In the previous blogs, I reported on the topic of “What Are American Students Learning About US History?” The first blog introduced the two-year study conducted by the American Historical Association (AHA). The second blog provided an overview of the report. The third blog reviewed the national patterns observed by the AHA in the teaching of social studies. The fourth blog examined the decision-making curricular materials. The fifth blog surveyed the issue of curricular content in the teaching of social studies. The sixth and final blog covers the AHA conclusions plus an analysis on what was omitted.

AHA CONCLUSIONS

AHA noted the highly visible controversies in the public arena … and also the lack of evidence behind those debates. As AHA began this study

…we realized that tensions and conflicts within a school community rarely matched the conflagrations depicted in national and social media (182).

AHA strongly supported the teachers who they found to be strongly committed to keeping their contemporary preferences from skewing how they teach. They are committed to teaching students how to think and not what to think (183).

Overall, “the edifice of secondary history education in the United States rests on solid foundations” (183).

AHA found that the typical tensions derive from fundamental struggles over authority and autonomy: with adolescents who aren’t necessarily motivated by what teachers have to offer and with administrators’ expectations (184).

The AHA strongly supports history-rich professional development for social studies teachers. The cancellation of the Teaching American History federal grant program in 2011 was mentioned. AHA says there is a desperate need for renewed professional development opportunities for K-12 teachers. Teachers want access to the high-quality content-specific programs essential to maintaining their qualifications as historians and their enthusiasm for history (185). The licensing to become a social studies teacher in the first place requires passing a test and typically taking history courses (192).

For two centuries, the basic rational for teaching US history I public schools has been consistent: to instill in students a sense of belonging to the nation and to prepare them for participation as citizens of a republic (185). History is a thrilling way for students to learn about their communities, whether understood locally, nationally, or globally (186).

CRITIQUE

A class in civics on paper does not mean that students and students who are now adults are knowledgeable about American history or how the government operates.

For example Shelly Mayer, my state senator and chair of the New York State Education Committee was just interviewed (November 29, 2024, Westmore News) for my local weekly newspaper. The following comes from the notes of the Westmore News reporter as presented by the op-ed writer:

New York’s per pupil spending has been the highest in the nation since about 2005 with mediocre results and very little, if any academic improvements for decades. The changes in graduation requirements just approved by the Regents will require a massive overall of the entire system.

The purpose of public education has been changed from raising academic achievement for all students (No Child Left Behind) to Equity defined as Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). Is this what parents, businesses and colleges want given the divisiveness DEI has caused in the workplace, in colleges, in the military, such that it is being cut back, and even eliminated in many places.

What is the cost? It is likely to cost millions if not billons. There has been no public discussion of how much or where it will come from. How many hires to work on transformation of high schools? What about professional development?

According to Senator Mayer, when she goes to visit schools and is introduced as a State Senator, the students are usually baffled. They know about Senators but they are in Washington!

It was at this point we all shard a collective frustration about the lack of civics education and the dangers of turning out an ignorant electorate.

Note: My local newspaper closed December 20, 2024, which will be the subject of another blog.

Unfortunately history and civics scores are dropping nationally. Covid witnessed a decline in scores that continues even now that the pandemic ended. The Department of Education’s National Assessment of Educational progress recorded a decline in the number of students who attained basic standards.in US history.

One possible explanation given is the corresponding reduction in classroom time dedicated to social studies. No Child Left Behind promotes reading and math with there being no federal mandate for social studies. If it’s not tested, it’s not taught. That diminishment has consequences for the future of democracy (“History and Civics Test Scores Are Dropping: A Existing Trend Sped Up as Students Endured the Panic” [New York Times May 24, 2023, print]).

The ripple effects of the decline in civics caries forward from high school to college (“By Dropping Civics, Colleges Gave Fuel to the Culture Wars” [Debra Satz and a Edelstein, New York Times, September 7, 2023, print). Students lack a shared intellectual framework that is called civics education. College courses “provided a mutually intelligible set of reference that situation student’s disagreements on common ground” (Satz and Edelstein). These courses have been abandoned except at Columbia. They were replaced by often excellent courses “that had no common core of readings nor any transparent rationale for why they were required” (Satz and Edelstein).

Civic education as a public good cannot compete with STEM, vocationalism, and career-oriented classes. We the People always comes in second to I, the individual and the country is the loser.

One should keep in mind that we have a Senator from Alabama who did know what the three branches of the government were and who were our allies and who were our foes in World War II. One might add given Supreme Court decisions on presidential immunity and Seal 6 teams and the lack of commitment to the Constitution, determining exactly what civics is and what it is not are problematical.

