History Standards Flawed but Can Be Saved, Panels Say

Stepping back from the broadsides launched by conservative critics, two independent review panels of historians, educators and civic leaders said Wednesday that newly developed national history standards for elementary and secondary students are biased, but should be revised and retained.

Most troublesome, the panels found, were thousands of teaching examples provided to supplement the learning standards, which they said came dangerously close to promoting a national curriculum. The panels urged that those examples be eliminated.

The panels, led by a former Republican governor and a university president, drew a sharp distinction between the standards themselves--some 70 broad statements of what all American children are expected to learn about world and U.S. history--and the accompanying segments called “examples of student achievement.”

Written by teachers, the examples offered ways to engage students in more than rote memorization of facts, asking them to weigh and analyze historical evidence and construct arguments through debates, plays and other lively classroom activities.

But, lending validity to many of the barbs from critics such as presidential contenders Patrick Buchanan and Sen. Bob Dole, the panels said numerous examples reflected unsound historical scholarship “by asking leading questions or by inviting students to make easy moral judgments” about unresolved historical issues.

They said the standards failed to give a complete picture of American history, slighting in particular “such presences as [George] Washington and [Thomas] Jefferson and seminal documents such as the Bill of Rights and the Constitution.”

The panels also concluded that the sheer volume of teaching examples offered--more than 2,500--could lead to wrong impressions about the purpose of the voluntary standards.

“We are strong in our advocacy of removing the examples,” said former Minnesota Gov. Albert Quie, who chaired the U.S. history review panel. “Other than the fact there was more bias in the examples than in the standards, the fact they are so voluminous causes people to misinterpret them and think of them as curriculum. . . . It is clear the public does not want a national curriculum.”

The recommendations pleased some critics, who called the proposal to drop the teaching examples a step in the right direction. But they failed to mollify others, who would like to see the whole project scrapped.

“There is still so much skepticism out there,” said Jeanne Allen, president of the Center for Education Reform in Washington. “There is a question out there: What are these standards for? Are they supposed to be a blueprint for assessing how our states or communities should be teaching history, or are they rallying cries for social thought? What they seemed to do was the latter.

“Many people are wondering whether there is any role for a national commission in devising standards,” she said, “and whether that should be totally a state role or, even more, a district role.”

The review boards were convened by the Council for Basic Education, a nonprofit organization advocating school reform, in response to criticism that the standards--developed over three years with the help of more than 35 organizations, including historians, school superintendents and teachers--sacrificed traditional history on an altar of political correctness.

The panels reviewed three volumes of guidelines on the teaching of U.S. and world history, produced by the National Center for History in the Schools at UCLA as part of a comprehensive national effort to set high academic goals in every major subject.

Intended to guide history teachers and textbook publishers, they spell out what all students should know and be able to do to demonstrate their grasp of the subject.

But the documents were roundly attacked even before their official unveiling late last year, accused of pandering to liberal viewpoints and committing sins of omission--including, by one accounting, six mentions of Harriet Tubman but none of Paul Revere.

Lynne V. Cheney, who helped fund the development of the standards when she chaired the National Endowment for the Humanities during the Bush Administration, excoriated them in a Wall Street Journal column last October, charging that the authors tended to “save their unqualified admiration for people, places and events that are politically correct,” while slighting such icons of traditional history as Thomas Edison and the Wright brothers.

The statement issued Wednesday by the review panels was an attempt to moderate the debate and refocus attention on the benefits of setting common learning goals for the nation’s schoolchildren.

“I’m very enthusiastic about the report of the panel,” said panel member Diane Ravitch, a former assistant secretary of education under President George Bush and a leading figure in the national school reform movement.

“It should help quell attacks on the standards and end this particular battlefront on the culture wars. We come down somewhere in the middle and say the standards can be improved, that there is value in having standards and that these are worth fixing.”

In a statement released at a meeting in Williamsburg, the panels affirmed the need for voluntary national standards and lauded the history standards for “correctly emphasizing” the importance of both acquiring historical knowledge and the “critical thinking” skills students need in order to apply the knowledge in their everyday lives.

But they found troublesome some standards that used “loaded language,” which the panels said had the effect of directing students to one-sided conclusions. Some wording suggested an anti-European slant. For example, one standard cited by the panels asked students to compare encounters between “intrusive” European migrants and “indigenous people.”

In another instance, the standards discussed the religion of Native Americans and blacks in early America but not the religion of European settlers.

The panels’ critique of the teaching examples lent credence to some complaints by conservatives that the guidelines overemphasized negative episodes in American history.

For example, the section dealing with the period after World War II offered more exercises about McCarthyism than any other topic, completely ignoring other notable developments such as the growth of the middle class and advances in science and technology.

In another example cited by Quie, a suggested lesson about John D. Rockefeller could lead to “easy moralizing” by asking students to conduct a trial in which the magnate was accused of “knowingly and willfully participating in unethical and amoral business practices.”

The panelists would not characterize these examples as demonstrating liberal biases. But, said Ravitch, “it was an unconscious bias, and one of the points panelists felt there was no place for in the standards.”

But John Fonte, executive director of the Committee to Review National Standards founded by Cheney, said separating the examples from the standards will do little good. “There are 25,000 or 30,000 copies of the books already in circulation. The problem is the horse is out of the barn, the train has left the station. What’s all this about flawed stuff if it’s already in use?”

Fonte believes that the standards should be scrapped and started again from scratch. “They are not worth revising,” he said. “They are flawed throughout.”

Gary Nash, director of the UCLA center that developed the standards, complained that too much time was wasted during the debate “counting the number of names” of historical figures included or omitted.

But, he said, the center welcomes improvements recommended by the panel and will not include the teaching examples when it publishes the final draft next year.

The intent of the examples, he said, “was to provide teachers with many active learning activities and strategies for bringing history alive, really getting beyond the passive absorption of textbook material and digging into the nitty-gritty of history. . . .

“The teachers who wrote these were extending a hand from their own experiences in the classroom,” said Nash, president of the Organization of American Historians and the author of several textbooks.

Michael Kirst, a Stanford University education professor and former president of the California Board of Education, said it would be a mistake to separate the examples from the standards.

“You can’t cleanly divorce the two. If you want to teach students how to think and reach their own conclusions . . . then you have to include teaching examples. If you cut all that out,” he said, educators run the risk of having their instruction guided too heavily by standardized tests, which may not reflect the more demanding standards.

High school history teacher Ruben Zepeda, who taught in Los Angeles city schools for 10 years, said teachers welcomed the sample lessons, and detractors such as Cheney fail to give teachers enough credit for being able to judge such material critically.

“They don’t think teachers can say, ‘Look, here’s a good example, here’s a terrible example, and I know what I need to get across and how to make this a better working piece.’ They think teachers don’t have good sense.”