No Common Core US History or World History content standards?

by Jim Buxton

              There are Common Core Math and ELA content standards, and I understand they’re coming in Science.   The last of the Big 4, Social Studies, does not have Common Core content standards. 

                There are Common Core standards for Literacy/Social Studies, but these are not content standards.  So, the Literacy/Social Studies standards might expect 11-12 grade students to be able to “analyze a complex set of ideas or sequence of events and explain how specific individuals, ideas, or events interact and develop over the course of the text.”  Certainly, that is an important skill, and one we can promote in Social Studies classes, but I don’t get any guidance as to what individuals, ideas or events I should have the students analyze.  The standards don’t suggest that students analyze Woodrow Wilson’s initial opposition to entering World War 1, and then trace how he eventually encouraged US involvement as a way “to end all wars” and to “save democracy.”  Wouldn’t it be helpful to all Social Studies teachers, but especially for new teachers, to have a specific set of content standards so that we can know what we should teach – like Math teachers have?  Fat chance!  

             So why is Social Studies the orphan?  It’s a long story, and one which I will try to concisely summarize.  Please feel free to post important parts which I left out, or misspoke about.  In doing so, I will be drawing extensively from an article by Diane Ravitch.  (“Hijacked!  How the Standards Movement turned into the testing movement”; March 2013)  By the way, I would highly recommend Diane Ravitch’s Blog.  In using Diane Ravitch’s work, I’ll be using her coverage of standard’s history, but I won’t be dealing with her remarks around testing.

         Ravitch feels we have to look back to the educational system of the 1960s – 1970s, and the reaction to it, in order to assess the standards movement.  The 1983 publication, “A Nation at Risk”, called for major changes in the way we educated our students at the time of the hey-day of the hippie.  Ravitch states, “A Nation at Risk was a response to the radical school reforms of the late 1960s and early 1970s.”  She continues, “the reforms of the 60s-70s were proferred with the best of intentions; some stemmed from a desire to advance racial equity in the classroom and to broaden the curriculum to respect the cultural diversity of the population.  Others were intended to liberate students from burdensome requirements.  Still others supported schools where any sort of adult authority was strictly forbidden.  Tear down the walls between the classrooms, said some reformers.  Free the children, free the schools, abolish all rules and requirements.  Let the English teacher teach Math, and the Math teacher teach English.  Let students design their own courses and learn whatever they feel like learning whenever they feel like learning it.  Get rid of graduation requirements, grades, tests and textbooks……. On it went, with reformers, radicals, and revolutionaries competing to outdo each other.”

                I have to admit that in my college days (1971-1974), I took three courses where the students graded themselves. (Most of us did very little work, and gave ourselves  A minuses.)  In one of the courses, I had an independent study with a professor in the Religious Studies Dept.  I was supposed to be taking Auto Mechanics at the local high school.  The professor and I titled the course, “Man and his machine.”  Being that I am technologically challenged, after one class, I was way behind, so I stopped going.  At the end of the semester, I went to see the professor to determine my grade.  He asked me what I usually got for grades, and I said B plus, so that’s what I got!!!   Suckers!!!!  I suppose that amongst all the “losers” in this story, the biggest one was my Father who paid the tuition which included that course! 

                It doesn’t take too many stories like the aforementioned for one to conclude: “Boy, did they need some educational standards in those days!“   Therefore, I’ll spare you some of the other absurd examples from those days!  You can imagine that this pendulum swing was inevitably going to swing the other way.   Diane Ravitch was among those calling for change decrying what she called "permissive, child centered pedagogical strategies." (American Education: a History by Wayne Urban and Jennings Wagoner; 2014; pg 320)

              One of the factors which caused a 180 was a 1975 New York Times story about SAT scores dipping dramatically.  Although some contend that much of the dip "could be attributed to the fact that during the 1970s the school-age population that took the tests had broadened to include a much larger portion of the high school-aged student cohort than had taken the tests in previous years." (American Education; pg 320)   Nonetheless this story, and others like it, led many, including Diane Ravitch, to express serious concern.  Eventually, the Reagan administration tasked a Commission with exploring this educational conundrum, and in 1983 they produced a document called “A Nation at Risk.”  The most memorable statement made by the authors of the publication, was the following:   “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war."

                The “Nation at Risk” report found that “students  were taking fewer basic academic courses and more fluffy electives (“Man and his machine”!!); there was less assignment of homework, more absenteeism and less thoughtful and critical reading.  Careful writing had apparently gone out of style.  Math, Science and Foreign Language enrollment was falling.  The Commission stated:  “In effect, we have a cafeteria-style curriculum in which the appetizers and desserts can easily be taken for the main courses.”          The Commission proposed a wide variety of remedies for the US K-12 educational system.  Amongst the recommendations were longer school days and years, more homework, higher expectations, and a greater focus on Math, Science, Foreign Language and Computers.   There were many other concerns delineated by the Commission, including the creation of high standards for each subject.