We also live in a time of school closings not expansion or stability. These closings are due to demographic declines and the post-Covid growth of private schools and homeschooling.

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers said “At the end of the days, kids need to be together in community” (quoted in “The Unequal Effects of School Closings,” Alec MacGillis, The New Yorker, August 26, 2024).

Despite the rosy picture painted by the AHA there is a decline in the belief in American Exceptionalism. Among the young, that belief is rapidly dying. The surveyed students indicated a positive response by 27% in 2022 (“The Death of American Exceptionalism,” Jean M. Twenge, The Atlantic, October 15, 2024).

Even the belief that the founding of the United States was a positive development seems to be on the way out (Twenge).

Four of 10 Gen Zers identified the Founder as “villains.” What is the explanation for the disillusionment? One explanation is the mental health of depressed teens. Negative news is king. The death of newspapers which printed both sides of an issue has contributed to this perpetual negative spin (Twenge).

Twenge suggests another reason may be in shifts in high-school American-history curricula. In some states, especially the liberal ones, more time is spent on the deplorable facts of the nation’s history. That includes the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, the massacre of Native Americans, and the ownership of slaves by the Founders. As a social psychologist Twenge expressed concerns about the impact these conditions are having.

The call for more professional development for history teachers is exactly right. However that raises the question of which history by the “experts” will be taught.

But since the 1960s, academic historians have splintered into narrow subfields that speak only to one another in increasingly esoteric jargon, while the public has become incurious and incapable of reading anything longer than a few paragraphs. Popular history has come to mean political biography and military history, two fields that academic historians often avoid or even disdain (“Uses and Abuses,” Scott Spillman, Popular History 33, September 29, 2024).

This topic has been the subject of multiple blogs for many years. Spillman extends kudos to Jill Lepore and Heather Cox Richardson. He also notes the impact of the 1619 Project which the teachers in the survey specifically downplayed as a source.

Spillman comments that to achieve popularity, a book needs to be interesting and fun to read. The problems with academic books is not that the authors are terrible writers on a sentence-by-sentence level [this excludes German writers where a sentence can be a paragraph or page long!], but that they are overwritten. The popular postwar historians who did not write like that were not primarily historians.

There was a need for a new narrative synthesis of American history. Spillman provides examples of 18 such books from the 1980s to 2009 that fit the bill. “Taken collectively, these books told the whole story of the United States from the colonial period to the present, defying the conventional wisdom that professional spurned synthesis, narrative or the reading public in these decades. Left unsaid in the AHA report is when are teachers expected to have time to read these books assuming of course that they can identify them in the first place.

Spillman observes a change has occurred.

A generation earlier, in the previous round of culture wars, the battles over American history ultimately died away because almost everyone involved still agreed that the American story was fundamentally a story about the promise of freedom, even as they disagreed over whether and when that promise had been achieved. By the 2010s, that had changed.  

Spillman complains that the books “often lack any acknowledgement that people of good faith might hold conflicting ideas about the story of American history or hat, even if they agree about the basic story, they might draw starkly different lessons from it.”

One area not included in the AHA report is the effect of influences from outside the classroom. Teaching United States history does not exist independent of family and community. Take for example, slavery and the Confederacy. In addition to the prominent monuments which have been toppled there are Confederate streets, parks, buildings, battlefield re-enactments, family traditions and mementos right inside the home … to say nothing of Gone with the Wind and decals on a whole range of items. A Confederate flag was even waved inside the Capitol during the January 6 insurrection which the incoming President calls a day of love. So regardless of what happens inside the classroom, teachers are not teaching in a vacuum.

Now since October 7, 2023, the issue of anti-Semitism has come to the fore. True, the AHA report predates that event, but the issue of contentious topics really was not addressed in it. Here the true measure of the effectiveness of the teaching of social studies may be measured in events outside the classroom rather than curriculum boxes checked off inside the classroom.

To sum up, the AHA report paints a somewhat rosy picture for the teaching of social studies in American education. There may a gap between what is presented on paper and what is learned by the students. If the primary goals are teach students critical thinking, civics, and to be prepared to be adult citizens in the United States more work needs to be done. As we are beginning to celebrate the 250^th anniversary of the birth of the country if a growing percentage of the population thinks the country was born in sin twice and is not fit to play a leading role on behalf of freedom in the world, then the consequences will be dire not just for the country but the planet.

