Ravitch Controversy over the History Standards - MAT-ED513-2011

The Controversy over National History Standards
Author(s): Diane Ravitch
Source: Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Vol. 51, No. 3 (Jan. - Feb.,
1998), pp. 14-28
Published by: American Academy of Arts & Sciences
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3824089
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STATEDMEETINGREPORT
The Controversy Over National
History Standards
Diane Ravitch
In the fall of 1994, an explosive controversy began in the pages of the Wall Street
Journal.The former chairperson of the National Endowment for the Humanities,
Lynne V. Cheney, wrote a blistering critique
of national standards for the teaching of
American and world history that her own
agency had underwrittenduring her tenure.
In the months and years since, charges and
counterchargeshave been exchanged by partisans in an extraordinaryinstance of prolonged public attention to the content and
teaching of history.The dust has not yet fully
settled,but I would like to considerhow these
events came about,whathappened, and what
the consequences are for the teaching of history in the schools of the United States.
It should not be necessary to argue the
importance of learning history.Anyone who
hopes to understand his or her own life, as
well as to comprehend events in society and
the world, must have a firm grasp of history.
Educated people recognize the necessity of
teaching young people why the past matters
and how it influences our understandingof
the present.Yet there are precinctswithinthe
education profession in which historyis disparaged as nothing more than a bunch of
names and dates about long-ago events and
dead people, and therefore not especiallyinteresting or relevant to today's youngsters.
Some social studies educatorsdismisshistory
Diane Ravitch is senior researchscholar at New York
Universityand seniorfellow at the BrookingsInstitution. Her communicationwas presentedat the 1 799th
Stated Meeting, held at the House of the Academyon
April 9, 1997.
14
because it has too many facts, and they just
don't like facts; or they say that they want to
teach "critical thinking," not "content"; or
they say that since no one knows which
knowledge is true, it is best to concentrate on
teaching students how to look things up.
Such attitudes help to explain why American
students have for a very long time displayed
an abysmal ignorance of history.
I must acknowledge my own interest in the
events surrounding the national history standards. Since the mid-1980s, I have been an
advocate of improved history education. I
helped to write a new history-centered curriculum adopted by the California Board of Education in 1988. A book I coauthored in 1987
with Chester E. Finn, Jr.-What Do Our 17Year-OldsKnow?-described the results from
the first national assessment of history, which
showed that large numbers of high-school
juniors did not know important things about
American history. For example, some twothirds did not know in which half-century the
Civil War had taken place, and even larger
proportions could not identify the Scopes
trial, the Progressive Movement, orJim Crow
laws. After the book appeared, I helped to
organize the Bradley Commission on History
in the Schools and the National Council for
History Education.
Last, I was assistant secretary of the US
Department of Education from 1991 to 1993,
when the department awardedgrants to groups
of scholars and teachers to develop voluntary
national standards in science, history, geography, civics, English, the arts, and foreign languages (mathematics standards had already
been developed by the National Council of
Teachers of Mathematics). The grants were
processed by the Office of Educational Research and Improvement, which I headed, and
I enthusiasticallysupported the initiative.
Both the National Endowment for the
Humanities and the US Department of Education awarded funding for the history standards project. The organization that received
these dollars was the National Center for His15
tory in the Schools at the University of California, Los Angeles. The Center had been
brought into existence by Lynne V. Cheney
when she chaired the NEH and was, in many
important respects, her creation. She had encouraged its founding and supported it
through a cooperative agreement that gave
the NEH the authority to review and approve
all the Center's products before they were
published. The Center was selected to coordinate the development of history standards
because its leaders had enlisted every significant organization with an interest in history
and social studies to participate in the proposed standard-setting project. Hundreds of
scholars and teachers collaborated in the
standard-writing process.
All the principals in this effort sincerely
wanted to see good national history standards. Those of us at the Department of Education did; Lynne Cheney did; the
leadership at the UCLA Center did. And yet
things went horribly wrong.
Lynne Cheney's first salvo against the history standards appeared in October 1994,
only days before the draft standards themselves were officially published. She indicted
the standards as a paradigm of political correctness that emphasized race and gender
while ignoring traditional heroes, and that
magnified the failings of American society
while belittling its accomplishments. She
complained that the document mentioned
Senator Joseph McCarthy and McCarthyism
nineteen times, the Ku Klux Klan seventeen
times, and Harriet Tubman six times, but left
out Paul Revere, Robert E. Lee, Thomas Alva
Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, and the
Wright brothers. She objected to double standards that romanticized non-European cultures, pointing to a teaching example that
expressed admiration for the architecture
and agriculture of the Aztecs while overlooking their practice of human sacrifice. She
contrasted a teaching example that encouraged students to admire "the achievements
and grandeur of Mansa Musa's court" in Af16
rica with another teaching example that proposed a mock trial ofJohn D. Rockefeller for
amassing too much wealth.
