WOMAN IN THE NEWS : UCLA Professor Is Seeking a Front-Row Seat for History : Education: A $1.6-million grant to set national standards gives Charlotte Crabtree a chance to upgrade the teaching of our past.

Charlotte A. Crabtree has seen the fall of history in the public schools. Now she hopes to be part of its resurgence.

Crabtree heads the UCLA-based National Center for History in the Schools, which last week was awarded $1.6 million to help establish national standards for the teaching of history in the public schools.

The award has focused national attention on the 62-year-old UCLA education professor and her facility, which was established in 1988 as a joint project of the university and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Endowment Chairman Lynne V. Cheney said Crabtree, of Pacific Palisades, is uniquely qualified to organize a national effort to set high standards in history teaching because of her work as co-author of California’s landmark “framework” for history and social science.

That 1988 effort increased the amount of American and world history taught in the state’s public schools and mandated that history be taught rigorously and from a multicultural perspective.

The framework went into effect in California classrooms this fall. Although it has not yet been formally evaluated, the revised curriculum has drawn wide praise.

“Charlotte has been involved in standard-setting for a very long time because of her work on the California framework, and she has also been involved in consensus building,” Cheney said. She praised Crabtree, who has a doctorate in curriculum theory from Stanford University, as “very intelligent and very patient, and you often don’t find those attributes in the same person.”

Crabtree said she has seen dramatic shifts over the last 40 years in history’s status in public education.

“We had a wonderful, strong program in history when I was a beginning teacher,” she said. Unfortunately, “the whole system was dumbed-down during the 1970s and early 1980s,” in what she describes as a well-intended but misguided attempt to improve the basic skills of disadvantaged students.

Cheney said the need for higher standards in history became clear to her several years ago when a poll revealed that two-thirds of 17-year-old Americans couldn’t say within 50 years when the Civil War took place. The gravity of the situation was underscored, she said, when she subsequently asked the same question to students in Seoul, South Korea, and 50 out of 51 knew the right answer.

With its award from the U. S. Department of Education and National Endowment for the Humanities, Crabtree’s center is expected to establish broad-based committees that will draw up preliminary documents outlining nationwide standards in American and world history. The center also hopes to start building support for such standards by including as many affected groups as possible in the process, Crabtree said.

The center hopes to submit its recommendations to the Department of Education, the endowment and other appropriate federal bodies by fall of 1993, she said.

Crabtree described the center as a place where scholars and teachers work together to improve the teaching of history.

“For education to be effective you have to create a partnership between academics, who are scholars of the discipline, and classroom teachers, who can learn from the scholars and make the transition to the student’s mind,” she said.

The center has produced a 300-page document, “Lessons From History, Essential Understandings and Historical Perspectives Students Should Acquire,” that outlines the historical material all students should master before graduating from high school, from archeological findings about the earliest cultures to the recent breakup of the Soviet Union. The document is often requested by federal and state groups and “has already become a major resource for standard-setting,” Crabtree said.

In 1989 and 1990, the center also undertook a comprehensive national survey of the status of history in the public schools. Crabtree cited such findings as the inadequate preparation of most history teachers (23% have no significant training in the field) as information that will help improve the way history is taught.

The survey also found that 10% of the nation’s high schools do not offer courses in American history.

Another of the center’s major accomplishments, Crabtree said, has been the development of 48 detailed lessons that focus on critical moments in history. These lessons, which have already been distributed in 46 states, deal with subjects ranging from ancient Africa to the women of the American Revolution.

“They always have something dramatic about them, and they always bring in the documents and the voices of the people of the time,” Crabtree said. The lessons are characterized by high-quality scholarship, she said, “and because they are also developed by teachers, they are always filled with wonderful ideas for getting the students involved.”

The lessons are central to the center’s mission because “content is what it’s all about,” said historian Gary B. Nash, a UCLA history professor who is the center’s associate director. The lessons include original documents or primary sources whenever possible, allowing students to dig more deeply into important topics than textbooks can hope to do, he said.

Crabtree said that a major innovation of California’s reform and the center’s work has been the inclusion of controversy in the history curriculum by advocating study of the often-heated debates that surround important issues.

Francie Alexander, executive director of the National Council on Education Standards and Testing in Washington, agreed.

“History is intrinsically contentious and that should be part of the classroom presentation,” said Alexander, who worked with Crabtree on the California framework and continues to be consulted by her about the setting of standards.

Crabtree said she is thrilled to be part of what supporters hope will be a revolution in the teaching of history. “I am simply awed by my incredible good fortune at being part of a reform of this magnitude.”