The amendment buried on Page 69 of the federal education budget for 2000 was easy to overlook. Tucked into “Repeals, Redesignation, and Amendments to Other Statutes” was a proposal by Sen. Robert C. Byrd to provide $50 million “to develop, implement and strengthen programs to teach American history … as a separate subject within school curricula.”
The speed of the amendment’s passage on June 30, 2000, caught most observers unawares. Department of Education officials scurried to set up shop, draft specs for grant proposals, establish due dates, post notices, solicit reviewers, and put into place procedures for the disbursement of funds. Few historians saw the windfall coming, especially those who remembered the thrashing they got in the 1990s when they tried to tinker with the nation’s curriculum. The ill-fated National Standards for United States History — a collaboration among professional historians, curriculum specialists, teachers, and staff developers — hemorrhaged on the Senate floor before its death in a 99-1 censure (the lone dissenter fuming that the rebuke was insufficiently harsh).
But on this June day, history found its superhero. Senator Byrd, Democrat of West Virginia, commanded respect as one of the longest-ranking members of Congress. He was admired for his stately manner, encyclopedic knowledge of Greek and Roman history, and his habit of drawing a folded copy of the Constitution from his breast pocket to remind fellow senators of their sworn duty. Byrd believed that the teaching of history was in crisis, that the “civic glue” that bound the strands of a polyglot mix into a single people was losing its power. He noted that only 22 percent of seniors at America’s colleges could identify the line “government of the people, by the people, for the people” as part of the Gettysburg Address. Colleges and universities were shirking their responsibility: America’s most prestigious institutions “no longer require the study of any form of history.” Sen. Joseph Lieberman, a Connecticut Democrat, backed him up with numbers just as bleak: 81 percent of college seniors “received a grade of D or F on history questions drawn from a basic high-school examination.”
The history program was based on a survey designed to make students look dumb.
What Byrd and Lieberman didn’t mention was that American students had never been the sharpest at answering decontextualized test questions. In 1917, in the first large-scale test of historical facts, Texas high-school students conflated Thomas Jefferson with Jefferson Davis, yanked the Articles of Confederation from the 18th century and plunked them down in the middle of the Confederacy, and stared with bafflement at 1846, the beginning of the Mexican-American War, unaware of its significance in Texas history. “Surely a grade of 33 in 100 on the simplest and most obvious facts of American history,” the testers admonished, “is not a record in which any high school can take great pride.” A 1942 test of 7,000 college students, designed by Columbia University’s Allan Nevins and administered by The New York Times, found students “all too ignorant of American history,” a finding recycled in 1976 just in time to pour down on the bicentennial parade: “Times Test Shows Knowledge of American History Limited.” Subsequent test administrations in 1987, 1994, and 2006 of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP, the “Nation’s Report Card”) showed scant improvement.
One has to wonder, then, what mix of pollen was in the air that made Byrd, Lieberman, and other senators wake up one day and fret that American memory was disintegrating. The senators, it turned out, had all read the same document, or at least its press release: Losing America’s Memory: Historical Illiteracy in the 21st Century, a report of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), an organization that Lieberman characterized as a “nonprofit group dedicated to the pursuit of academic freedom.”
ACTA guards academic freedom the way foxes guard chicken coops. With the financial backing of foundations like Bradley and Olin, the council specializes in making headlines with reports such as Defending Civilization: How Our Universities Are Failing America and What Can Be Done About It. To measure civic memory, ACTA commissioned the Center for Survey Research and Analysis, at the University of Connecticut, to create a 34-item multiple-choice test about American history. Respondents had to identify the Missouri Compromise (legislation that admitted Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state), name the court case associated with John Marshall (Marbury v. Madison, in which the chief justice held that the Constitution did not grant the Supreme Court the right to issue writs of mandamus, effectively establishing the precedent of judicial review), and name the father of the Constitution (not Jefferson, chosen by 53 percent of respondents, but James Madison, identified by less than a quarter).