In the days and weeks after Cheney's preemptive strike, conservative talk-show hosts
excoriated the standards as a menace to the
republic, historians debated their merits, editorialists opined pro and con, and a spokesman from the Clinton administration issued
a statement pointing out that the standards
had been funded by the Bush administration.
The US history standards were attacked for
political bias; the world history standards were
assailed for minimizing the importance of the
West. There will surely be books written detailing the charges and responses; I will not attempt to do that here. The volume of outrage
was sufficient to provoke the US Senate in January 1995 to pass a resolution disapproving the
history standardsby a vote of 99 to 1. Later that
year, Secretary of Education Richard Riley
firmly distanced the Clinton administration
from the controversy,saying, "Thiswas not our
grant. This is not my idea of good standards.
This is not my view of how history should be
taught in America's classrooms."
The draft standards were vigorously defended by the leaders of the historical profession. Gary Nash, a prominent historian who
had overseen the writing of the standards as
director of the UCLA Center, was president
of the Organization of American Historians;
he insisted that the attacks were aimed not
just at the standards but at an entire generation of historical scholarship.
In the midst of this extraordinary polarization, a few voices of moderation contended
that the standards should be revised, not
abandoned. The late Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers
and a strong proponent of national standards, was critical of the standards for their
negativism and their failure to place democratic ideals at the center of the nation's
history, but he appreciated that they called
for "substantiveand demanding" history in the
schools. He argued that the draft standards
17
should be rewrittenand improved. And, thanks
in part to his urging, that is what happened.
Early in 1995, the revision process began,
sponsored by the Council for Basic Education. The CBE convened two panels of historians: one to review the draft US history
standards, another to review the draft world
history standards (I was a member of the
American history panel). Historians of widely
divergent views participated on the CBE panels, which were models of democratic discussion and professional responsibility. The
panels noted that the project had defined
excellent criteria for standards and that most
of the problems stemmed from the project's
failure to meet its own criteria. The panels
called attention to the standards' inadequate
treatment of economics, science, medicine,
and technology, as well as their tendency to
portray technological changes in terms of
their negative social impact. The world history panel discounted the charge that the
standards had denigrated Western civilization, but noted prejudicial language (e.g.,
Europeans "invade" other countries, while
similar actions by non-Europeans are described as "expansion"rather than "invasion").
The panels commended the UCLA Center
for the rigor of the standards and pointed out
that "the majority of the documents' shortcomings are in the teaching examples." In
the US volume, the teaching exampleswhich occupied far more than half of the
text-gave the misleading impression of a
national curriculum. Furthermore, those teaching examples tended "to dwell on the country's
shortcomings" and conveyed "a disproportionately pessimistic and misrepresentative picture
of the American past."Also, with their emphasis on drawing attention to those who had been
underrepresented in the past, the teaching examples were "unbalanced in the other direction, giving the appearance of a curriculum
that pays little attention to political history."A
relativelysmall but significant number of these
examples violated the project's own criteria
about the importance of avoiding presentism
18
and moralism in teaching history. Some examples posed loaded or leading questions that
expressed political bias.
Gary Nash and his colleagues at the UCLA
Center responded professionally and enthusiastically to the CBE report. Language that
was flagged as politically biased was revised or
eliminated. All 2,500 or so teaching examples
were dropped; the teaching examples, not
the standards themselves, had prompted
most of the criticism, and many readers confused them with the standards.
When the revised standards were released,
the controversy largely subsided. Some critics
were unappeased and continued to insist that
the standards were unacceptable, but after
the egregious excesses that had fueled the
original controversy were removed, the public battle receded. This is more or less where
matters stand today: a standoff, an uneasy
silence, a controversy that has left the headlines but not the hearts and minds of those
who were in the trenches on both sides. Stepping back from the abyss, I would like to
express some tentative judgments about what
happened and why it matters still.
First, Gary Nash was right when he argued
that the attack on the history standards was
an attack on an entire generation of scholarship. The original history standardsespecially the US standards-reflected the
significant influence of those social historians
who have used race, class, and gender as
organizing lenses through which to view the
past (although it must be said that many
contemporary social historians have pursued
other lines of inquiry). Those ideas assumed
unusual prominence in the standards-far
more than most Americans can recall from
their own history courses in high school and
college. To be sure, American history should
no longer be taught without attention to the
experiences and achievements of previously
neglected groups and individuals. But the
decisive shifting of the balance toward the
pluribus in the US standards document
prompted concern that the unum-the com19
mon civic ideas and values that unite us as a
nation-would be neglected.
