for the development of state and district-level standards, curricula, and assessments (Council for Basic Education 1996, iii).
The CBE review went well beyond the political controversy. Most of the final report discussed issues largely absent in the public debate - such as gaps in thinking skills, inconsistent treatment of institutions, or the difficulty in addressing social groups.
However, the report obviously addressed issues central to the controversy. While I think CBE's other recommendations are ultimately more important, those "political" findings had the most immediate impact by helping to establish a climate more conducive to NCHS's revision of the original standards. Most important was CBE's suggestion to separate the standards and the examples.
The teaching examples, CBE concluded, were simply too problematic. First, there were just too many for a standard's document. The books devoted over seventy percent of nearly six hundred pages to teaching examples. Over seventy percent of the criticism seemed to attack examples, not standards. Further, the sheer number of examples gave the impression of a national curriculum, not merely a framework within which state or local schools might construct curricula.
The number of examples left the impression that they were inclusive, adding to the problems. CBE thought that exemplars might mislead readers to conclude that an example covered the breadth of a standard.
Thus, a standard that refers comprehensively to "the origins and consequences of European overseas expansion in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries" refers to all of the voyages of this era, but when accompanied by specific examples about Vasco da Gama and Columbus may cause some readers to preclude Cortes, Raleigh, and Magellan, or to assume that those mentioned in the examples are more important than others (Council for Basic Education 1996, 3).
CBE also agreed with critics who charged that the exemplars were unbalanced, though not for the ideologically tainted reason suggested by Cheney and others. Many examples covered material traditionally underrepresented in U.S. schools. Far fewer examples touched upon content that has stood in the center of school history for generations. Therefore, people who did not differentiate between standards and exemplars concluded that the Standards left out the familiar heroes and stories. Some critics claimed the motives were to create politically correct history. CBE drew a different conclusion. Since CBE did not find the similar unbalance in the standards, the panels suspected that the NCHS decided to use the examples to provide lessons that might be most beneficial to teachers. Since every text has material and lessons on Washington, Jefferson, and the Civil War, NCHS included examples that gave ideas on how to teach about Tubman, Ghengis Khan and McCarthyism. While practical and reasonable, this opened the door for the name-based analysis that defined most of the criticism.
Some exemplars also used loaded, biased language in treating a topic. The NCHS did not edit examples as carefully as they did the standards. Lessons or activities, described in only a sentence or two, occasionally stacked the deck in one direction or the other. Such loaded language seemed to direct students to preconceived conclusions rather than engaging them in a historical investigation.
For these reasons, the CBE panels unanimously recommended that NCHS drop the exemplars from all further versions of the Standards. If, nothing else, it would narrow the political target significantly.
This is not to suggest that examples are unproductive. The CBE panels, particularly the teacher members, strongly endorsed the need for good teaching examples. We were confident that many organizations, teachers groups, publishers, and teaching centers (including NCHS) will produce teaching materials based on the national standards. However, the CBE did not think that teaching examples should have the appearance of being "official." The NCHS' publishing such extensive examples with the standards gave such an appearance, giving undo weight and value to these teaching suggestions over others.
Viewed without the teaching examples, the CBE panels held that the Standards provided "a reasonable set of expectations for learning and a solid basis for strengthening history teaching." (Council for Basic Education 1996, 3) However, the standards themselves also needed revision as CBE found instances of loaded and inconsistent language. These occasional lapses in language were problematic and violated the NCHS' own criteria. Therefore, the standards needed further editing. Yet, it is important to stress that absent the exemplars, there were very few cases of bias or loaded language in Standards. Clearly NCHS took great care to be fair an effort that was easier to recognize once the standards were freed from the examples.
The CBE panels also urged the Center to expand the treatment of historical thinking; strengthen standards in science, math, intellectual history; treat social groups in their historical context; and encourage students to build narrative coherence.
Critics greeted the CBE report as a compromise that did not go far enough in condemning standards. Some asserted that CBE was trying to save a ship that has already sunk. However, NCHS, especially Gary Nash and Ross Dunn took CBE 's report and its working papers very seriously. The NCHS convened new working groups to review CBE's recommendations and begin revision. After months of review, NCHS submitted the new document to its newly created advisory board. The chairs of the CBE panels, CBE's director, and its funders also reviewed the new edition. Agreeing that NCHS lived up the letter and spirit of the CBE recommendations, the funders supported the printing of the revised Standards and is sending a copy to every school district in the United States.
