Sunday, September 28, 2003

By Lori Shontz, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

An F in social studies? For Pennsylvania? Vaughn Dailey, a social studies teacher at Peters Township Middle School, couldn't believe it.

"That's particularly tragic," he said, "for the birthplace of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution."

But according to a report released this week by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, Pennsylvania's standards for how to teach U.S. history to pupils in kindergarten through 12th grade are so disorganized and convoluted that they are little more than "a particularly ineffectual version of 'Trivial Pursuit.' "

Pennsylvania isn't alone. Twenty-two other states failed, and the author of the report, historian Sheldon M. Stern, formerly of the John F. Kennedy Memorial Library, wrote that standards for teaching American history didn't emphasize chronology, ignored political history and forgot to tell the stories of real people.

Which makes history so dry, Stern wrote, that "for many young people, declaring 'he's history' is the ultimate put-down, because it consigns 'him' to a past that seems entirely disconnected from their lives."

Dailey, winner of many national teaching awards, finds it incredible that for some students, history doesn't come alive.

"Oh, that's so easy," he said. "You get the kids involved. You do re-enactments. You role-play, have the kids get out of their seats. ... If you're sitting in a classroom, watching videotapes or just taking notes, you're losing it. You're not going to maintain the kids' interest."

According to the study, that commitment doesn't happen often enough in American schools.

In the report's introduction, Chester E. Finn Jr. writes that too many history teachers have never actually studied history, that states don't hold teachers accountable to the existing standards and that the No Child Left Behind legislation could cause American history to be neglected because the act focuses on reading, math and science.

"The study of American history has a vital civic mission," Finn wrote. "For young citizens to understand the political, social and economic dimensions of their world and America's relationship to other nations, it is imperative to grasp the main lines of U.S. history."

Few social studies teachers dispute such a statement. But many aren't ready to agree with the report's conclusions, which provide some insight into the debate over how best to tailor the entire social studies curriculum.

As defined by standards set nearly 100 years ago, social studies includes seven disciplines -- history, government or political science, civics, economics, geography, anthropology and psychology. A teacher certified to teach social studies could have concentrated on any one of those seven areas.

"That's one criticism of social studies -- that we've muddied the field," said Peter DiNardo, a social studies teacher at Mt. Lebanon High School. "That's a dilemma."

The report expresses concern about the qualifications of history teachers, noting that many of them studied one of the other six components of social studies. Some education programs focus on teaching students how to teach, without always focusing on content.

Cathy Gorn, executive director of National History Day, said she was once on a search committee for a school of education looking to hire a social studies method teacher and was shocked to see that on the list of criteria, "knowledge of discipline" was last.

"I was floored. I said, 'Wait a minute. This person is going to teach young people to do this?' They told me they were going to teach them how to teach. But it's different. It's a real tension in schools of education," she said.

David Berman, who coordinates the social studies program for the University of Pittsburgh's School of Education, said most of the students who are admitted to the university's master of arts and teaching program for social studies, which requires that students have a degree in a content area, majored in history. Pitt's education program is five years long, not four.

"The reality is that they recognize that social studies in the schools is by and large the study of history," he said. "It's the most popular of the social sciences."

Equally controversial are standards, which can turn into political minefields. History standards, some say, can be particularly tricky because, unlike, say, mathematics, there is not always a 100 percent correct answer.

Additionally, according to the report, some standards smack of "presentism," in which the actions of historical figures are judged and understood not in the context of their time, but our own. Stern singled out a Massachusetts high school that marked the 500th anniversary of Columbus sailing to the New World by holding a mock trial and convicting him of genocide, rather than simply acknowledging that for the natives of the Americas, Columbus' visit was disastrous.

And by necessity, the standards tend to stick to the basics. Pennsylvania's standards for U.S. history, for example, provide a list of significant people whom students should be able to identify in third, sixth, ninth and 12th grades, along with examples of historic places and primary documents.

Many think that doesn't get to the heart of what's important about history.

"There's nothing meaningful about knowing the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776," Gorn said. "It's fine if you know it, but if you don't know what it's about, and in particular if you don't know what the legacy is about ... it's not just a yellow piece of paper."

DiNardo said that simply evaluating the standards wasn't enough. "They're presuming that's all that's taught in the classroom," he said. "To study the classroom may be a better barometer than the standards. Also, the book would be 6,000 pages long if it had every item they wanted."

Other criticisms in the report were specific to Pennsylvania.

The sequence of the standards means that Colonial history is studied only in elementary school and that students are never introduced to the United States post-1890 until the 10th grade. And U.S. history is divided into 20 categories, including "Political Leaders," "Innovators and Reformers," and "Social Organization," something the report contends fails to teach students the connections between events.

But in the best classrooms, such as Dailey's and those of his colleagues at Peters Township Middle School, history comes alive.

For instance, each of the eighth-graders whose National History Day project on the Stamp Act won second place nationally could tell a different story of a day last year in class when the past became real.

And for Brett Ekberg, it was when the class re-enacted the Army's difficult winter at Valley Forge last winter. His homemade tent kept collapsing, forcing him and his tent mates to hold it up with their bodies as they did their assignment -- writing to their parents about the encampment's hardships.

For Jordan Klaja, it was the song about Thomas Jefferson, "The Jefferson Litany," which begins, "Third president, 1801 to 1809. Virginia. Monticello. Writer of the Declaration of Independence. We hold these truths to be self-evident." A year later, he and his friends remember all of the words.

Grant Burkhardt can still visualize the death of George Washington, starring his classmates, and recount how everyone in the class gargled the same medicine Washington did -- butter, molasses and vinegar.

Those are the kind of activities the National History Day program advocates.

"The whole premise is that we're trying to help teachers get away from the textbooks," Gorn said. "Not that they're bad things. They're a fine place to start. But you should get the kids engaged in looking at primary documents. The teachers have to change the way they teach class [and must] incorporate into regular classroom lessons how to look at documents -- to think critically and ask questions, to study the past, not to memorize it.

"It's teaching kids to think differently and think critically about what they learn in history class and how it's relevant to society today."

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