In the previous blogs, I reported on the topic of “What Are American Students Learning About US History?” The first blog introduced the two-year study conducted by the American Historical Association (AHA). The second blog provided an overview of the study. The third blog reviewed national patterns which the AHA observed over time in the history social studies teaching. The fourth blog focused on curriculum decision-making. In this blog the focus is curricular content.

Goals and Values

Surveyed teachers were asked to respond on the importance of a series of goals and values. High rated items include

Building a shared sense of national identity among students across social groups
Building an appreciation for diversity
Cultivating an appreciation of the United States as an exceptional nation – 25% said not at all important
Developing informed citizens foe participation in a democratic society – highest rated
Expecting students to confront the role of racism in our nation’s character
Focusing on challenging/controversial topics – 4% said not at all important
Helping students see the role of God in our nation’s destiny – 67% said not at all important, more than double the second place topic
Installing civic pride in the nation
Installing core knowledge of national heritage – 5% said not at all important
Making connections to the present – 93% important/very important, the highest rating

Presenting us history as a consistent fulfillment of the promise of the nation’s founders -30% said not at all important, the second highest after seeing God’s role

Presenting us history as a story of violence, oppression, and/or injustice – 29% said not at all important.

AHA proposes these results are an index of a common national teaching culture among educators (134).

The topics and era that were the favorites to teach include

81% Civil Rights Movement
79% American Revolution and Founding of the republic
74% World War II
70% Great Depression and New Deal
70% Slavery and Antebellum South,

The least favorite were

11% Clinton and the New Democrats
15% The Great Recession and Present Day
16% The Information Age
17% The Counterculture

“This picture doesn’t square with ideological caricatures of politicized classrooms” (136). When there is a problem with the curricular materials it is more likely due to sacrificing detail and complexity in pursuit of streamlining.

Historiography rates low as a skill set. This means that teachers and students do not learn about the behind-the-scene debates which occur over these topics.

The following is a review through the timeline in the teaching of US history. It identifies some of key events and issues in that teaching.

[C]urricular coverage of Native American history is the most likely to blur into generalities and the least likely to reflect recent scholarship from professional historians. Surveyed teachers confess to feelings of inadequacy on this topic (140).

They tend to be grouped together and generalized save for specific acts in history like the Trail off Tears. There is a “sharp drop-off of Indians after the close of the Plains Wars” (141).

It’s as if Indians disappear in the 20^th century as historical actors. That disappearance of the “abstract Indian” may be counteracted in state and local history classes were the Indians are rooted in a particular place. The greater the presence of federally recognized tribes the more curricular time will be devoted to them (142).

There is a naming issue. European peoples and nations tend to be named despite their regional and cultural diversity. By contrast, Indian nations and peoples tend to be collapsed into a single entity [You’ve seen one, you’ve seen all – not in the report].

Problems of abstraction and timelessness in Native history have not been solved by various gestures of sensitivity, sympathy, or a decolonized pedagogy… While perhaps well-intentioned, these approaches obscure the political, cultural, and material contexts that shaped Native American societies and empires (145-146).

As you might expect, this leads to problems.

The framing of Native history as a moral quandary for contemporary Americans is a recurrent theme in classroom coverage.

“The most common ideological synthesis among teachers described the founding as an expansive and unfinished struggle” (157) – a work in progress.

John Gast’s painting American Progress is one of the most assigned sources for students studying westward expansion….But the painting is also a handy symbol for the overemphasis on the concept of Manifest Destiny that predominates in K-12 materials” (157).

Indian removal, specifically the Trail of Tears, frequently is taught in this era but often disconnected from the broader story of westward expansion. Rarely do standards or curriculum give much detail about the dozens of distinct efforts undertaken by Native tribes to resist or determine the path of removal. And seldom does the curriculum tie the removal of Indians to other antebellum events, including the expansion of slavery (159).

[S]ome curriculum plans indicate overly general questions and descriptions that give students the wrong impression about the significance of westward expansion (160).

[T]here no longer appears to be any serious controversy among teachers about slavery’s central role as the cause of the Civil War (161).

AHA comments that slavery still could be covered more comprehensively. But it is recognized that it is a uniquely challenging topic due to its potential for controversy (162).

Frederick Douglass’s “the Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro” is the go-to text for this period (163).

[W]hile no teachers we spoke to or surveyed apologize for slavery in their courses, their efforts to explain the economic existence of slavery sometimes gives it a sense of inevitability that should not be applied to its existence or its end….[C]urriculum textbooks consistently overemphasize the importance of Eli Whitney and his cotton gin to the spread of plantation slavery (165).

