Thinking and Linking by Joanne Jacobs
When the Daily Beast asked 1,000 Americans to answer questions from the U.S. citizenship exam, 38 percent failed to answer six out of 10 correctly, reports Newsweek.
According to the Beast, only 27 percent of Americans knew we fought the Cold War to turn back communism. Only 19 percent can name one power of the federal government. Only one third could name the economic system of the U.S., though it’s likely the test rejected “screwed up” as an answer.
Most states’ U.S. history standards are “mediocre to awful,” concludes a Fordham Foundation study. Nationwide, the average state got a D. Eighteen states earned F’s.
South Carolina earned an A and Alabama, California, Indiana, Massachusetts, New York and D.C. earned an A-. So did the U.S. history framework used by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).
On Ed Next’s blog, A. Graham Down praises David Awbrey’s A Journalist’s Education in the Classroom, which describes his attempt to teach history to middle school students who thought “any kind of learning, especially history” was “totally irrelevant to their lives.”
. . . despite David Awbrey’s heartfelt and totally admirable championship of the liberal arts, and his best intentions to the contrary, his book is more of a depressant than a source of inspiration.
. . . David Awbrey’s courage and tenacity should be applauded. His efforts to revitalize traditional history instruction are both imaginative and compelling.
But it’s not one of those books where the nice white lady (or gent) saves the day.
Update: Texas corrected the liberal bias and then introduced a heap of conservative bias, writes Mike Petrilli.
Will Fitzhugh’s crusade to get high school history teachers to assign research papers to allegedly college-prep students made the New York Times.
“Most kids don’t know how to write, don’t know any history, and that’s a disgrace,” Mr. Fitzhugh said. “Writing is the most dumbed-down subject in our schools.”
His mood brightens, however, when talk turns to the occasionally brilliant work of the students whose heavily footnoted history papers appear in his quarterly, The Concord Review. Over 23 years, the review has printed 924 essays by teenagers from 44 states and 39 nations.
Publishing in the Concord Review is the equivalent of winning a national math competition, says William R. Fitzsimmons, Harvard’s dean of admissions.
In the most recent issue, a senior from Montclair, N.J., writes of Theodore Roosevelt’s tenure as a New York police commissioner; a New Orleans student profiles a 19th-century transcendentalist philosopher; and a senior from Seoul documents the oppression of Korean residents on a North Pacific island.
Fitzhugh started teaching history at a Massachusetts high school in 1977. Already, the long research paper was out of fashion. But a sophomore’s well-researched, 28-page paper on America’s strategic nuclear balance with the Soviet Union persuaded him he hadn’t been asking students to work hard enough. In 1987, he started the review. it’s won praise but little financing.
Most essays come from students at private schools. Few public school history teachers assign long research papers, Fitzhugh says.
He recently asked the head of a history department at a New Jersey high school if he assigned research papers.
“Not anymore,” Mr. Fitzhugh quoted the teacher as saying. “I have my kids do PowerPoint presentations.” Mr. Fitzhugh said he scoffs when some educators argue that research papers have lost relevance because Google has put so much knowledge just keystrokes away.
Researching a history paper, he said, is not just about accumulating facts, but about developing a sense of historical context, synthesizing findings into new ideas, and wrestling with how to communicate them clearly — a challenge for many students, now that many schools do not require students to write more than five-paragraph essays.
In 2002, the Shanker Institute, a research group associated with the American Federation of Teachers, funded a nationwide survey of public school history teachers. While 95 percent said assigning long research papers was important, 80 percent said they never did because they had too little time to read and grade them.
Huck Finn and Slave Jim float down the Mississippi in search of adventure and freedom in a newly edited version of Mark Twain’s classic designed for schools. Injun Joe is now Indian Joe. Clarence Page eloquently defends Twain’s original language, even though it’s kept the book off some school reading lists. Teach the conflict, Page writes.