The NCHS judiciously released the new edition after the primaries and governors conference in spring of 1996. The reviews have been dramatically different. Many former critics, such as Schlessinger, Ravitch and Will, now support the revised Standards (Ravitch and Schlesinger 1996). Though Cheney is still not satisfied and one congressman even condemned the revised edition sight unseen, severe criticism is rare and now appears quite extreme.
This respite of political shouting may be temporary. However, the more civil tone allows classroom teachers and curriculum planners to carry on a conversation about how to use these documents to improve history instruction. It is to this question, I now turn.
As a classroom teacher, there is much to admire here. Two areas are particularly useful for improving instruction: (1) the conceptual guidance these projects provide in defining pre-collegiate world history and (2) the Standards attempt to merge content with history's habits of mind.
First, this project goes a long way to giving shape to what world-scale history might actually look like in schools. As William McNeill(1986), Marshall Hodgson (1954) and L.S. Stavrianos (1969) have argued for a generation (at least) world history is a distinctive branch of history. It has unique perspectives, concepts, generalizations, facts, and temporal patterns. Yet, too often teachers create a World History curriculum by merely adding units to the Western Civilization course. In this curricular "affirmative action," the study of Europe expands to include China, India or Africa. While valuable, the world historians such as Hodgson, Stavrianos and McNeil have reminded us that these additions do not create a true world history. McNeill (1986) said"[W]orld history must be expected to trace those developments which proceeded on a stage too wide for any more local history to cover other than fragmentarily, and which determined the cultural possibilities of mankind as a whole, or the greater part of it." World history entails its own unique object of study.
The central problem is to find a level of analysis sufficiently broad for the world system to emerge, without losing the cultural, political and social stories that are important to people's lives. For the history teacher, the constraints of texts, tests, time and training compound the world history problem. Teachers find it difficult to focus on the global story as they struggle to do justice to the cultural cavalcade that dominates history courses. It is almost impossible to add new units to courses already crammed with a multitude of regional or national stories.
The crucial step is to shift the traditional focus away from individual nations. World history's perspective is the entire globe, the "view from the moon" that Stavrianos proposed. At such a distance it is difficult to see what was once seen so clearly. Topics and patterns dear to western historians, teachers and students are not necessarily visible from a more distant perch. This change is difficult, "in some ways a psychological rather than a historical problem."(Hodgson 1954, 716) Teachers often put the west in the middle of their frame of reference, considering the rest of the world from our familiar time schemes, categories and terms.
This is where the National Standards in World History make an important contribution. They help give shape and structure to an effective world-scale history approach. The Standards present an effective periodization scheme, establish multiple levels of generalization, identify core concepts and stimulate broad comparison. These are extremely important for classroom teachers who want to create world-scale history, to help students place the west in larger context.
In the revised edition, the NCHS has added global standards to each era. These address key issues and questions that force students to reflect across both space and time. Global and era level standards situate the particular within a larger panorama. These standards push students to think about patterns through investigating worldwide interconnections. At the same time, the Standards do not ignore more familiar levels of analysis. They do not rely only upon world-scale data, but immerse students into the details of a particular time and place. These multiple levels of analysis encourage interconnection.
Secondly, I am also very enthusiastic about the Standards efforts to fuse content with thinking, knowledge with history's habits of mind. They tried to minimize artificial distinctions between content and thought process, between ends and means. Therefore, students are encouraged to do history as well as learn its substance. Standards stimulate students to switch frames and try put themselves in the framework of others. Both U.S. and world standards urge students to consider the world from multiple perspectives. The Standards recognize that the historical enterprise involves participation in a community of inquirers who construct and reconstruct arguments using evidence, theory and thought. Inviting students to join the conversation, Standards ask students to making cases for plausible interpretations of evidence.
The push towards world-scale history and attempt to merge thought and content make the revised Standards a valuable resource for teachers struggling to improve history instruction. In the hands of teachers, the standards will be catalyst for change. This is exciting, though, will continue to be lightening rod for criticism.
However, despite their great value, I think the revised Standards ignore vital issues in history education, such as cognition and assessment. The current lull in the political storm provides the chance to shift the discourse, bringing to the center pedagogical issues endemic to history instruction. To that end, I want to address three concerns not directly addressed in the Standards or the debate cognition in history, assessments, and group categorization.
History teachers stand in the center of a unique enterprise "the teacher of history must face inward and outward, being at once deeply familiar with the content of the discipline while never forgetting that the goal of this understanding is to foster it in others."(Wineburg and Wilson 1991, 335) While the Standards help pre-collegiate history teachers develop deeper familiarity with the content of history, they do not reflect the marvelous work being undertaken that focuses on how children come to understand history, how mastery of historical concepts develops, how children's thinking is similar to and different from working historians. Though I like the initial steps the Standards took to merge content and thought, it only skims the surface of the rich research on how students come to understand the past.