[A]n excessive focus on military history leaves out far too much of the other histories that students should learn about (166).

AHA favors more coherently incorporating the insights of social and economic history (166).

The post-Reconstruction eras are challenging for teachers. Students are uninterested, disengaged, or academically unprepared (167). It may be taught at the beginning of the school year up to three years after the student’s last US history class and with a different teacher. Teachers spoke of the shaky transitions between middle school and high school history classes (168).

It is the time of the masses and not the individual of the earlier American history.

…keywords from both the Gilded Age and Progressive Era form a barrier of anonymity that only the most well-known and elite historical actors, like Carnegie and Rockefeller, can breach (170).

Technology and the improvement of daily like is a common idea (171).

The Civil Rights Movement is the only content area that can be critiqued by still-living participants and witnesses (173).

Local resources can be invaluable here but in general, the story of the Civil Rights Movement is told with a southern accent (180).

Room for improvement clearly remains, most notably in expanding treatment of events outside of the South (181).

This concludes the review of the curriculum. The next and final blog on this topic will report the conclusions of the AHA plus what it missed.

In the previous blogs, I reported on the topic of “What Are American Students Learning About US History?” The first blog introduced the two-year study conducted by the American Historical Association (AHA). The second blog provided an overview of the report. The third blog tracked the national patterns in social studies education over time. This blog will focus on the curricular decisions which the AHA observed.

The first point involved the chronological timeframes of the history classes, whether or not state history was included, and the grades where history is taught.

Students benefit from repeated exposure to the same historical content, with increasing depth and sophistication, across their K-12 experience (50)

In other words, the idea that students already had been exposed to the material x years ago and therefore it did not need to be repeated is hogwash. The brains of students change over the years and presumably they are better able to cope with a topic on a more advanced level. This presumes not only continuity but familiarity by the teachers about what was taught in the earlier grades.

When the timeline of American history is divided into two grades, the gap between the two halves can be problematical.

When teachers identified the topics where they felt the need for more support, six of the top ten came from the post-civil rights era. Part of the reason is the need to rush through the last half-century at the end of the school year. Once upon a time the Reconstruction to the Civil Right era might have constituted the scope of the entire course. The Reconstruction still tends to be the dividing line in 2-part courses, but a lot has happened since the1960s, a time when many teachers themselves were growing up and remember first hand.

As for the state standards, AHA reports that a “great many teachers carry on with minimal awareness of the state agency’s alleged role in their work” (52)

Those “standards offer a rationale focused on preparing students for citizenship with critical thinking skills and an understanding of a complex world” (57”.

According to the AHA, “[t]eachers give mixed signals about history’s position in the accountability landscape” (60). Teachers “consistently cite social studies’ low priority status as a source of frustration” (60). Sometimes teachers in states with no state social studies testing wish there was such testing if only to boost the status of the discipline.

Still what happens in the schoolhouse often begins in the statehouse. AHA tracked 808 legislative acts passed between 1980 and 2022 which seems like a lot. “There’s also the much longer and quite widespread effort to incorporate diversity—namely the notion that the narrative of American history should incorporate stories from multiple perspectives, inclusive of the various groups that constitute the national population” (63). Between 1980 and 2022, there were 199 instances of state legislatures requiring that specifically named groups be accorded coverage in US history curriculum” (63). I suspect this in one reason why professional historians tend not to write general histories of the United States.

State legislators then may complicate the teaching of chronology-based courses.

State legislators are particularly fond of designating specific times of year (holidays, weeks, or months) as moments for concentrated study of a particular historical event, theme, group, or person (66).   

AHA found 79 such laws between 1980 and 2022. The result is the civic calendar is prioritized over the chronological pacing for United States history.

[It] seems likely to encourage a series of ceremonial non sequiturs, rather than historical exploration of content and significance (66).

AHA reported on the low priority in managerial attention than mathematics and language arts (69). The lack of clarity around administrative roles contributions to confusion (72). Large districts tend towards large bureaucracies. Such structures diminish classroom autonomy and idiosyncrasy toward course team alignment and common assessment (73).

According to the AHA, administrators often express frustration with teachers focused on content rather their skills. By contrast, teachers typically define their expertise in terms of content. And this is particularly so if the administrator lacks a social studies background (74).

The more a district develops curricular materials, the more likely teachers are to be the primary authors (75).

The social studies coordinators constitute a sizeable and active proportion of the membership in the NCSS.

According to the AHA:

Ultimately, classroom teachers remain the decisive curricular policy makers (76)   

Resource and materials mean those the teachers write themselves. The teachers who work alone tend to be those where they are the only US history teacher particularly in smaller-town and rural settings. Teachers rely more on colleagues than administrators when it comes to content (77).