Additionally, in the wake of the Vietnam
War, political assassinations, and the Watergate affair, many of the younger generation
of historians derided any celebration of the
nation's past, especially of the sort that used
to be typical of high-school textbooks. Consequently, historians have discovered new heroes among previously neglected groups and
cast a hypercritical eye toward traditional heroes, whose failings now seem to loom larger
than their accomplishments. Historian Stephen Ambrose complained that the annual
meeting of the Organization of American
Historians in 1993 had sessions on "black,
Indian, Hispanic and other minority history,
gay and lesbian history, and multicultural history," but not a single session marking the
250th anniversary of Thomas Jefferson's
birth. He concluded that this was probably a
good thing, since "had there been a session, it
almost certainly would have been on whether
or not his slave Sally Hemings was his mistress
and mother of some of his children" or on
"[Jefferson]the slaveholder and racist."
Second, it is important to note the adversarial role played in the history standards
project by representatives of the American
Historical Association, who warned that their
organization would quit the project unless
language according special recognition to
Western civilization in the criteria for world
history standards was revised. Whether the
membership was aware of these views is not
clear, but they were forcefully expressed in
several letters by the AHA's deputy director
and the vice president of its teaching division.
A few other organizations agreed with the
AHA, but no other organization threatened
to withdraw support for the consensus process if its views did not prevail. The leaders of
the UCLA Center disagreed, but ultimately the
confrontational style of the AHA staffprevailed.
The national council for the history standards
project revised the offending language in order
to preserve the project. The decision to do so,
20
however, conveyed the impression that the
standards project was ambivalent about acknowledging the distinctive European contribution to American and world history.
Third, defenders of the standards mistakenly insisted that few reputable historians objected to the standards, thus implying that
only racists and yahoos were against them.
Nash's codirector warned me that my reputation would suffer if I criticized the standards, because only racists, anti-Semites, and
the far right were doing so. This refusal to
brook any criticism was not what one would
expect from those responsible for writing national standards. In fact, a number of reputable historians criticized the standards,
including Walter McDougall of the University
of Pennsylvania, David Kennedy of Stanford,
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese of Emory, Sheldon
Stern of the John F. Kennedy Library, and
John Patrick Diggins of the City University of
New York. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., objected
that the US standards failed to credit the
European origins of "the formative American
political ideas-democracy,
representative
government, freedom of speech and the
press, due process, religious toleration, human rights, women's rights, and so on."
While applauding the standards' attention to
the history of those who had previously been
slighted, Schlesinger worried that the standards had embraced the pluribus at the expense of the unum, a concern that I shared.
Although the documents' own criteria declared that standards for US history should
reflect "both the nation's diversity.. . and the
nation's commonalities" and should develop
understanding of "our common civic identity
and shared civic values," it seemed to me that
the original draft of the standards did little to
fulfill those goals. However, when the revised
standards were released in April 1996,
Schlesinger and I jointly endorsed them in an
article in the Wall StreetJournal.We concluded
that the revised standardswere "rig6rous,honest, and as nearly accurate as any group of
historians could make them."
21
Fourth, even after the revisions were released, some die-hard critics continued to
attack the standards as though nothing had
changed, while some defenders continued to
insist that the original standards were flawless
and that the revisions were only cosmetic. In
this bitter debate, reasonableness went out
the window early on, and some adversaries
never wanted to find a workable compromise.
Fifth, the overall effort to develop national
standards became hopelessly hobbled by partisan politics in Washington. Originally, there
was supposed to be a nonpartisan panel to
review and evaluate proposed national standards, to consider criticisms, and to recommend revisions. The Goals 2000 legislation
authorized a review panel in 1994, but it became ensnared in politics, and President
Clinton never appointed its members. In
1995 Congress abolished the nonexistent review board. So those who wrote voluntary
national standards had no external agency to
review their work; critics had no place to
direct their comments; those who wrote the
standards were put in the inappropriate position of deciding which critics to attend to;
and documents that should have been
treated as provisional drafts were wrongly
presented and wrongly perceived as finished
standards. All in all, it was a messy and failed
process that left no avenue for sober public
evaluation of the proposed national standards.
