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Where Did Social Studies Go Wrong?

by James Leming, Lucien Ellington, Kathleen Porter-Magee
08/01/2003

August 1, 2003

by James Leming, Lucien Ellington, Kathleen Porter-Magee

This new report from the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation consists of penetrating critiques by
renegade social studies educators who fault the regnant teaching methods and curricular ideas of
their field and suggest how it can be reformed. While nearly everyone recognizes that American
students don't know much about history and civics, these analysts probe the causes of this
ignorance-and lay primary responsibility at the feet of the social studies "establishment" to which
they belong.
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http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,97521,00.html

U.S. Students Need Better Civics Education, Experts Say

Wednesday, September 17, 2003

By Peter Brownfeld
WASHINGTON — Emphasis on multiculturalism and cultural diversity is getting
in the way of proper history and civics educations, particularly the teaching of the
Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and its aftermath, say some education experts who
are demanding teachers refocus their classes.
“What is wrong with social studies today is a large number of those who determine what
is taught ... don’t think it’s important to teach what it means to be an American," said
Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., speaking to an audience Tuesday at the American
Enterprise Institute.
"They do not believe America is exceptional. They do not believe unity is more important
than diversity. There are a lot of people who don’t think it’s important or right for
Americans to have a common culture,” he said.
Last month, the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation released a book titled, "Where Did
Social Studies Go Wrong?," which lambasted the way social studies are taught in
America's schools.
The volume criticizes university professors who steer future teachers in too liberal a
direction. It attacks weak civics curricula and a misplaced focus on multiculturalism, and
expresses particular indignation about the way the Sept. 11 attacks were handled by
educators.
“At the very time we most need our citizens and future citizens to learn what it means to
be American and why America is worth defending ... the part of the school curriculum on
which we must rely for help has turned into a hindrance. It’s not getting the job done. It’s
wrongheaded. It may even be making matters worse," reads the book's introduction,
written by Chester E. Finn, Jr., president of the Fordham Foundation.
"The keys to Rome are being turned over to the Goths and Huns," Finn wrote.
Teachers’ associations reject the suggestion that educators have failed at teaching social
studies and take exception to accusations that social studies teachers and their mentors in
academia are attempting to spread an un-American message.
“We do not see ourselves as lunatics, Huns or Goths,” said Rick Theisen, former
president of the National Council for the Social Studies and a veteran teacher.
Theisen said that while the language of the Fordham report is objectionable and does
little to further a dialogue on the improvement of social studies, the teaching of history
and civics could be bolstered in a number of ways.
For instance, as a result of the No Child Left Behind Act which places an emphasis on
reading and math and imposes serious consequences on schools that fail to educate
students in those subjects, social studies gets short shrift.
“If it’s not tested, it’s not taught,” Theisen said, adding that if NCLB is not modified, “it
will do more [to harm the teaching] of social studies than virtually any other movement."
Theisen also said publishers can also do more to increase student interest in the topic.
“Most textbooks are almost universally bland and uninspiring,” he said.
Former Secretary of Education Bill Bennett agreed that teaching civics and history
should not be merely an academic exercise.
In light of Sept. 11, “it’s very important for people to know what to love and not to love,
what’s worth defending and what’s not,” he said.
Bennett offered several remedies for the problems he saw both in the way social studies
is taught and in education generally.
Citing the narrowness of opinions on some campuses, Bennett said schools should
emphasize greater intellectual, rather than cultural, diversity.
He also encouraged parents to become more involved in their children’s education and
emphasized the importance of school choice.
“You really should be able to flee a place that you think is corrupting the child’s mind,”
he said.
Alexander said he is not just complaining about the way social studies is taught. He has
also taken action, sponsoring the "American History and Civics Education Act,"
passed 90-0 by the Senate in June.
The legislation, based on the Governor’s School program that Alexander established
while governor of Tennessee, would establish grants for as many as 12 Presidential
Academies for Teachers of American History and Civics and authorizes $25 million to
fund them.
The House has not yet scheduled a vote on its version of the bill, introduced last March
by Rep. Roger Wicker, R-Miss.
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http://washingtonpost.com