Textbooks clearly are diminishing in influence (86). The most significant force driving teachers and districts away from textbooks is the proliferation of free stuff (91). Josh Green and Sam Wineburg are frequently cited (92). Others include PBS, National Geographic, and the Gilder-Lehrman Institute of American History. Interestingly, The New York Times Magazine 1619 Project earned top spot on the list of resources to avoid. There was a correlation between length of teaching career to the cooler the reaction (113).

One teacher commented:

“I warn kids that social media is no place to get their information, so I follow the same rule” (95).

The visual landscape of the typical textbook can feel like a cluttered webpage (96).

According to AHA, textbooks portray a mostly uncontroversial (if not always dynamic) professional consensus about the scope and sequence of content that belongs in a US history course. On many topics, textbooks offer more detail than the typical teacher-created or district-produced material. Narrative exposition is alive and well on YouTube and documentaries still have a powerful appeal.

As a classroom resource, history videos function (like textbooks) in the expository mode, providing a single voice of narrative synthesis, but with a flair that textbooks rarely match (97).

The ascendant format is the document-based lesson.

The basic intellectual moves of the document-based lesson date to the 19^th century, when the first generation of professional historians called on schoolteachers to depart from the blunt moralism of many textbooks (98).

The AHA favorably comments on the adoption of document-based inquiry within the educational system:

In many instances, the prevalence of essential questions and document-based inquiry seems likely to deliver on its promise of promoting historical thinking (102).

There is a drawback:

Too many lessons ask students to stake a position on a moral binary, rendering judgment on a past policy or person from the perspective of a national (and present-tense) “we” (102).

The goal however is to privilege historical understandings rather than lawyerly thinking. AHA objects to the recurring assignments that require historical figures to be rated as heroes or villains (103). Another shortcoming is decontextualization where shorter and shorter sources are disembodied from their original contexts.

Despite all that has been said here and in the media, many social studies teachers struggle to get parents, students, and even administrators to care about history at all (108).

Slavery and race ranked as the topics of most consistent and heated resistance (116). Schools themselves have been so much a part where these tensions played out in the national arena.

Teachers struggled amid relentless administrative pushes for more superficial displays of social justice and antiracism, efforts they described as frivolous at best and stifling at worst (118).

After a brief discussion of the politics of education today, this section concludes with

…if teachers are encouraged to abandon their obligation to their students as experts in historical content knowledge under one round of political pressure, then they will be ill-equipped to face the next one (129).

This blog is the third in a series on the study of the American Historical Association on the subject of “What Are American Students Learning about American History.” For the first two go to:

What Are American Students Learning about US History Today? (Part 1: Introduction)

What Are American Students Learning About US History? (Part 2: Overview)

The focus now shifts to the heart of the study.

Before delving into the report, there are some general observations about national patterns which deserve consideration.

High schools were and are universal. This led to multiple changes.

The high school building became a fixture in the civic landscape of a community. The physical state of the building became a comment on the state of the local community.

The high school became a center for non-academic activities, particularly sports, bands, cheerleading, and theater. These activities were visible to the general community in a way strictly classroom activities were not. Mascots became an important logo and symbol of identity for the school and the community.

Two new terms developed to describe the students attending these high schools – teenagers and adolescence. This meant such people were spending more and more time with their peers and less and less with their kin on the family farm.

The high school graduation ceremony became a defacto and unofficial form of naturalization where the graduating senior was recognized as an adult person in the community witnessed by family, friends, and elected officials.

Technological change provided increased mobility for these teenage adolescents independent of adult supervision..

Technological change provided increased means of communication for teenage adolescents independent of adult supervision.

Think of all the movies there have been related to these changes often with music.

Teaching now had to operate in a vastly different world then a few decades ago yet a century or more.

The AHA could not be expected to study all these developments. On the other hand, isolating a topic like history teaching from the surrounding world is incomplete too.

 “AHA researchers immediately realized that two straightforward facts rendered sweeping generalizations about whitewashed history and brainwashed students implausible. The chasm between curriculum as written and the curriculum as taught… (18).

One might add the decentralization of the setting of standards further complicates the challenge of even having a single standard. As part of the study the AHA therefore reviewed the standards in all 50 states along with 877 distinct pieces of legislation related to US history education primarily over the last 40 years.. One common occurrence was noted.