ACTA designed its survey to make students look dumb. The strategy worked. Archly sprinkled among its questions were items on popular culture (Were Beavis and Butt-Head cartoon characters or “fictional soldiers”? Was Snoop Dogg a rapper or a “jazz singer”?) that testers knew would be a cinch for any self-respecting college kid. Ninety-nine percent of students aced Beavis and Butt-Head; only a third pinned Marshall to Marbury. Nor were the 556 respondents your garden-variety undergraduates. ACTA went out of its way to bag seniors at top colleges and universities — including Harvard, Amherst, and Swarthmore — with the heftiest price tags and the most liberal faculties.
Even before the first dollars were disbursed, this model of professional development was deeply suspect.
By the beginning of the new millennium, testing the young on historical facts had become a yearly ritual, a blip on the news feed gone as soon as it appeared. But Losing America’s Memory seized the attention not only of Senators Byrd and Lieberman, but also of Sen. Edward Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, and Sen. Slade Gorton, Republican of Washington. The report spurred Congress to make the biggest federal commitment to history education — more than one billion dollars — in the annals of the Republic. How come?
For the launch of Losing America’s Memory, ACTA recruited some of the history profession’s biggest names, including Gordon S. Wood and John Patrick Diggins, and solicited written statements of support from luminaries like the best-selling author David McCullough. More events than available slots compete each day for space on lawmakers’ packed schedules. How, then, did a news conference assailing college students’ failure to tie John Marshall to William Marbury climb its way to the top? Hard to know for sure, but accompanying Lieberman and Gorton to the event was a colleague from the House of Representatives, Tom Petri, a Republican from Wisconsin’s Sixth District. It couldn’t have hurt that Petri had a special relationship with the lead author of Losing America’s Memory, Anne D. Neal. She was his wife.
ACTA’s target, and the original target of Byrd’s program, was the lax history requirements at the nation’s colleges. Byrd called on trustees to “review public college and university curricula in their states and promote requirements in United States history.”
The senator had to know that the kind of history he championed — the portrayal of America as a “wonderful, glorious experiment in representative democracy” — wouldn’t go down easily with many professors. So he found a more tractable target: schoolteachers. Byrd redirected his criticism at the teaching of “‘multicultural’ social studies,” which “shortchanges our young people who will someday be the leaders of our nation.” Nothing but a return to teaching “traditional American history” in our nation’s schools would avert a crisis of civic memory. Even though the use of “traditional” and the baggage it carried didn’t sit well with college history departments, they ended up embracing it, and enriching themselves, with the teacher-training programs that resulted. Today, when Americans are bombarded by misinformation and propaganda, the missed opportunity to teach students the skills of historical analysis and interpretation is especially glaring.
Accustomed to being passed over in funding priorities, historians were initially slow to see the windfall headed their way. When the program was announced, Arnita Jones, then director of the American Historical Association, objected that university-based historians were barred from applying for the Teaching American History (TAH) dollars, their role confined to “content providers.” Jones grumbled that program guidelines offered “no provisions for projects to be initiated or financed through colleges, universities, historical societies, or other such institutions.” Because of this restriction, content-allergic schools, she feared, might do an end run around historical knowledge and focus on lesser goals, such as “teaching strategies or curriculum development.”
The steady flow of TAH grant funds, however, had a way of greasing squeaky wheels. TAH dollars plied historians with handsome summer salaries and pumped new life into moribund M.A. programs, their seats now filled with schoolteachers holding tuition waivers courtesy of the program. Historian dream teams barnstormed the land. In one rural Wisconsin project, teachers hosted the likes of Gary Nash, Eric Foner, and Mary Beth Norton in hamlets like Bayfield (population 578) and Washburn (population 2,280). Amid the rushing stream of green, historians’ ambivalence toward TAH morphed into boosterism. Arnita Jones, who in 2002 objected to TAH’s funding guidelines, exhorted America’s schoolteachers in 2009 to write their representatives, letting them know that “TAH grants are making a difference and should continue.”