Sunday, March 14, 2004

Most students struggle with U.S. history
Problems with subject transcend generations, education experts say
By / Washington Post
WASHINGTON — When the U.S. Department of Education reported that in 2001
nearly six out of 10 high school seniors lacked even a basic knowledge of the nation’s
history, Bruce Cole was indignant and concerned.
“A nation that does not know why it exists, or what it stands for, cannot be expected to
long endure,” said Cole, the chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
It is a sentiment repeated often, part of a torrent of distress over the state of American
history education.
The 2001 report said most 12th-graders did not know that the Gulf of Tonkin resolution
led to the war in Vietnam.
Most eighth-graders did not know why the First Continental Congress met.
Yet, according to recent papers by two researchers, it turns out Americans have been
deeply ignorant of their history for a very long time, while still creating the strongest, if
not the brightest, country in the world.
A test administered in 1915 and 1916 to hundreds of high school and college students
who were about to face World War I found that they did not know what happened in
1776 and confused Thomas Jefferson with Jefferson Davis.
A 1943 test showed that only a quarter of college students could name two contributions
made by Jefferson or Abraham Lincoln, leading historian Allan Nevins to fret that such a
historically illiterate bunch might be a liability on the battlefields of Europe in World
War II.
And still, Americans won both wars, and many of the 1943 students who said the United
States bought Alaska from the Dutch and Hawaii from Norway were later lionized in
books, movies and television as “the greatest generation.”
“If anything,” writes Sam Wineburg, a Stanford University education professor in a new
Journal of American History article, “test results across the last century point to a
peculiar American neurosis: each generation’s obsession with testing its young only to
discover — and rediscover — their ‘shameful’ ignorance.
“The consistency of results across time casts doubt on a presumed golden age of fact
retention.
“Appeals to it are more the stuff of national lore and wistful nostalgia for a time that
never was than a claim that can be anchored in the documentary record.”
Richard Paxton, an assistant professor in the Educational Foundations Department of the
University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh and a former Wineburg student, makes a similar point
in the December issue of the Phi Delta Kappan.
Frequent articles about historically challenged U.S. students, plus public displays of
ignorance on programs like “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno,” “propagate the
impression that today’s students are educational midgets standing on the shoulders of
giants,” Paxton wrote. “ ... More important, they spread the false notion that the biggest
problem facing history students today involves the retention of decontextualized
historical facts.”
The earliest evidence of historical cluelessness that either scholar could find was a study
by J. Carleton Bell and David F. McCollum in the May 1917 issue of the Journal of
Educational Psychology.
Bell and McCollum tested 1,500 students in Texas and reported these percentages of
correct answers on history questions: elementary school, 16 percent; high school, 33
percent; teachers college, 42 percent; and university, 49 percent.
It was particularly troubling that many of these sons and daughters of Texas could not
state the significance of the year 1846, the beginning of the Mexican-American War, and
had Sam Houston marching triumphantly into Mexico City rather than beating Gen.
Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna at San Jacinto 10 years before.
The next key survey cited in the Wineburg and Paxton studies appeared in the New York
Times on April 4, 1943, under the headline “Ignorance of U.S. History Shown by College
Freshmen.”
Only 6 percent of the 7,000 freshmen could name the 13 original colonies. Only 13
percent identified James Madison as president during the War of 1812, and only 15
percent knew that William McKinley was president during the Spanish-American War.
A bicentennial survey in 1976, supervised by Harvard University historian Bernard
Bailyn and published in the New York Times, tested nearly 2,000 freshmen at 194
colleges.
On average, the respondents got only 21 of 42 multiple-choice questions right, although
Bailyn’s standards appeared to be very high.
Wineburg said the professor called it “absolutely shocking” that “more students believed
that the Puritans guaranteed religious freedom (36 percent) than understood religious
tolerance as the result of rival denominations seeking to cancel out each others’
advantage (34 percent).”
Many surveys and tests in the generation since have produced similar results, with high
school students getting about half of the questions right.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress history tests in 1987, 1994 and 2001
came out about the same. Slightly less than half of high school students scored at what
the test makers considered a basic knowledge of U.S. history in 2001.
Younger students showed modest gains, with 67 percent of fourth-graders and 64 percent
of eighth-graders scoring at at least the basic level.
Wineburg and Paxton said their goal is to advocate changes in the way history is taught.
Wineburg said the history standards that teachers must cover are often so detailed that the
main points of the American story are lost, and few schools teach the subject well, in any
case.
http://washingtontimes.com/national/20060926-105117-9261r.htm