State lawmakers also have repeatedly chosen social studies and US history instruction as a place in school codes to leverage moral authority, comment on issues of civic import, or recognize advocacy by particular constituencies.  (21)

This diffusion guarantees a diversity of approaches regardless of any national directive.

Looking at US history curriculum historically, the AHA notes that “[t]he current clashes are hardly the first time that US history curriculum has become a proxy for ideological factions in the broader American culture war” (28).

Furthermore,

History has always been more likely than other subjects to provoke disputes about national identity. If common schools were, as Horace Mann put it, an “apprenticeship for self-government,” history took the role as head tutor. American history, a widely used mid-19^th-century explained, inspired the pupil with tales of “virtue, enterprise, generosity, and patriotism… (29).

In 1884, the AHA was founded. It marked an effort to delimit the boundaries of professional historians as scholars and educators. In the meantime, state legislators were turning schooling into a compulsory fact of American childhood (29).

However a change had occurred in the discipline of history. The “sense of history’s purpose had grown beyond inspiration and instruction for citizenship” (29). The reason for the change was Germany. The latter had created the graduate school.

[A]cademic training increased the social distance between historians and history teachers. Many academics doubted whether the nation’s schoolteachers, many of whom were women and clergymen, were capable of transmitting the discipline’s new insights to American classrooms (30).

This disconnect continues to this very day. It has been the subject of several blogs that note the popularity of the so-called “airport” and “Fathers’ Day” history books versus the exceedingly publication runs of deeply researched academic history only of interest to other academics in the field. It is always a newsworthy event when a professional historian pens a book with general public appeal.

This did not stop professional historians between the 1890s and 1920s enthusiastically joining a cascade of special committees intending to bring order, disciplinary integrity, and continuity to elementary and secondary education (30). A goal was the scientific training for culture, character, and citizenship (30). This meant that history and not social, economic, or cultural matters should form the core of a US history course (30-31).

Of course professionals in those areas sought a seat at the table. Hence the new multidisciplinary class called social studies. Now history, geography, civics, and economics would be joined together (31). Historians were now caught between asserting the primacy of history versus elbowing for a place within social studies (32).

Tensions arose. But the public was not necessarily aware of the battle within the academic arena.

Despite an apparently diminishing profile for history in the schools, popular expectations—that history should be taught, and that its main themes should be heroism, patriotism, and (a contested) pluralism—drove an entire genre of activism (32).

The battle over history created some odd developments. European immigrants demanded that coverage of defining episodes of the American character, especially the American Revolution, be made inclusive of heroic contributions by their co-ethnics (33). One could add that as long as the newcomers to the United States were from southern and eastern Europe, it remained comparatively easy to incorporate these people into the fabric of American history. Think of George M. Cohan and Jimmy Cagney with Yankee Doodle Dandy, Irving Berlin with God Bless America, and Frank Capra with It’s a Wonderful Life. But what happens when the immigrants are global in origin? Will they still identify with the defining episodes of the American character? Will they celebrate the Sesquicentennial? We will know soon enough.

There were other challenges as well.

Confederates ever watchful for northern bias in textbooks.

Blacks who wanted to be included.

Historical scholarship of this era thus added scholarly and cultural cachet to the racist portrayals that structured generations of American textbooks, popular histories and film (34)

So they did exactly what they did in baseball. They created their own parallel organization, the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. This provided an opportunity to refute white racist textbooks and extol their own achievements as long as the materials were distributed only to the segregated schools. That way even white school boards could approve them (34).

The criticisms of social studies textbooks were amplified when a New York Times study claimed there was an absence of US history in typical k-12 courses and that there was a “’striking ignorance’” of US history among college freshmen (35). By contrast a Rockefeller Foundation funded study conduct by the AHA published in 1944 demonstrated a nearly universal requirement in elementary and high school for social studies (35). Here the AHA is comparing apples to oranges. The issue at the college level was the ignorance of the students and not whether or not they had taken classes k-12. The report thus glides over the issue of what the students actually were learning in the social studies classes which according to the college professors was woefully inadequate.

By the 1960s, turmoil had engulfed social studies as it had so much of life. Multiculturalism and traditionalist were the terms of engagement. Eventually new standards were implemented that were more content-rich and which reaffirmed history’s distinct role in the curriculum. Although the term “social studies” remained dominant new organizations like the National Center for History in the Schools, the National Council for History Education, National History Day, and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History emerged. Soon there would be a federally sponsored Teaching American History grant program. It also was a time of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States and James Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me.

The culture wars continue. One could add the New York Times 1619 project and critical race theory to the mix. The incoming President vows to eliminate the Department of Education. Many states advocate funding reductions for public schools. The battle for history in education is hardly over.

