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We Are Not Ready to Assess History Performance
Richard Rothstein
| Americans have never considered learning history to be an end in itself. Instruction about history and the development of political institutions (civics) has always been justified as an exercise that would produce better citizens, however blandly defined. Yet educators have never successfully explained how the content of history or civics curricula promotes the stated goal of good citizenship. Even when educators duck this problem of means and ends and treat history and civics instruction as an end in itself, they have no realistic expectations of what students should learn. Most definitions of student proficiency are corrupted by nostalgia for alleged past achievement levels that never existed. |
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What is more, educators cannot make up their minds about whether history instruction (and hence its assessment) should be "broad" or "deep." This is also true in other fields (it has become commonplace for experts to say, for example, that mathematics curricula are "a mile wide and an inch deep" and are thus flawed), but the problem is compounded in history because ideological and political disputes distort pedagogy. All partisans insist that they want both depth and breadth, but in practice the Left prefers depth and the Right prefers breadth. Since nobody is satisfied by assessments that inevitably take sides in this dispute, these conflicts cannot be resolved by educators alone. |
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In this essay, I will discuss these problems—lack of clarity about the purpose of history instruction, fanciful definitions of student proficiency, and debates about historical facts versus historical thinking—in that order. I conclude that we are not ready to assess history performance. |
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Standards and Outcomes | |
| In 1994 Congress adopted eight education goals for the year 2000. They included having all young children ready to learn, raising the high school graduation rate to 90 percent, and becoming "first in the world" in mathematics and science. In social studies, students were to "demonstrate competency over challenging subject matter in civics and government, economics, history, and geography, so they may be prepared to exercise the rights and responsibilities of citizenship." The naïveté (or cynicism) of the endeavor was breathtaking. Unsurprisingly, the goals had been barely approached by the deadline. With regard to preparing youth to exercise citizenship, voting participation of recent graduates remains embarrassingly low. Observers also bemoan low levels of participation in the voluntary institutions of civil society.1 |
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Predictably, assessing the fulfillment of such unrealistic goals has also been flawed. States have set high academic standards with little consideration of how they relate to desired outcomes. For example, what evidence is there that students who meet a state's history standards will be more likely to exercise the rights and responsibilities of citizenship? Partly because states never face up to this question, their tests that purport to uphold high standards actually measure lower levels of achievement. States whose standards call for students to assess multiple perspectives regarding historical controversies administer tests that require little more than recall of names and dates or the placement of history passages in context. And state accountability systems cannot fairly distinguish whether students are making progress even toward the lower objectives that tests implicitly adopt. |
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