As a result of complains from black children, who say the word causes them pain and inspires bullies, Huckleberry Finn “has begun to be marginalized ironically into Twain’s definition of a ‘classic,’ a work ‘which people praise and don’t read’,” Page writes. Educators dread dealing with hurt feelings.
As a black kid who read “Huck” in a mostly white classroom with a white teacher, I know the unsettling startling pain of seeing the N-word used so casually in print. But I also am eternally grateful to our teacher for helping us to talk about it. She helped us to appreciate the book’s genius of language, vision and, most memorable, its quietly subversive satirical cleverness. It skewers the immorality of white supremacy that it so vividly portrays.
Young Huck’s moral compass is warped by his drunken, brutal father and the culture in which Huck was raised, as his casual use of the N-word illustrates. Escaping his father, he unexpectedly teams up with the slave Jim. He feels guilty at first about helping his neighbor’s “property” escape. Yet as he gets to know Jim and his desire to rescue his wife and children, the slave becomes a better father figure than the one Huck left behind. To me, the book is that rare classic that I not only praise but still enjoy reading.
Editing the language “also risks taking away its edge, the risky subversive power of Twain’s words and story that kept my classmates and me awake, alert and talking about it,” Page writes.
I think Page makes a great case, but I know many more students will read the book if teachers don’t have to deal with the “n-word.” It’s a word I never write on this blog, because I don’t want to deal with it.
Music videos by history teachers are hits on YouTube, reports the Honolulu Star-Advertiser. Hawaii residents Amy Burvall and Herb Mahelona have won rave reviews for “The French Revolution,” set to Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance.” Dressed in period costumes and wigs, Burvall sings lines like, “La la liberte,” and “Walk, walk scaffold baby.” The video has topped 166,000 views.
Mahelona and Burvall produce their music videos in their free time, mostly on weekends, and from start to finish the process takes about three months. So far, they have posted 49 on YouTube, including “Black Death” set to Gwen Stefani’s “Hollaback Girl,” “Martin Luther” set to “Manic Monday” by the Bangles, and “Henry VIII” set to ABBA’s “Money, Money, Money.”
Napoleon will be next.
“The kids just eat it up,” said Mahelona. “And then they take the exam and just from singing the songs, they would remember everything.”
An extremist, anti-American agenda tainted History and Commemoration: The Legacies of the Pacific War,” a workshop for community college professors sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities, complains Penelope Blake, a humanities professor at Rock Valley College in Illinois. The workshop was held at the University of Hawaii’s East-West Center in July.
Blake sent Power Line a Sept. 12 letter she wrote to Illinois Rep. Donald Manzullo, her congressman, asking him to vote against funding for future workshops until the NEH explains the violation of its objective to foster “a mutual respect for the diverse beliefs and values of all persons and groups.”
In my thirty years as a professor in upper education, I have never witnessed nor participated in a more extremist, agenda-driven, revisionist conference, nearly devoid of rhetorical balance and historical context for the arguments presented.
Among other things, presenters want Japan to be seen as a victim of U.S. imperialism forced to attack Pearl Harbor. War memorials like the Arizona Memorial should be recast as “peace memorials,” with care taken not to offend visitors from Japan. They see veterans as old fogies with suspect memories who are going to die soon anyhow, letting the academics determine what really happened.
A year-long class on diversity is an elective at affluent, high-performing Jericho Middle School, where most students are white or Asian-American, reports the New York Times.
Fifteen eighth graders at Jericho Middle School were considering a fictional case of stereotyping by hair color the other day, or how a boy came to be prejudiced against people with green hair, or “greenies.” From there, they extrapolated to the stereotypes in their own lives: dumb football players, Asian math whizzes, boring bankers.
Teacher Elisa Weidenbaum Waters hopes to “build acceptance, awareness and appreciation that people may be different than you.”
There are no quizzes or tests in the class, and homework is assigned only occasionally. Instead, there are free-flowing discussions about privilege, discrimination and oppression, and readings, like the recent one about people with green hair from “Prejudiced — How Do People Get That Way?” — a book published by the Anti-Defamation League.