In the first two years of TAH, the Department of Education doled out 174 grants to local school districts. At the end of the program’s second year, the Department of Education contracted with SRI International, a nonprofit research firm headquartered in Menlo Park, Calif., to evaluate what this $150-million investment had bought. SRI evaluators reviewed project proposals and work plans, interviewed program directors, surveyed teacher participants, and conducted eight case studies of individual programs. The range of projects they reviewed gave new meaning to “eclectic.” Some projects were informed by guidelines set by the Bradley Commission on History in Schools, funded by the conservative Bradley Foundation; others drew on Howard Gardner’s multiple-intelligence theory, which encouraged teachers to exploit the full range of students’ intelligences, including “kinaesthetic,” “visual-spatial,” and “naturalistic.” Still others used a curriculum called History Alive!, produced by the Teachers’ Curriculum Institute, to promote “experiential learning,” which involved having students crouch under their desks as they viewed slides of World War I battles in order to “empathize with the physical discomforts of trench warfare.”
SRI found that the assessment instrument of choice for teacher learning was also the least reliable: More than 90 percent of projects relied on teachers’ self-reports. Although the original legislation specified that activities with teachers should be linked to student achievement, fewer than half the projects tried to forge that link; those that did relied on teachers’ subjective reports rather than studies by outside evaluators. In a conclusion that excelled in understatement, evaluators wrote that “overall, the projects’ efforts to assess students’ or teachers’ knowledge of American history did not appear to be systematic.”
Summer institutes were the activity of choice in three-quarters of the projects. Teachers convened in bucolic settings to listen to “content providers” (typically historians from the local college or historical society) deliver lectures. Scintillating or boring, the underlying logic was the same. Teachers were expected to return to classrooms with knowledge that they would then impart to 12- and 13-year-olds. Students would, presumably, go on to score higher on standardized tests.
The teaching program benefited those who needed help the least: professional historians.
Even before the first dollars were disbursed, this model of professional development — putting knowledge into the heads of teachers who would put it into the heads of students — was deeply suspect. Research on professional development had shown that teachers needed classroom-based support throughout the school year to try out ways of teaching they may not have experienced as learners. Although new content knowledge was necessary, it alone could not be expected to make a dent in classroom practice; what works in a college seminar can hardly be expected to go swimmingly with squirmy seventh-graders. Yet classroom-based follow-up was rare; less than one-third of teachers reported being visited by anyone during the ensuing year.
To measure what teachers learned, SRI evaluators analyzed teachers’ lesson plans. These materials were scored using a three-point “historical analysis and interpretation” scale: the ability to render “insightful accounts of the past,” establish “cause-effect relationships,” and weigh “evidence to draw sound conclusions.” Scores languished between 1.5 and 1.7. Most lessons “did not demonstrate an understanding of key higher-level historical concepts and thinking skills.”
Laura Westhoff, an associate professor of history and education at the University of Missouri at St. Louis, reached similar conclusions after examining lesson plans submitted by teachers from a project in that city. The plans focused on the 1848 Declaration of Sentiments from the Seneca Falls Convention. Radical in tone, the document drew inspiration from the fiery language of the Declaration of Independence. But instead of lobbing grievances at a British monarch, fury was aimed at patriarchy itself. Examining teachers’ plans, Westhoff found that the Declaration of Sentiments played a role not unlike the textbook: supplying information for students to inscribe in their notebooks. Students were instructed to copy the grievances and then rewrite them from the viewpoint of “students’ rights, gay rights, African-American rights, illegal immigrants’ rights, etc.” The primary source from 1848 was neither analyzed nor mined for the light it shed on a bygone era; its role was to provide “information.” The lessons, in Westhoff ’s estimation, foreclosed “deeper understanding of the movement or the convention” and left teachers “without a basis on which to adequately evaluate students’ historical thinking.” Instead of opening a window to the past, the assignment bolted it shut.
From the start, the Teaching American History program never suffered from a shortage of anecdotes about invigorated teachers and engaged historians. But hard evidence that it had any effect on student achievement was nowhere to be found. Aware of this Achilles’ heel, the Department of Education made a crucial pivot on its 2003 grant specifications. New money would be given to initiatives that used a scientific treatment/control design in which “students in experimental and quasi-experimental studies of educational effectiveness in Teaching American History projects will demonstrate higher achievement on course content measures and/or statewide U.S. history assessments than students in control and comparison groups.”