The story does not end happily, because in
many states and school districts, the controversy over the national history standards reinforced the position of those who prefer to
stick with vacuous social studies and to steer
clear of history altogether. Consider some of
the standards that have been promulgated in
the past two years.
In Illinois, the 1996 draft standards for
history include the following: "Assess the
long-term consequences of major decisions
by leaders' in various nations of the world,
drawing information from a variety of traditional, electronic and on-line sources." Or,
22
even vaguer still, "Compare and contrast varying interpretations of major events in selected periods of history." To take another
example of a standard lacking in content:
"Analyze the impact of major humangenerated events that affected a wide segment of the world's population in the 20th
century." Such statements provide no guidance for teachers, students, textbook publishers, or test developers.
In Wisconsin, history is only one of ten
thematic strands in the social studies. The
state's draft history standards lack any specificity and refer to events in sweeping and
meaningless terms. High-school seniors are
expected, for example, to "analyze differing
historical and contemporary viewpoints within
and across cultural regions and political boundaries"and to "analyzethe economic, social, and
political changes in response to industrialization and urbanization in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries." Each local school district
is left to decide how to interpret the meaning
of these vague and empty statements.
In Minnesota, middle-school students are
expected to "understand historical events
and contributions of key people from different time periods." Nothing is defined; no
events, issues, or individuals are identified as
especially worth knowing.
The significance of statements like these is
clear: Those who think history is boring are
still in control, still believing that it is possible to teach "critical thinking skills" without
content or knowledge. The study of history
without reference to specific events, controversies, and individuals is simply impossible.
The strength of the anti-history forces at the
state and local level is a good reason to support national standards. Indeed, the best argument for national standards is that the
central facts and issues in American history
are the same whether one is a student in
Anchorage or Key West, Dallas or Detroit (or,
for that matter, Paris or Tokyo).
The issue, in my view, was never whether to
have national history standards, but whether
23
national standards should be created by a
deliberative public process, or whether implicit
national standards would continue to be controlled by the serendipitous requirements of
textbook committees in three or four major
states. It seems that we are back where we
started, having taken a circuitous route that
involved lots of bruises, injuries, and split lips.
But we are not really back where we started.
Historians and the public learned something
about one another. Some historians seem to
think that a large sector of the public is made
up of ignoramuses who don't appreciate expert
knowledge and refuse to defer to it, and some
members of the public seem to think that historians are elitistswho are contemptuous of the
views of ordinary people.
Is this chasm necessary? Was this controversy inevitable? Perhaps it was, given the
wide gulf between the politics of the majority
of the historical profession and the politics of
the larger public. Surely, conflicts were
bound to arise in any effort to reach agreement about the history that should be taught
to our children. Yet it does seem that there
was at least the possibility of a middle ground,
a path that was not taken. On one side was
the assertion that the history standards had
revolutionized the study of history, opening
up for study the experiences of groups that
had previously been left out. On the other
side was the assertion by critics that many of
today's social historians disdain America and
belittle its traditional heroes.
Perhaps there could be no middle ground
between those who want a critical view of our
nation's history and those who want a history
that inspires love of country. But if we set
aside those who hold the most extreme
views-those who want the schools to teach
students only the underside of American history and those who want the schools to teach
only the bright side-there is a reasonable
middle ground. That reasonable middle
ground requires that we acknowledge the importance of race, ethnicity, class, and gender
in history while also paying due heed to im24
portant historical figures like Washington,
Franklin, Jefferson, and Edison. Why not
weave together both approaches and add new
faces to the pantheon of American heroes?
It is also important for historians to realize
that the critical perspective appropriate for
university students may not be appropriate
for children in elementary and secondary
schools. According to the "criteria for the
development of standards" produced by the
UCLA Center, one of the purposes of history
education in the schools is to "contribute to
citizenship education," but this is not usually
a goal of historical studies in the university.
When citizenship education is a goal, then history education must teach not only how to
think critically,but also which ideas and experiences unify our nation and which ideals and
individualsdeserve our admiration and respect.
The drafters of the history standards
thought they had satisfied the need for heroes through such statements as "analyze the
character and roles of the military, political,
and diplomatic leaders who helped forge the
American victory [over the British]." Why not
identify which military, political, and diplomatic leaders achieved historic significance?
Why not name those whose signal accomplishments were unusually important in
American history? It is not simply a question
of heroes or no heroes; biography is an excellent way to learn history.