School leaders say students growing up in Jericho need preparation for the diverse world they’ll encounter in college and beyond.
The class easily could turn into “amorphous mush” with little intellectual value, warned Rick Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. Class discussions could be slanted to “favor more popular, progressive views,” Hess added.
“You know it’s a bad idea . . . when Crash is on the teacher-training syllabus,” writes Liam Julian on Flypaper.
A year-long diversity workshop sounds like a giant bore, even if students don’t have to do much work. It’s possible to learn a great deal about human differences and similarities by reading literature or studying history. Why not design a humanities class that deals with these issues while also asking students to read challenging books, not just pamphlets, and expand their knowledge of the world?
Easton Area High School’s 2010 yearbook was checked for profanity and sex, but nobody at the Pennsylvania school noticed that one of the inspirational quotes came from Adolf Hitler.
“And in the last analysis, success is what matters,” attributed to Hitler, was published next to student photos.
“I think they were so inundated with spreading these quotes sporadically through the pages that, unfortunately, (they) just stopped recognizing the authors,” Easton Area High School Principal Michael Koch told the newspaper. “I don’t by any means think it was put in there maliciously.”
Perhaps Easton Area High needs to focus more on teaching history.
Via Detention Slip.
Now that New York has raised its definition of proficiency in exams for grades three through eight, it’s time to fix the high school Regents exams, writes Marc Epstein in City Journal. The Regents have been dumbed down, charges Epstein, a high school history teacher in New York City.
The Global History and Geography Regents requires no knowledge or geography, he writes.
One handout shows a man sitting in a pedicab while the driver tries to walk the bicycle pulling the passenger through about three or four feet of water. The question asks: “What was one problem that people in the Varanasi region of India faced once the 1983 summer monsoons arrived, based on this National Geographic photograph and its caption?” If you couldn’t figure it out just by looking at the picture, the caption informs you that there was flooding and sewage, along with floating animal carcasses.
. . . A second part of the test, known as the thematic essay, asks the student to write about change and ideas, selecting two famous people—from a list including Nelson Mandela, Karl Marx, Galileo, and Mikhail Gorbachev—and explaining a specific idea the individuals developed, the historical circumstances surrounding its development, and how it influenced a group, a nation, or a region. After two years of global history, it’s safe to say that even your marginal students can find something to say about Marx and Communism or Mandela and apartheid.
The U.S. History and Government exam asked students to “write about the positive and negative effects of technology on the American society and economy,” a “rehashed question” from an old test designed for special-needs students or those who couldn’t pass the Regents exam, Epstein writes.
The document-based questions on the History exam were just as risible. A cartoon from the National Temperance Almanac depicts a saloonkeeper laying bricks around the entrance to his saloon—with the bricks labeled “wrecked lives,” ruined fortunes,” “lost virtue,” and “ruined characters.” The question then asks the student to state two effects that alcohol had on American society.
Students can pass by answering only one of two essay questions if they do well enough on the multiple-choice and document-based questions.
Proficient should mean college ready, backed up by automatic admission to a state university, writes Core Knowledge’s Robert Pondiscio on Answer Sheet.
For low-income families with high aspirations but little educational experience, all they know is what the state and public schools tell them. And they’ve been misled. Seeing their children through the K-12 pipeline with a clear picture of readiness and a guaranteed college acceptance would likely be the difference between success and failure.
“’Proficiency’ on our exams has to mean something real,” (New York Education Commissioner David) Steiner wrote recently. “No good purpose is served when we say that a child is proficient when that child simply is not.”
Sol Stern writes about the history of New York’s testing mess in National Review.
Via This Week In Education comes a very cute Babelgum video of little kids acting out scenes from the American Revolution.
One actor says, “Don’t shoot till you see the whites of their eyes.” Several kids open their eyes very wide. “OK, now shoot.”
When they get to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” some of the kids start dancing.
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