With this focus on rigor, the department commissioned a second evaluation, turning to Berkeley Policy Associates (BPA), a well-regarded firm in Oakland, Calif. BPA chose to study projects that promised reliable data on student learning. But such promises proved easier to make than keep. Of nine projects selected, only one succeeded in randomly assigning students to a treatment or a control group; none were able to “recruit and retain sufficient numbers of teachers to support the original [research] designs.” Projects that set lofty goals like teaching historical interpretation lacked reliable measures to assess it. The “capacity to generate statistically reliable findings regarding impact on student achievement,” BPA evaluators concluded, “is limited due to small sample sizes and lack of control group.”
By 2007, TAH was in trouble. Department of Education officials knew they had to come up with something tangible to show that it had an effect. SRI and Berkeley Policy Associates teamed up in what would become the program’s most extensive evaluation. The plan radiated optimism. Researchers hoped to identify practices associated with gains in teacher knowledge and student achievement, establish a connection between school districts that participated in TAH and students’ scores on state and national tests, and compile a “meta-analysis” of successful projects in order to distill practices associated with positive results.
High hopes were quickly dashed. The meta-analysis had to be abandoned because “the great majority of evaluation reports either did not analyze student achievement outcomes, lacked controlled designs or did not provide detailed information about the sample, design and statistical effects.” Wobbly self-reports remained the instrument of choice for the majority of projects. Evaluators couldn’t even determine what distinguished successful from less successful projects: “Ultimately, no patterns in practices were identified that could clearly distinguish ‘high performing’ and ‘typically performing’ sites.” With more than 1,000 grants disbursed across 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico, and a truckload of reports sent back to the Department of Education, the only conclusive statement that could be made about this gargantuan investment in history teaching was that the evidence was “not sufficient to analyze the effects of TAH on student achievement.”
Cary D. Wintz, a historian at Texas Southern University, had been involved in the teaching program from its inception. From 2001 to 2006, he judged proposals, giving him a “firsthand look at the program, the evolution of the program as well as the evolution of the reviewing process.” Taking stock in 2009, he, too, concluded that the “impact on student learning is not clearly documented.” But at the same time, Wintz was downright bubbly about whom the program had benefited: “The quantity of money and the number of grants awarded has had a significant impact on historians and history departments.” Little did Robert Byrd dream that a program created to raise the knowledge of schoolteachers and their charges would end up benefiting those who needed that help the least: professional historians.
Looking back, it’s appalling how little thought was given to the design of TAH projects. The typical session suffered from a division of labor that belied the realities of schoolteaching. Historians lectured in the morning, while teachers, working among themselves, planned lessons and units of instruction in the afternoon. Dana L. Carmichael, a project director in Minnesota, put her finger on this built-in defect: “Historians (whether local or national) providing ‘content sessions’ rarely take the time to find out what teachers will be learning in the ‘pedagogy’ sessions,” which often left teachers to integrate content and pedagogy on their own, resulting in “fragmented learning.”
Few historians possessed the expertise to guide teachers in selecting documents that helped teenagers see the same event in a different light; few had training in modeling the intellectual moves that propel 15- and 16-year-olds beyond simplistic either/or answers without overwhelming them or leading them to believe that everything’s up for grabs. Few historians were equipped to remedy the gaps in background knowledge found in a single classroom that included students who had recently immigrated from El Salvador and Guatemala and were just learning English, others who lagged years behind in reading level, and still others who were ready to assume the rigors of college-level work.
Even fewer historians were in a position to help teachers grapple with new forms of assessment that provide reliable information about whether kids are actually “getting it.” By their own admission, historians, as Anne F. Hyde, winner of the prestigious Bancroft Prize, quipped in a 2016 essay, “suck at assessment.” Despite sonorous rhetoric about the importance of teaching with original sources, a 2005 study found that in a third of college history classes, only one book — the textbook — appeared on the syllabus, and that two-thirds of final grades depended on a single multiple-choice exam.
