The Stealth Curriculum: Manipulating America's History Teachers
April 13, 2004
Contents
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Foreword
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PDF version )
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Introduction
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Part I. Supplemental Curricula
(PDF version )
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Part II. Professional Development
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Conclusions and Recommendations
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Appendix A
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Appendix B
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Appendix C
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Endnotes
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Foreword
PDF version
by
If American teachers of history were broadly educated and deeply knowledgeable about the subjects for which they're responsible in the classroom, and if they were free to draw their information, textbooks, and other instructional materials from whatever sources they judge best, all within a framework of sound academic standards and results-based accountabilityunder that dreamy set of circumstances, this report would not be necessary.
The sad reality, however, is that many of our history teachers don't know enough history. To make matters worse, the textbooks on which they typically depend are vast yet surprisingly shabby compendia of dull, dated, and denatured information. (See A Consumer's Guide to High School History Textbooks, www.edexcellence.net/institute, for independent reviews of the most widely used texts and to see some examples of their shortcomings.) Thus, those teachers that seek to use their textbooks as a crutch to help fill the gaps in their own knowledge are not doing right by their students.
This reality has led to the development of an immense cottage industry in our primary-secondary education system, one designed to supply history and social studies teachers with pre-digested "supplemental materials" and "professional development," ostensibly to help remediate teachers who do not have sufficient historical knowledge or suitable instructional materials.
As with just about everything else that ends up going awry in American education, this enterprise began with the best of intentions. In the aftermath of September 11, for example, how could we reasonably expect teachers who had never studied Islamic history to explain Islam to their pupils, especially if their textbooks were devoid of pertinent information? How could we expect them to handle complicated and emotionally charged subjects like the Holocaust and figure out what lessons to learn from it? To escort youngsters safely through the thicket of political correctness and ethnic politics that now surrounds such formerly benign holidays as Columbus Day and Thanksgiving? We simply assume that they need help.
In a perfect world, they wouldn't. In our dreams, history teachers possess enough general historical knowledge that they would start with solid scaffolding by which tough and contentious topics could be scaled. They'd be adept at acquiring whatever additional knowledge they needed to address a new issue, and would have both the freedom and the resources (time, money, internet access, libraries, etc.) to obtain any materials, or take additional history courses that they judged necessary for their own edification or for their classroom use. (This would be true for all teachers, but history is the subject most apt to twist and turn in unexpected ways in the months after a textbook was published, since a teacher finished her own formal training, or even during a single school year.)
But few
And so we try to compensate and backfill. Innumerable organizations and agencies, public and private, large and small, commercial and non-profit, are engaged in the creation and delivery of "supplemental" instructional materials and "in-service education" or "professional development" for teachers. School systems and state education agencies do this. So do publishers of books, magazines, and newspapers. Advocacy groups. Universities, research centers, and think-tanks. Itinerant teacher trainers. Cable networks and film producers. It's a long list. It occupies a lot of people and spends a lot of money. (So far as I can tell, nobody has a clue how much, but it's obviously many tens of millions per annum.) Some is subsidized by tax dollars or philanthropy. Some is baldly commercial. Much comes out of school system budgets.
Charting a
This part of K-12 education rarely gets examined or evaluated. We know staggeringly little about how good these materials and workshops arehow accurate they are, whether the information they present is balanced and accurate. We know even less about the efficacy, value, or intellectual integrity of innumerable workshops, institutes, and training programs in which teachers participate. To be sure, funders may demand that their grantees arrange for some sort of evaluation. Purchasers may ask for evidence. But what they usually get is less than they need: "evidence" of quality and effectiveness generated either by the suppliers themselves or by evaluators trying to assure school administrators that they got their money's worth. Be not misled. The truth is that this is a vast dark continent within our public (and private) education system.
The Thomas B. Fordham Foundation tries to identify such troublesome gaps in our understanding of K-12 education and make efforts to begin to fill them. This time, however, we deserve no credit for perspicacity. Instead, Sandra Stotsky alerted us to a problem that she had spotted during her tenure as senior associate commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Education from 1999 to 2003, as well as during a long and distinguished career as analyst and participant in the development of academic standards, research into educational effectiveness, and the preparation of teachers. Stotsky had long been collecting examples of supplemental materials and professional development workshops aimed at K-12 history and social studies teachers because so much of what she had observed in these areas was deeply troubling.
It appeared that the creation and dissemination of these materials, often through professional development institutes and in-service programs, had fallen into the eager hands of interest groups and ideologues yearning to use
In the heart of this dark continent, Dr. Stotsky had found what appeared to be an alien civilizationalien to mainstream American values, alien to the carefully developed academic standards that some states and communities are crafting for their schools, and alien to the licensure requirements, tests, and evaluations by which the U.S. is increasingly trying to assure that our schoolteachers are qualified for their solemn responsibilities.