                In regard to developing US History standards, we move up to the early 1990s.  At that time, the Department of Education awarded grants to groups of teachers and scholars to develop voluntary national standards in history, as well as in the other major disciplines.  By 1994, the history group, led by UCLA historians, had developed a set of US and World History standards.  These standards did not go over well!  Lynne Cheney, Chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities, lambasted the standards for their left wing bias.  Cheney objected to the amount of times Joe McCarthy and the Ku Klux Klan were mentioned, whereas Paul Revere, Ulysses S Grant, Robert E. Lee, Thomas Edison and the Wright brothers were not mentioned at all.  Part of her concerns, therefore, seemed to be that the Standards focused on American failures, and not on American successes. 

                Cheney was not alone.  Rush Limbaugh felt the standards should be flushed down the toilet, and that’s essentially what the US Senate did in a 99-1 vote condemning the standards.  The lone dissenter wanted stronger language than condemnation.  The Clinton administration disowned the History standards, and in the mid 1990s, the movement to create national history standards was dead in the water.  However, legislation supported by the Clinton administration said that every state should develop its own history standards and develop its own tests, and other measures of accountability.

                In reality, it may be the case that there was, and is, no way for each of the 50 states to agree on national history content standards.  Would the Social Studies educators in Oklahoma want to cover Roger Williams to the extent Rhode Islanders would, and would RI teachers spend as much time teaching about the Cherokees?  Do Rhode Islanders want to learn as much about the Mormons as those from Utah?  Can you ever get Massachusetts and Texas to agree on the content of the wars with Mexico in the 1840s?                 

                So, bit by bit, states developed their own standards.  So, now RI has voluntary standards developed in the following disciplines:  Civics/Government (2008); RI History (2012); Geography (2012) and Economics (2012).  Dates of approval by RIDE are in parentheses.  As you can see, there are no US History standards.  In fact, that is also understandable.   Indeed, it may be impossible to get teachers in Massachusetts and Oklahoma to agree with each other, but it may also be impossible to get teachers in South Kingstown and Newport to agree with each other.   Can you get each of the RI Social Studies Departments to agree on what should be taught about Vietnam?  President Reagan’s “trickle down economics?”  Immigration from Guatemala, Colombia or the Dominican Republic?   One could argue that deciding what to cover in a US History course is a political decision, and there’s no way we have the same politics.  (This is interesting, but I’ll leave that for another post)

                The difficulty with having Geography, or Economics standards are that not every high school teaches those subjects.  What if we had a Regents test, a la New York, on Geography?  If your Social Studies department doesn’t offer a Geography course, then your kids wouldn’t have a chance.  Hence, the standards in these areas must be voluntary, and broad.  For example, one of the Civics and Government standards for high schoolers is:

“Students demonstrate an understanding of origins, forms, and purposes of government by comparing and contrasting different forms of government and their purposes.”   Pretty broad, eh!?  You can cover that standard in a World History course, a USH course, a Comparative Politics course and so on. 

                Diane Ravitch has significant concerns about this type of standard.  She states:   “A typical high school history standard says that ‘students will demonstrate an understanding of the chronology and concepts of history and identify and explain historical relationships’. ……………  Since these statements do not refer to any actual historical event, they do not require students to know any history.  They contain no historical content that students might analyze, debate, or reflect on.  Unfortunately, they are typical of most state standards in history.  The much- maligned, voluntary national history standards of 1994 (which Ravitch favored amending), by contrast, are intellectually challenging, because they expected students to discuss the causes of the American Revolution, the Great Depression, world wars, and other major events in US History.  Without specificity and clarity, standards are nothing more than vacuous verbiage.” 

                So, we are left with voluntary, broad content standards in a few subjects, which may or may not be taught at a given high school.  Now, however, we have Common Core standards, but not in History content.  Rather, they are in “Literacy in History/Social Studies.”    Therefore, Social Studies teachers must deal with standards like the following, for grade 11-12 students:

                1) Cite strong and thorough textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text, including determining where the text leaves matters uncertain.

                2) Analyze a case in which grasping point of view requires distinguishing what is directly stated in a text from what is really meant (e.g. satire, sarcasm, irony, or understatement)

                3) Produce clear and coherent writing in which the development, organization, and style are appropriate to task, purpose, and audience.

                I’m not objecting to any of these standards.  I’m just concerned that focus on these matters will crowd out significant portions of the actual historical content we have time to teach.  I suppose that’s where the “less is more” crowd says that the breadth of content is not as important as learning things like 1-3 above.  I have to admit that I have a cynical view of the “less is more crowd” whereby I wonder if all they know is a little bit of history, biology, algebra, etc. so that they don’t know what would be missing if the content was diluted by 50%.

(That’s a topic for a future post.  I have to work on saying those ideas delicately.)

                Here’s two final concerns that I’ll leave you with.  Even without content standards, some would argue that many of us do, indeed, conform to standards on a national level.  "In practice, there is a set of national standards in place because almost the entire nation is following the same curriculum using the same basic US and World History textbooks from a few large publishers." (Social Studies for the 21st Century, by Jack Zevin; 3rd Ed; 2011; pg 367)  More on that issue in another post.

                Secondly, since there is no upcoming History content test, and since there is now a much bigger focus on accountability, how are Social Studies teachers going to be evaluated.  If it’s on meeting the Common Core standards, then kiss the breadth of content away!  In order to keep your job, you will have to decimate the breadth of content you cover, and focus on the Common Core standards which do not promote breadth of content at all.