In an article written for the William and
Mary Quarterly,Gary Nash acknowledges that
the drafters of the standards "consciously
tried to temper the great man theory of history." They believed that students were likelier to be involved in politics and community
affairs if they saw ordinary people as shapers
of historical events. But it does not seem
necessary to get into a dispute about whether
historical agency comes from the elites or
from the masses. Youngsters need to learn
both about great individuals-many of whom
were ordinary people who did great thingsand about the ways that events and social
25
movements were influenced by ordinary people who did not become famous.
In the same essay, Nash notes that the new
scholarship embodied in the history standards attempted "to prick the nation's conscience while serving as an antidote to the
flag-waving,jingoistic, self-congratulatory history that was the standard fare of textbooks
for generations." This reevaluation of the
American past, he says, was intended to "remedy the malign neglect or vicious treatment
of African and Native American history," but
there has also been "a tendency to romanticize those previously denigrated or to overlook the dark side of peoples previously
ignored while seeming to reserve criticism
mostly for the European colonizers." Nash
writes that the original version of the national
history standards shows the influence of
scholars who wanted to "analyze American
history in a more penetrating way"while helping their students "appreciate and recognize
the achievements and struggles of minorities
and non-Western peoples." Nash anticipates
that "as thesis leads to antithesis and then to
synthesis,self-correctionin a mature profession
has certainly been taking place." He predicts
that in years to come, another generation of
scholars will produce new history standards reflecting new understandings.
The debate over the national history standards has certainly produced lots of thesis
and antithesis; we have not yet seen much in
the way of synthesis. This is a sort of political
tragedy that might be called Murder on the
OrientExpress,after the Agatha Christie whodunit. In that book, it turns out that everyone
on the train had a motive and an opportunity
to kill the victim. Then the crime is finally
solved: everyone did it. The same is true in
the case of the national history standards.
The historians did it, particularly those
who failed to understand that some of their
most controversial decisions-especially
choosing to deemphasize the commonalities
that define American nationality and our
shared civic culture-were questions of po26
litical ideology rather than issues of scholarship.
The critics of the standards did it, especially those who made false and inflammatory
charges, as well as those who refused to assist
in the revision and continued to condemn
the standards after they were revised.
The social studies field did it, because it
has long considered history a boring discipline and seen its own role as shaping students' political and social attitudes rather
than as teaching history, geography, and civics in ways that enable students to reach their
own judgments.
I did it too. I accept responsibility for not
having insisted-when the contracts were negotiated in my office at the US Department of
Education-that the consensus process include a significant representation of the public from the very beginning. Participation by
journalists, civic leaders, legislators, parents,
and others who were neither historians nor
teachers might have ensured that the standards passed the "barbershop test" before
they were released to the public. Shirley Malcom of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science coined the "barbershop test" metaphor for a forum in which
ordinary citizens discuss public policies that
affect them. In a democracy, expert views are
never the sole determinant of public policy.
The consensus process for the national civics
standards did include nonexperts, and the
document was warmlyreceived. For those who
would shape public policy, the lesson is clear:
either public engagement at the beginning of
the process or public trial by fire later.
In the end, we all did it, because we bear
collective responsibility for the education of
the next generation. When it comes to history, the next generation doesn't know
much. The latest report on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, released in
late 1995, showed that 57 percent of highschool seniors scored "below basic"-as low
as it is possible to go on that exam-in their
knowledge of American history. Those
27
youngsters will be voters in a year or less.
They will probably never study history again
after high school.
The distinguished historian Bernard Bailyn recently said that high-school history
teaching must do two things. First, it must
give students the "basic structural lines to
large-scale historical narratives-basic information, so they know that there was an English Civil War, that Rome follows the great
era of Ancient Greece, that neither Germany
nor Italy was a nation until the nineteenth
century, that Napoleon follows the French
Revolution and that what he did was related
to it, etc." Second, it must "fascinate highschool students with history-get them excited about it, show the fascination of events,
personalities, and outcomes; emphasize the
drama and personal interest of it all-so they
see that this is something that can be vitally,
intrinsically interesting to them, and not
something dull." These seem to me to be the
right goals for history education. To judge by
the results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, we are currently not
achieving them.
I continue to believe that we need national
history standards. Like Arthur Schlesinger,
Jr., I would be pleased if students today knew
even half of the content in UCLA's national
and world history standards. I will be even
more pleased when the synthesis that Gary
Nash predicted becomes a reality, when history in the schools ceases to be a battleground for warring ideologies, and when
educators agree with Bernard Bailyn that
history education must give the younger generation a basic structure of historical knowledge and inspire them with enthusiasm for
learning more. If our recent arguments
about teaching history speed that day, then
the struggles and controversy of the past few
years will have been worthwhile.
? 1997 by Diane Ravitch.
28