College students fail civics test

By Chrissie Thompson
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
September 27, 2006

Fewer than half of college seniors tested in a study knew that the Declaration of
Independence contained the phrase "all men are created equal."

Intercollegiate Studies Institute released results yesterday of a history and institutions

test given last year to seniors and freshman, stating both groups failed the exam.

On average, seniors scored 1.5 percent higher than freshmen did on the test, which
included questions about American history, government and international relations. The
survey, administered by the University of Connecticut's Department of Public Policy,
tested 14,000 randomly selected freshmen and seniors at 50 colleges and universities in
the United States.

Seniors averaged a score of 53.2 percent, while freshmen averaged 51.7 percent.
Seniors at 16 institutions, including Cornell, Brown, Yale and Georgetown, scored lower
than freshmen did at their school.

"Students learn almost nothing about civic matters while they are in college," said
Josiah Bunting, chairman of ISI's National Civic Literacy Board. "Our students neither
enter nor exit their universities with a level of civic literacy that even approaches a
satisfactory level."
 Eugene W. Hickok, former U.S. deputy secretary of education and a member of ISI's
National Civic Literacy Board, says undergraduate education is often an afterthought at
research institutions. The study found that prestigious institutions improved students'
civic knowledge far less than other schools did, Mr. Bunting said.

"An Ivy League education contributes nothing -- nothing -- to a student's civic

education," he said.

The study found that schools where students took more history and civics-related
courses scored higher than schools where students took fewer courses, prompting ISI to
recommend curricula requiring such courses.

In addition, the study indicated that students who knew more about American history
and institutions were more involved in community service and political campaigns and
tended to vote more often. The study also said family discussion of current events or
history also appears to contribute to higher levels of civic learning.

Mr. Hickok said ISI called on colleges to take responsibility for assessing and
addressing the quality of their history and civics instruction and challenged university
trustees to become involved in the process.

In addition, he said ISI recommends building centers of excellence to train professors

in teaching, provide faculty resources and encourage student civics organizations.

"America's students need to understand what America is about," Mr. Hickok said.
"Nothing less than our nation's failure is at risk. We need to be about the business of
making patriots."
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http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/09/27/MNGC4LDHS91.DTL

Top-flight colleges fail civics, study says

Cal and Stanford seniors test poorly
By Tanya Schevitz, Chronicle Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 27, 2006

Seniors at UC Berkeley, the nation's premier public university, got an F in their basic
knowledge of American history, government and politics in a new national survey, and
students at Stanford University didn't do much better, getting a D.

Out of 50 schools surveyed, Cal ranked 49th and Stanford 31st in how well they are
increasing student knowledge about American history and civics between the freshman
and senior years. And they're not alone among major universities in being fitted for a
civics dunce cap.
Other poor performers in the study were Yale, Duke, Brown and Cornell universities.
Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore was the tail-ender behind Cal, ranking 50th. The
No. 1 ranking went to unpretentious Rhodes College in Memphis.

The study was conducted by the University of Connecticut's department of public policy
and the nonprofit education organization Intercollegiate Studies Institute. Researchers
sampled 14,000 students at 50 schools, large and small.

The aim was to determine how well the colleges are teaching their students the basics of
government, politics and history -- the bedrocks of good citizenship.

Beyond the rankings, the study found that across the board -- from elite universities to
less-selective colleges -- the typical senior did poorly on the civics literacy exam, scoring
below 70 percent. This would be a D or F on a basic test using a conventional grading
scale.

That shows, the researchers said, that the students don't have -- and the universities
generally aren't teaching -- the basic understanding of America's history and founding
principles that they need to be good citizens.

It is a crisis, the report warns.