Peter Knupfer, a historian at Michigan State University, dubbed sessions in which historians dusted off old lectures for TAH audiences the “Dalai Lama approach,” in which teachers “sit at the foot of the master in a summer institute.” From the start, however, it was clear that the master was not always showered with rose petals. The same year SRI issued its first evaluation, a second report appeared in the newsletter of the Organization of American Historians. Brian Gratton, a history professor at Arizona State University, and his team of graduate students randomly sampled 59 TAH grants. They found “repeated complaints that professors were not able to adapt content to grade level, integrate state standards, or contemplate teachers’ classroom needs. As one director put it, ‘They do not know about teaching kids.’ "
No doubt many teachers were invigorated by contact with the leading lights of the historical profession and benefited from their collaboration with professional historians. But taxpayers don’t invest millions in professional development to make teachers (or, for that matter, historians) happy, although happiness is surely a terrific byproduct. We invest in teachers so that they will be more effective with kids. If that doesn’t happen, the other benefits of professional development are for naught. On this account, the $1-billion investment in Teaching American History must be considered a failure of catastrophic proportions.
Yet many teachers recall the program with fondness. Across its life span, teachers consistently gave it high marks, concurring with statements that TAH was “the best in-service I’ve ever had.” Strolling leafy college campuses, being treated with respect as professionals, dining on a boxed lunch of a roasted-vegetable sandwich hugged by a shrink-wrapped brownie — what’s not to like? TAH dollars provided a bounty of resources that teachers could bring back to the classroom: free books, “oversized historical photos and primary source kits,” and, in many cases, new interpretations and insights to spruce up outdated, textbook-driven lessons.
Some projects afforded teachers the chance to earn M.A. degrees, which translated into real money on school-district salary scales. In TAH’s waning days, when the bench of volunteers was running thin, and project directors had to shake trees to fill seats, some dangled incentives like free laptops and expense-paid trips to Philadelphia and Washington. In such projects, where costs could run as much as $30,000 per participant, project directors were forced to ask whether “grant monies could have been used for other purposes with a more direct impact on teaching practice and student performance.” At $30,000 a head, one can only hope this was a rhetorical question.
On June 28, 2010, Senator Byrd died at 92. Sixteen months later, this statement appeared on the Department of Education website: “Funding for the Teaching American History (TAH) program was not included in the FY 2012 budget.” Already hobbled and now orphaned, TAH expired with barely a whimper.
Catholics enumerate seven cardinal sins, including TAH’s greatest: the sin of gluttony. The program consumed much and left little. While stacks of reports were sent to Washington that boasted of stupendous successes (thus committing another mortal sin: pride), almost all failed the sniff test when examined by independent evaluators.
If timidity were a mortal sin, the Department of Education would certainly have to serve penance. Rather than earmarking funds to develop assessments that could be used for cross-project comparisons, the department treated each project on its own, wasting untold resources in fruitless attempts to reinvent the wheel. Worse still, department officials ignored advice given to them back in 2002 at a meeting that included the executive directors of the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, and the National Council for the Social Studies. This gathering (and another, held two months later) called on the Department of Education to abandon bubble tests in favor of assessments that examine “student understanding of historical thinking and important, in-depth, contextualized subject matter rather than discrete historical ‘facts.’” While leaders of individual projects may have heeded this advice, it never influenced the program as a whole. When evaluators in 2011 submitted their recommendations at the end of their report, the department was, yet again, urged to create tools that “could contribute both to stronger local evaluations and to potential comparisons between projects.” This suggestion came too late for TAH.
By 2015, with TAH a distant memory, Stacia Kuceyeski, a historian with the Ohio History Connection, a statewide organization, wistfully recalled a time when her organization partnered in 22 TAH grants, and money flowed like water over Brandywine Falls. “Many of us at history museums and departments of history,” she blogged, “were like Scrooge McDuck, sliding around giant piles of sweet [federal] money that was especially designated for American history. How Amazing!” But with the party over, she and fellow historians were left with a “massive hangover, the likes of which can’t be helped with three Advil and a bunch of Gatorade.”
The history profession sure got plastered on TAH dollars. The billion-dollar bash lasted for a decade. But with sobriety comes a reckoning — in the words of the Twelve Steps, “a searching and fearless moral inventory.” We’re still waiting.
Sam Wineburg is a professor of education and, by courtesy, history at Stanford University. His book Why Learn History (When It Is Already on Your Phone), from which this essay was adapted, is out this month from the University of Chicago Press.