In the previous blog, I introduced the topic of “What Are American Students Learning About US History?” That blog introduced the two-year study conducted by the American Historical Association (AHA). Now I wish to turn to the content of the report and make some observations about it.

INTRODUCTION 

This section notes the stormy debate which has engulfed the country: the stereotypes, the assumptions, the overtly ideological agendas. Even without evidence about “’inherently divisive concepts,’” state governments have plunged ahead to create unprecedented legal restrictions on the content of history instruction (7).  What has been missing is evidence.

To elaborate on the points noted in the previous blog:

Many teachers participate in a nationwide culture of history education that operates through channels rarely addressed in public debates

In the United States, unlike with many other countries, there is no national education system. However there does exist an informal culture for the teaching of history grounded in common goals and a shared professional sensibility in both discourse and classroom practice.

Since the 1990s, there have been multiple rounds of standardization that have created a shared vocabulary. “This common ground is sustained by professional organizations of teachers and administrators, curriculum publishers, social media groups, resource provides, and professional development programming” (10).

AHA found that “US history typically taught in public schools is not riddled with distortions or omissions” (10). [Home school? Private schools?] The curricula works best when questions of causation, context, and significance frame the content.

At times the materials fall short of the expectations of professional historians. The reasons being that history instruction has been streamlined to focus “on bare facts, banal platitudes, flat inevitabilities, or a vague set of literacy skills rather than meaningful knowledge” (10). One might add that these are exactly the traits that make history boring.

One conclusion should have been written in bold:

…social studies teachers need more classroom time and more professional development

One might add that these are precisely the areas that are most easily cut because they are direct reductions in spending just as bus trips are.

The good news is that according to the AHA the media has overblown the politically charged atmosphere except in specific communities. But while the classroom is grounded in professional norms that bear little resemblance to caricatures of classroom indoctrination, that AHA report states significant majority of teachers do not face regular political objections to the way they teach US history. Quite the contrary, “many struggle to get parents, students, and even administrators to care about history at all” (11).

According to the AHA, “Teachers want students to read and understand founding documents to prepare them for informed civic engagement” (11). Left unaddressed here is the ability of students to read and comprehend such documents or to place them in context.

The AHA adds that teachers want students “to grapple with the complex history and legacies of racism and slavery. Curricular materials associated with overtly partisan or ideological messaging can expect a cool reception from teachers” (11).

The AHA learned that the question of “’what is actually taught in American history classroom?’” involves determining how decisions are made, how teachers feel about the process, and what goes right and wrong along the way.

Free Online Resources Outweigh Textbooks

Teachers increasingly view students as unprepared and/or unwilling to read critically or at length. Meanwhile teachers make prolific use of a decentralized universe of no-cost or low-cost online resources. (11)

Testing Matters, for Better or Worse

State-mandated assessments in history exerts a strong influence on district conditions. Tested subjects receive more attention but teachers bemoan the narrowing of curriculum that can accompany standardized assessment. But assessment rituals have been slow to reassert themselves following the interruption of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Teachers Make Curricular Decisions

Teachers have substantial discretion in deciding what they teach, how they teach, and what materials they use. At the course level collaboration is ascendant. But looking across their careers, veteran teachers report a clear trend away from autonomy and idiosyncrasy and toward alignment and common assessment.

Bad Questions Give Inquiry a Bad Name

“When content (names, dates, places, stories) are blurred in favor of skills-based abstractions, teachers may have more difficulty defending the integrity of history against politicized accusations….Nor does calling something an inquiry guarantee that moralism, presentism, or fatalism won’t creep into history teaching” (12).

Calls for Help

“Teachers freely admit where they could use more support” (13). In particular both ends of the American history timeline are cited: precolonial Native America and post-1970s.

To summarize, the AHA report is driven by three questions:

1 What is taught?
2 Who decides what is taught?
3 What resources do teachers actually use in teaching US history?

The report is divided into four parts.

Part 1: Contexts
Part 2: National Patterns
Part 3: Curricular Decisions
Part 4: Curricular Content.

These sections will be the subject of subsequent blogs.

Before doing so, there are issues which need to be addressed which are outside the purview of the social studies teacher.

1. the ability to read

2. the alternate sources of history information outside the classroom – these sources include family, community, and online. Just because a curriculum does include teaching that slavery was the cause of the Civil War, does not mean that students are not bombarded with the view that the War of Northern Aggression was an invasion by Yankees.

