UCLA Will Get Center on Teaching of History

UCLA will establish a center aimed at improving the teaching of history in the nation’s public schools with a $1.5-million grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, officials announced Tuesday.

National Endowment for the Humanities Chairwoman Lynne V. Cheney, who announced the award at a Washington press conference, said the Center on the Teaching and Learning of History in Elementary and Secondary Schools will examine the ways history is taught and teachers are trained and develop better ways to teach the subject.

“Clearly there are fundamental problems with the way history is taught and learned in our nation’s schools,” said Cheney, who wrote a report for the endowment last year that found severe deficiencies in students’ knowledge.

Report’s Findings

The report, based on a survey by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, found that more than two-thirds of the nation’s 17-year-olds were unable to place the Civil War in the correct half-century, for example, or define the Reformation and the Magna Carta.

UCLA was chosen from among 11 institutions that applied for the grant, which will provide $500,000 a year for three years.

According to Cheney, one of the main reasons UCLA was selected was because of its proposal to heavily involve elementary and secondary teachers in the work of the new research center. The staff will include 60 teacher associates who will work with a panel of eight to 10 prominent historians to develop new classroom programs and deepen their knowledge of history.

“One of the things I concluded from visiting schools and talking to teachers was that the problem can’t be solved by outsiders--by institutions of higher education or by government agencies,” Cheney said.

The center will be directed by UCLA education professor Charlotte Crabtree, a nationally known leader in efforts to upgrade history teaching. Crabtree helped write a widely praised blueprint for teaching history in California’s public schools that was adopted by the state Board of Education last year.

The new guidelines recommend three years of U.S. history and three years of world history for all California students--significantly more history instruction than students in other states receive.

Statistics Cited

Crabtree cited these statistics to show the decline in the amount of history teaching nationwide. Fewer than 30% of junior high schools offer history. In 20 states, an 11th-grade U.S. history course is the only history required for high school graduation. In 34 states, no world history is required. In four states--Alaska, Michigan, Nebraska and Wyoming--no history study is required at all.

“When you combine those figures with the poor test results, you realize that history has really lost the significant role it once had in the schools,” she said.

Sometime this spring, the UCLA center will name the panel of history scholars who will attempt to define a body of “essential historical knowledge” that students must master. The center also will examine the quality of history textbooks, which to a large degree influence how teachers teach the subject, as well as analyze the quality of history instruction received by high school students on vocational tracks compared with those on academic tracks.