I am referring to the work of researchers in cognitive psychology people like Samuel Wineburg, Peter Seixas, Suzanne Wilson and students of Lee Shulman at Stanford. (2) Part of the cognitive revolution, this shift in perspective recognizes that learning is more than a mere change in students' behavior. The cognitive outlook towards learning demands that teachers understand students' thinking, the structure of the discipline and the context within which learning occurs. The cognitive revolution transforms the questions history teachers ask of learners and learning. How do our students construct historical meaning? What pedagogical tools stimulate the building of historical meaning?
A natural affinity exists between history and a cognitive understanding of learning. History as a discipline depends upon historians reconstructing the past. Doing history is more than uncovering facts. It requires actively constructing the past in the mind of the historian. Likewise, learning history is more than memorizing facts. Students of history actively construct the past in their own minds. History as a discipline and a course of study demands "meaning over memory."(Stearns 1993) As historians work to give meaning to historical facts, so students work to give meaning to their experiences.
For example, the Standards encourage students to use primary sources to build historical arguments. Yet they never consider how students actually think about this task. Do students see primary sources differently from secondary sources? What thinking do students bring to their investigation of historical documents? In a wonderfully rich study, Samuel Wineburg (1991b) contrasted historians' thinking about sources with history students' thinking. Wineburg found a gap. Historians treated the documents chronologically, looking first for attribution, and then checking one document against another. The students, however, treated the documents as they did textbooks passively and without questions. Students looked at the documents in the order given, seldom looked for authorship, and rarely contrasted one source with another. Wineburg's locating specific differences between expert and novice cognition takes us beyond the overt behavior of an activity, in this case the activity of reading sources. Such research points to the hidden thinking of those involved, thus yielding new insight into learning and instruction in history.
As the curriculum projects go forward, and as we work to enact the Standards, our work should be informed by the new research on cognition in the study of history.
How should we assess progress on the standards? I do not think that multiple choice questions are consistent with the spirit of the Standards. Rather, the Standards require students to use facts to construct arguments, make and take positions, interrogate evidence, analyze and compare. Yet, the Standards is strangely silent on the question of assessment. Since teachers teach what is tested, the assessment issue is crucial.
I think that Standards carries an implied call for authentic assessments - assessments that are "truly representative of performance in the field."(Wiggins1989) Such assessments must pay attention to " the criteria to be used," so that "self-assessment plays a much greater role than in conventional testing."(Wiggins1989) Authentic assessment then returns us to history's habits of mind. That is, linking thinking and content in lessons is insufficient, if we do not also link disciplinary thinking to assessment. Therefore, the Standards' thinking skills merged with knowledge standards must form the criteria teachers and students use to assess performances in history. Did students ask meaningful questions? Did they use evidence to support their argument? Did they explain using counterexamples? Were they empathetic to the historical frame and context? Did their analysis suffer from ahistorical presentism?
Without a clear statement on assessment, some organization might use the Standards to create the "Mother of All Multiple Choice Tests."(Stearns 1995, 448) If historians and educators do not address the questions of assessing the standards, others will design the assessments for us.
The CBE report raised a complicated, but important issue concerning how the Standards defined groups and minorities. This difficulty is larger than Standards. It is central to any effort to bring marginalized groups into the main story. The difficulty rests in a paradox. When placing a previously ignored group in the foreground of classroom study, teachers often pull the group out of context. Teachers often use decontextualized, ahistorical categories to locate groups in the past. For example, a teacher might ask students to consider the role or status of women in Athens. Role and status typically appears static, losing the dynamic interactions that shape social relations. Further, the category itself often consists of fixed characteristics that ignore the differences within the group or among members of the group. As such, the category homogenizes the group under study. This leads to overgeneralizing. To avoid this, teachers must help students historicize the category, locating it in time and context. However, to do so risks "losing" sight of the group as a category altogether.
The original Standards suffered from this paradox. Reflecting a generation of new scholarship, they admirably added social history to the pre-collegiate course of study. However, they often did so by presenting groups "without regard to the historical contexts in which they developed and thus their interactions with others [were]... ignored."(Council for Basic Education 1996,10) One of the important, though unacknowledged, improvements in the new Standards was NCHS's extensive revision in this area. In every instance the revised Standards locate minorities within their historic context. Thus the Standards challenges the idea that groups have an essential, timeless or homogeneous quality.