"It is at a point in history in this country where it has probably never been more
important," said Eugene Hickok, a former U.S. deputy secretary of education and a
member of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. "The study tells us we have a rising
generation of bright, intelligent citizens that won't have the knowledge they need to be
informed citizens. We are really only a generation or two away from a republic in pretty
big trouble."

The study was conducted in 2005 by asking freshmen and seniors to answer 60 multiple-
choice questions in the subject areas of American history, government, America and the
world, and the market economy.

It then compared the averages from the two classes at each school to determine how
much more seniors knew than freshmen -- indicating how well the university was doing
in increasing student knowledge.

The survey found that more than half of students could not correctly identify the century
(the 17th) when the first American colony was established at Jamestown.

A majority of students also could not identify the Baath party as the main source of
Saddam Hussein's political support in Iraq.

At UC Berkeley, the results showed freshmen knew more than soon-to-graduate seniors.
Freshmen scored an average of 60.4, and seniors scored an average of 54.8. That earned
Cal a failing grade, the researchers said.
At Stanford, freshmen scored an average of 62.2 percent, and seniors scored an average
of 63.1 percent. The difference between the freshmen and seniors was minimal, which the
study's authors say shows they are not being taught the content during college.

In comparison, at Rhodes College, the freshman average was 50.6 percent and the senior
average 62.2 percent. Even though the Rhodes seniors scored lower than Stanford's, the
researchers concluded Rhodes was doing a better job because of the percentage of
improvement shown.

"This is something that if the colleges and universities teach it, the students will learn,"
said Professor Christopher Barnes, director of project development for the University of
Connecticut's department of public policy.

Barnes said that one encouraging finding of the study was that knowledge of civics was
closely tied to voting and community engagement. But that is also alarming, he said, if
the nation's students do not learn more about history and politics.

History and political science leaders at UC Berkeley and Stanford took issue with the
methodology of the study and its rankings but agreed that students weren't learning
enough of the important basic historical and civics lessons.

"There may be real issues here about how universities should organize their curriculum,
but there is a scandal-mongering aspect to the way this survey has been presented," said
Professor David Hollinger, chairman of the UC Berkeley history department. "I would
not assume that this is a credible survey without more scrutiny."

Still, he said, UC Berkeley -- like most large universities -- has relatively few
requirements for undergraduates, even within the College of Letters and Science. He
believes that should change.

"I do not doubt that Americans would be better off knowing more history than they do,''
Hollinger said. "And I do not doubt that Berkeley would be wise to consider requiring
more history than it does."

The study found that civics learning was greater at colleges and universities that required
students to take courses in American history, political science and economics. For
example, seniors at the institutions ranked the highest for increase in knowledge --
Rhodes College and Colorado State University -- took an average of 4.2 history and
political science courses, while seniors at the bottom two, UC Berkeley and Johns
Hopkins, took an average of 2.9 such courses.

Professor Terry Moe, chairman of the political science department at Stanford, also
questioned the study's methodology, saying that many factors can affect the outcomes,
including the fact that many students at schools like Stanford specialize in areas such as
science, engineering and math. In addition, he said, less-selective schools lose a lot of
students after their freshmen year, leaving a pool of higher-quality students who make it
through all four years and thus may score better than the more diverse pool of freshmen.

But he said, it is true that Stanford focuses more on teaching theory and critical-thinking
skills than facts. The teaching of facts and historical dates is considered "old-fashioned"
in academe, he said.

"There is a basic knowledge that students should learn, and I think that universities don't
think that way,'' he said. "My view is that they should."

Among the key recommendations in the report are that colleges and universities increase
the number of required history, political science and economics courses, improve their
assessments of what students are learning, and build academic centers on campus to
encourage and support the "restoration" of teaching American history and civics.
Highs and lows

The University of Connecticut's survey ranked 50 colleges on how well they increase
student knowledge about American history, government and politics between the
freshman and senior years.

Rankings from best to worst:

1. Rhodes College

2. Colorado State University

3. Calvin College

4. Grove City College

5. University of Colorado, Boulder

6. Spring Arbor University

7. University of New Mexico

8. University of Mobile

9. Florida Memorial University

10. Central Connecticut State University

...