One should keep in mind the limits of what teachers can accomplish during a school period with a subject perhaps only taught in one grade.

The American Historical Association (AHA) launched a two-year study on the topic of what are American students learning about US history today. The full report of 198 pages is available for download on its website. The study examined all 50 states for their standards and legislation. In addition, nine states covering a range of characteristics were selected for more in-depth analysis.

The release of the study was covered in the New York Times under the title “How History Teachers Navigate the Political Divide (September 22, 2024 print). According to that account, textbooks are out and digital sources and primary documents are in. Popular websites include the Smithsonian Institution and other federal archives and PBS. Others include the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.

In the second paragraph, the article states that in some left-leaning school districts, the lessons seemed to direct students toward viewing American history in an “’emotional’” manner as a string of injustices.

By contrast in conservative areas, laws restricting the teaching of “’divisive concepts’” have been “’extremely corrosive of teacher morale and detrimental to the integrity of good history teaching.’” Some of the most popular options have been called unacceptably left-wing by critics.

The report did not find much evidence in curriculum materials of conservative myths about American history that were once dominant, particularly in the South, such as the idea that slavery was not the cause of the Civil War.

The teachers seem to enjoy the topic.

The teachers who participated in the survey said they were drawn to social studies because of their love for American history and civics.

The report did survey teachers in several states where the curriculum has been most heavily contested. They include Florida, California, and Oklahoma.

Yale historian David Blight said “’I was surprised at the poignancy of some of the findings. A lot of teachers just want some time to read. They’d be grateful if someone gave them a $100 dollar book budget.”

A criticism of the study was that even if the term “critical race theory” is not used, the values of it can be embedded into the classroom.

AHA REPORT PREFACE 

In the opening paragraph, AHA states:

Overheated rhetoric threatens the professional integrity of teachers and exacerbates partisan polarization.

There may be a gap between what people think is being taught in the classroom. One result is legislative and/or executive action imposing restrictions on the content of history instruction.

The political theater and vigorous debate lack an important element: evidence drawn from careful research. The AHA study is intended to remedy that situation. Its conclusions were:

1. Secondary US history teachers are professionals who are concerned mostly with helping their students learn central elements of our nation’s history. Teachers want students to read and understand founding documents to prepare them for informed civic engagement. They also want students to grapple with the complex history and legacies of racism and slavery. These goals are entirely compatible. We did not find indoctrination, politicization, or deliberate classroom malpractice.

2. Teachers make important curricular decisions with direct influence over what students are expected to learn. Despite legislative interference, the localized influence of state-mandated assessment, and efforts to standardize instruction, history teachers retain substantial discretion over what they use in their daily work.

3. Free online resources outweigh traditional textbooks, which are unlikely to stand at the center of history instruction. While publishers pitch digital licenses and tech tools to districts, teachers instead make prolific use of a decentralized universe of no-cost or low-cost online resources. US history teachers rely on a short list of trusted sites led by federal institutions including the Library of Congress, the National Archives, and Smithsonian museums. 

4. Room for improvement remains. A lack of resources, instructional time, and professional respect are among the clearest threats to the integrity of history education across the United States. Many of the teachers in our sample wished for more time and opportunity for professional learning focused on historical content—in essence, what happened, how, and why. If there is any wholly inaccurate message being sent by our public schools to millions of students and their families, it is that history is not important enough to command time, attention, and public resources.

Personally, I found this last conclusion most significant. Teachers would like to learn more historical content. This suggests that programs need to be devised which provided teachers with an opportunity to be students, as college or grad students, to learn what is going on in their field. Years ago in a series on “Imperiled Promise,” a study commissioned by the National Park Service for the rangers at the historic locations, reached roughly similar conclusion. Teachers of history would like to be able to learn more history. That means attending history not pedagogy conferences. Having access to books/journals perhaps through a college library. Having the time to digest the information. Remember the Teaching American History grants, the federal program now discontinued which included visiting historic sites. Here is where a robust Department of Education could be most helpful especially since the Sesquicentennial has already started.

Speculation and outrage do little to address the many challenges our schools confront on a daily basis. American Lesson Plan provides a solid evidentiary foundation for policies directed toward teaching history with the professional integrity and qualifications that help students grow into informed participants in a vibrant democracy. It is time to get serious about history education.

Implicit in many of these points is that students are capable of and are reading at a high school level.

In the next series of blogs, I will review the AHA more thoroughly. For readers eager to get a head start go to:

https://www.historians.org/teaching-learning/k-12-education/american-lesson-plan/what-are-american-students-learning-about-us-history/