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The Ugly, the Bad, and the Good in the National History Standards Controversy
Ross E. Dunn
San Diego State University, California
| THIS MOVIE TITLE BACKWARDS has nothing to do with my professional relationship with Gary Nash. That has all been good. I have appropriated from Clint Eastwood's film simply to organize a few remarks on my experience working with Gary on the project to develop the U.S. national standards for history back in the mid 1990s. |
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I remember a day in the fall of 1994, when a reporter from the Los Angeles Times came to the office of the National Center for History in the Schools at UCLA to interview a few of us about the public media controversy over the national standards, which had just appeared. The reporter asked me to speak to the issues, but my remarks were abstract, windy, and way too qualified. I had no good sound bites for him, which is what he wanted. Kind man that he was, he stopped the interview and offered to give me some tips on how to produce sound bites. I tried to do it but without much success. |
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Gary was better at media interviews than I was, and he carried by far the heaviest burden of communicating with the public about the standards controversy. But none of us was a sound bite master of the caliber of Lynne Cheney, the ex-head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, who led the assault on the new guidelines. I warmly admired her media technique, even though most of her sound bites were not true. Her best trick, I learned, was to identify a promising "hot button" criticism of the standards, then repeat it over and over in interviews, in the press, and on talk shows. My favorite was her endless repetition of the charge that the standards for United States History never mentioned the Constitution. This was nonsense, of course, and the basis of her claim was simply that the word "constitution" did not appear in the particular standard heading that introduced that subject. |
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Sound bites are a powerful political tool, and it did not take us long to realize that the attacks on the standards initiated by Cheney and the ultra-conservative media were entirely political. This is the Ugly part of the controversy. The campaign to discredit the guidelines had almost nothing to do in any genuine way with the quality of history education in the United States and nearly everything to do with the Congressional elections of November 1994. |
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The public media rhetoric, both supporting and denouncing the standards, was all about teaching history, but our opponent's potent subtext was an emotional appeal to rigid moralist and nationalist sentiment in order to convince Americans that they ought to be in a state of moral panic, that the country was going to hell in a handbasket, and that this degeneration could only be stopped by electing a Congress committed to "mainstream values," a phrase we have heard again in the recent Presidential campaign. |
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The publication of Lynne Cheney's article in the Wall Street Journal on October 20, 1994, the event that launched the anti-standards campaign, occurred just when the political season was heating up. The strategy for attacking the guidelines went something like this:
Conservative political leaders, with Newt Gingrich at the helm and in alliance with very conservative Christian groups, have ringingly proclaimed a "Contract with America" to restore "mainstream values." The history standards represent the work of ultra-liberals like Gary Nash, who do not like those values and want to replace them with division, negativity, gloom, multiculturalism, and socialism. Ultra-liberals pervade our universities and our Federal cultural agencies, and you cannot get rid of them. The most hopelessly compromised agencies are the Department of Education, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. For example, the NEH's part in funding the National History Standards exposes the agency as a den of ultra-liberals (notwithstanding the fact that Cheney headed it when the grant was made). The solution to the problem of ultra-liberal infestation is to abolish these agencies altogether, including the DOE. This tenet of the Contract with America will help restore mainstream values, reduce the size of government, and save taxpayers money. Therefore, vote Republican.
This tactic was ugly to me because teachers and scholars who worked on and admired the standards had no credibility talking about the real meaning of the attacks. All we could do was to talk seriously about history education, but our adversaries really had no interest in that subject other than as a rhetorical device for proclaiming the country's bad moral state. The Clinton Administration, by the way, ran for cover, as Democrats were inclined to do on several issues during that election campaign. It offered no encouragement or defense to the hundreds of educators who developed the guidelines. |
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Then, there was the merely Bad. I might count up a number of bad consequences of the controversy, but a major one was that the standards became, to use Gary's phrase, politically "radioactive." Despite the efforts that Gary and the National Center for History in the Schools made to revise the standards judiciously with advice from a high-profile commission of educational, political, and business leaders, no state government or big city school district could adopt them outright as the foundation of their history–social studies curriculum. The standards were from the start meant to be voluntary, and not be imposed on American schools, as Cheney and her allies intimated. We had high hopes that state education agencies and school boards would find them substantive, innovative, and imaginative. But even though educators overwhelmingly praised them, few public officials of either party wanted to be accused of harboring derogatory, gloomy, and unpatriotic views of American history or Western civilization. |
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Indeed, the entire national standards movement collapsed, not only for history, but the projects in the other basic disciplines as well. Cheney declared that the job should be left to the states. And that is what happened. All states except Iowa initiated standards programs of one kind or another in the five years or so following the controversy. However, none of them—and this is another bad thing—had the inclination or resources to assemble the sort of large, comprehensive team of educators and public interest groups that developed the national standards. Rather, state standards development tended to rely on in-house committees and hired consultants that perpetuated conventional or even antiquated ideas about the historical discipline. I believe this was especially true in the case of state world history standards, which have largely reflected a compromise between multicultural educators and advocates of study of the Western tradition. These documents have incorporated little of the dynamic research and rethinking that has taken place in the world history field in the past quarter century, though the national standards did. |
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So, what Good came out of the standards project? For one thing, the controversy itself provoked so much public interest that the National Center sold some 70,000 copies of the first edition of the standards in the first few months. They went to schools, libraries, museums, boards, education agencies, public interest organizations, teachers, and parents. The controversy also triggered a broader national conversation about the importance of history education. Thanks largely to Gary, major philanthropic foundations funded a series of day-long meetings around the country to bring K-12 and collegiate history and social science professionals together to talk about historical research and teaching. |
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Also, when the states began developing their own standards, many of them drew on the national guidelines to one degree or another, for example, the adoption of the standards' periodization of world history. The documents have also been used as templates and resources for a number of independent educational projects. And they figure in some of the professional development that schools and colleges have recently carried out under federal Teaching American History grants. World History for Us All, the web-based model curriculum project I have directed during the past seven years to advance world history in middle and high schools, owes a great deal to the conceptualization of the subject that the National Standards for World History adopted. The National Center under Gary's direction continues to produce innovative materials for teachers, lead professional development, and sell copies of the standards and the two teaching Sourcebooks based on them. |
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The 1994 media storm now seems far in the past, but as Gary, the late Charlotte Crabtree, and I wrote in our book History on Trial, public controversy over which versions of the past produce the best young citizens has been a continuous theme in American civil society. This is a Good thing. "If Americans," we wrote in the preface to the second edition of the book, "should ever find themselves coalescing around a single version of the past endorsed by the government, they are also likely to discover that they no longer have a democracy."1 |
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Notes
1. Gary B. Nash, Charlotte Crabtree, and Ross E. Dunn, History on Trial: Culture Wars and the Teaching of the Past (New York: Vintage Books, 2000), xx.
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