It so happened that Stotsky's message of alarm dovetailed with our own mounting concern over the slipshod content of the K-12 social studies curriculum, particularly with respect to history; with our dismay over the messages that many prominent education groups had sent to teachers concerning how to explain the 9/11 terrorist attacks; and with the stir caused by publication of Diane Ravitch's brilliant book, The Language Police. Ravitch pointed to the many ways that interest-group politics, political correctness, and hypersensitivity to "bias" had turned textbookseven test questionsinto bland (if colorful) and boring (yet encyclopedic) assemblages of information, information that tried to tell everything but ended up telling the story of nothing in particular and coming to no conclusion. Stotsky, by contrast, seemed to have uncovered the reverse phenomenon: instructional materials and professional development that, because they fly under the radar, are free to promulgate bias, misinformation, and politically charged conclusions, though never acknowledging their semi-covert agendas.
Would she write about this, we asked. Yes, she would, despite myriad other professional commitments and family responsibilities. We agreed from the outset, however, that this would be an exploratory review, based largely on the examples that had already made their way into her "collection," rather than a comprehensive study. There is, in fact, no way that we can imagine anyone tackling this topic in comprehensive fashion, at least not without a huge investment of time and research assistance. Even then, it would be almost impossible to know what percentage of the totality of supplemental resources was actually included in the review, since new resources are constantly surfacing in reaction to myriad political, social, and historic events. So ill-mapped is this continent that one doesn't even know its full dimensions, much less what roads or rivers will carry one across it.
And so she did. This is one provocative report, grounded in textual analysis and accompanied by as much empirical evidence as its expert author could collect. Passionate, yes, but also deeply informed by Stotsky's profound understanding of curriculum and instruction. Selective, yes, but so is every worthwhile review of anything from restaurants to movies to automobiles.
What Exploration Reveals
Stotsky separated this continent into two parts, one dealing with supplemental materials, the other with professional development workshops, which are the most frequent vehicle for dissemination of these supplemental materials. And she found plenty to lament in both areas.
The semi-covert agenda varies, of course, by topic and group. But most of its specimens share these features: under the guise of heightening teachers' and students' awareness of previously marginalized groups, they manipulate teachers (and, thus, their pupils) to view the history of freedom as the history of oppression and to be more sympathetic to cultures that don't value individual rights than to those that do.
But Stotsky doesn't just wring her hands or throw brickbats. She also distills from this material a wealth of recommendations, which come in two categories. Her preferred course of action is to wipe out much of this "supplemental" stuff and replace it with something very different. Her "fallback" recommendations address ways of mitigating the problems if this enterprise persists.
I respect these proposals and believe they would do much good in the near and middle term as far as compensating for weaknesses in the knowledge base of today's teachers and better shielding them from manipulative mischief and the risk of becoming unwitting pawns of ideologues and interest groups. Over the long haul, however, we must insist that future teachers be vastly better educated in the first place or, as the No Child Left Behind Act puts it, "highly qualified" in the subjects they are responsible for imparting to children. Nowhere is that clearer or more important than in history and social studies.
Better-educated teachers ought not be equated with more time in ed school, though, maybe not even on the university campus (although well-conceived history courses taught by first-rate historians are hard to beat). People can also teach themselves history, pick it up from their reading, the History Channel, even movies. The key is to insist that, however they learn it, tomorrow's teachers must know itand demonstrate thisbefore confronting children in the classroom. It may be sufficient to insist that they pass rigorous tests of subject matter knowledge, such as those being prepared by the American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence. They can prepare for those examinations however they like, on campus or off.
As with the children themselves, let's stop endlessly forgiving and compensating and remediating teachers. Let's do it right the first time. Our thanks to Sandra Stotsky for undertaking and executing this study. An eminent authority on English language education, former senior associate commissioner in charge of the Center for Teaching and Learning at the Massachusetts Department of Education and co-director of a "We The People" summer institute, co-sponsored by the Lincoln and Therese Filene Foundation and the Center for Civic Education, she is now a research scholar in the school of education at Northeastern University. My thanks, as well, to Kathleen Porter, a former history teacher herself and now Fordham's associate director of research; to Emilia Ryan for deftly designing this report; and to my long-time colleague (and Fordham trustee) Diane Ravitch, whose clear thinking and resolute dedication to better history teaching inspire and inform so much of our work.
This is the fifth in a series of reports published by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and Institute as part of Back to Basics: Reclaiming Social Studies, which aims to revitalize the subject with renewed focus on serious content, high standards, effective teaching and sound instructional materials. The first two, Where did Social Studies go Wrong? and Terrorists, Despots and Democracy: What Our Children Need to Know, identified shortcomings in social studies and provided suggestions for teachers. The third, Effective State Standards for U.S. History: A 2003 Report Card, evaluated state academic standards for their treatment of
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President
April 2004