However, there is little formal discussion of this process or recognition of the issue in the Standards. Understanding this paradox of addressing groups in history is vital, yet teachers rarely acknowledge it. Historians Joan Scott (1988) and David Hollinger (1995) give discussion to this problem in recent works and history teachers would benefit from their treatment of this question. Teachers need to become more conversant in ways to encourage students to historicize the categories societies use to define individuals.
The creation of and controversy around national history standards makes this an exciting time to be a history teacher. Everyone is talking about what we do, should do or can do Newsweek, Time, the major newspapers and radio commentators. However, much of the conversation does not grapple with the questions that are crucial to improving history instruction. How do students think as they study history? How does students' thinking differ from that of historians? How is it possible to assess history in ways that are consistent with the discipline? How can students and teachers move on multiple levels of generalization to connect large global issues with the details of particular events? How can teachers include important groups without stereotyping the group or making them an appendage to the main body of history? It is incumbent upon historians and history teachers to turn the recent political excitement into productive pedagogical exchanges and then productive educational change.
Works Cited
Bain, Robert B., and Jeffrey M. Mirel. 1982. "Reenacting the Past." History Teacher 17 (May): 235-255.
Bruer, John T.1993. Schools for Thought: A Science of Learning in the Classroom. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press.
Cheney, Lynne. 1994. "The End of History." Wall Street Journal (October 20).
Council for Basic Education. 1996. History in the Making: an Independent Review of the Voluntary National History Standards. Washington, D.C.: Council for Basic Education.
Diegmueller Karen, and Debra Viadero. 1995. Playing Games with History. Education Week. (November 15):29-31.
Gardner, Howard. 1991. The Unschooled Mind: How Children Think in Schools and How Schools Should Teach. New York: Basic Books.
Gardner, Howard. 1985. The Mind's New Science. New York: Basic Books.
Hodgson, Marshall G. S. 1954. Hemispheric Interregional History as an Approach to World History. Journal of World History (Cahiers d'histoire modiale) 1: 715-23.
Hollinger, David A.1995. Postethnic America. New York: Basic Books.
McNeill, William H. 1986. A Defense of World History. Mythistory and Other Essays. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
National Center for History in the Schools. 1996. National standards for history: Basic edition. Los Angeles: National Center for History in the Schools.
National Center for History in the Schools. 1994. National standards for United States history: Exploring the American experience. Los Angeles: National Center for History in the Schools.
National Center for History in the Schools. 1994. National standards for world History: Exploring paths to the present. Los Angeles: National Center for History in the Schools.
Ravitch, Diane and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. 1996. The new, improved history Standards. Wall Street Journal (April 3).
Scott, Joan W. 1988. Gender and the Politics of History. New York: Columbia University.
Shemilt, Denis. 1983. The Devil's Locomotive. History and Theory 22: 118.
Stavrianos, L. S. 1969. The Teaching of World History. History Teacher 3.
Stearns, Peter. 1995. The World History Standards. The History Teacher 28: 441-448.
Stearns, Peter N. 1993. Meaning Over Memory: Recasting the Teaching of Culture and History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Wiggins, Grant. 1992. Teaching to the (Authentic) Test. Educational Leadership 46 (April): 41-47.
Wineburg, Samuel S., and Suzanne M. Wilson. 1991. Subject-matter Knowledge in the Teaching of History. Advances in Research on Teaching 2: 305-47.
Wineburg, Samuel S. 1991a. On the Reading of Historical Texts: Notes on the Reach between School and Academy. America7? Educational Research Journal 28: 495-519.
Wineburg, Samuel S. l991b. Historical Problem Solving: a Study of the Cognitive Processes Used in Documentary and Pictorial Evidence. Journal of Educational Psychology 83, 1: 73-87.
Notes
1 Complete CBE panels: U.S. History: Cary Carson, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, David Hollinger, Jeannette LaFors, Diane Ravitch, Rex Shepard, Stephan Thernstrom, Reed Ueda, Maris Vinovskis; World History: Hillary Ainger, Robert Bain, Allison Blakely, Lee glitch, Phillip Curtin, Prasenjit Duara, Michael Jimenez, Ramsay MacMullen, Marjorie Malley, Joan Wallach Scott, John Voll.
2 A good introduction to cognitive science is found in the works of Howard Gardner (1985; 1991). John Bruer (1993) provides a wonderful survey of the cognitive research in the classroom, though it ignores history teaching. For studies of cognitive science and history teaching see the work of Samuel S. Wineburg (1991a, l991b). Other discussions of history and cognition are found in Bain and Mirel (1982), Stearns (1993), and Shemilt (1983).