Teaching History Well is the Answer
Carol Berkin, Historian
The problem with NCLB is the tests themselves—and the pressure to teach history as dates, names, and random factoids. NCLB did not create this problem, though surely it has exacerbated it. The raison d'etre of our professional organizations should be to ameliorate this problem. As historians, we should have more confidence that we can have an impact on history teaching without the crutch of NCLB. But we have caved in, eager to turn over the problem to someone else. What good will more time spent on history be if it serves bubble test preparation or if the well meaning teacher remains isolated from new scholarship and new teaching techniques?
I do dozens of TAH grant workshops each year, and the teachers who walk out of these sessions often write me to say that the program renewed their enthusiasm for teaching not just history but all their subjects. Workshops like these are what OAH and NCSS and AHA should have been financing and organizing themselves for the past several decades. And they should be generating them now—adding to what the Teaching American History budget makes possible.
Historians should be offering assistance to teachers, going into classrooms and talking to students—setting up systems that allow us to provide expertise and guidance via chatrooms and other Web-based technologies. We should listen to teachers and provide them with what they want and need. We should write books for elementary school students and high school students, or at least be willing to collaborate on them. We should be putting out literature on how to use historical materials in reading classes and math classes. We should design curriculum that shows how to do this effectively, drawing on the new scholarship that shows how students best learn history. Let me add that we should be organizing sessions at our conventions at which history education and history scholars talk seriously about what this research shows, how we can apply it ourselves, and how we can help teachers apply it.
I do not believe that the addition of history to NCLB will raise scores on history bubble tests—but it will surely increase the number of bubble tests. More students than ever before will identify history as facts and dates and steer clear of it in college; academics will throw up their hands and declare students and teachers incorrigible. Testing has never been a solution to the problems of American education. This current example will be no exception.