31. Stanford University

...

40. University of Florida

41. Wofford College

42. University of Virginia

43. Georgetown University

44. Yale University

45. State University of West Georgia

46. Duke University

47. Brown University

48. Cornell University

49. UC Berkeley

50. Johns Hopkins University

The report is available at www.americancivicliteracy.org.

Source: University of Connecticut

E-mail Tanya Schevitz at tschevitz@sfchronicle.com.

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http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/pdupont/?id=110009000

OUTSIDE THE BOX

What Do You Know?
If you're an American college student, probably not much.
BY PETE DU PONT
Wednesday, September 27, 2006 12:01 a.m.

"I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people
themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a
wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their
discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power."
Thomas Jefferson
letter to William Charles Jarvis
Sept. 20, 1820

So how is America's modern education system doing in this regard? Are our citizens
enlightened enough to exercise the powers of our democracy? Do our colleges and
universities provide their students the American history and constitutional understanding
needed to make them strong and responsible citizens?

A study released this week by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute--

www.americancivicliteracy.org--demonstrates that the answers to both questions are no.
The study concludes that "America's colleges and universities fail to increase knowledge
about America's history and institutions." In a 60-question multiple-choice quiz ,"college
seniors failed the civic literacy exam, with an average score of 53.2 percent, or F, on a
traditional grading scale." And at many schools "seniors know less than freshmen about
America's history, government, foreign affairs, and economy." (Disclosure: I am a
member of the ISI's Civic Literacy Board, though I was not involved in preparing this
survey.)

In the fall of 2005 ISI worked with the University of Connecticut's Department of Public
Policy to ask "more than 14,000 randomly selected college freshmen and seniors at 50
colleges and universities across the country"--an average of about 140 each of freshman
and seniors on each campus--what they knew about America's constitutional and
governmental history and policies. The colleges ran from state institutions--the
University of New Mexico and the University of California at Berkeley, for example, to
Ivy League schools like Yale, Brown and Harvard, and less-well-known institutions like
Grove City College and Appalachian State University.

Some colleges did better than others, but few of them added very much to students'
knowledge of America's history or government. College freshmen averaged 51.7%, and
the seniors averaged 53.2%, so there was a slight gain in knowledge. But the average
senior scored only 58.5% on American history questions, slightly above 51% on
government and America-and-the-world questions, and 50.5% on market economy
questions. By every college's grading system those are failing grades.

Among college seniors, less than half--47.9%--correctly concluded that "We hold these
truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal" was from the Declaration of
Independence. More than half did not know that the Bill of Rights prohibits the
governmental establishment of an official religion, and "55.4 percent could not recognize
Yorktown as the battle that brought the American Revolution to an end" (more than one
quarter believing that it was the Civil War battle of Gettysburg that had ended the
Revolution).

The questions about more recent matters produced more accurate answers. More than
80% of students could identify Franklin D. Roosevelt's programs as the New Deal, 79%
knew that Brown v. Board of Education ordered an end to racial segregation, and 69%
were aware that GDP was the best measure of output of our economy.

But the responses to the survey's 60 questions reflect the students' poor understanding of
America's history and our institutions.

As for the 50 colleges that participated in the program, the best-scoring students were not
from the institutions one might expect. Rhodes College, Colorado State University and
Calvin College were the top three, with senior students averaging between 9.5 and 11.6
percentage points higher than freshmen.

At the other end of the scale were 16 schools that showed "negative learning"--that is,
seniors scored lower than freshmen. Cornell, UC Berkeley and Johns Hopkins were the
worst three, their seniors scoring between 3.3 and 7.3 percentage points worse than their
freshmen. And on the negative list were some other very prestigious universities:
Williams, Georgetown, Yale, Duke and Brown.

How did these educational failures come to pass? ISI concludes that "students don't learn
what colleges don't teach." In other words, in colleges where students must take more
courses in American history they do better on the test, outperforming schools where
fewer courses were completed. Seniors at the top test-scoring colleges "took an average
of 4.2 history and political science courses, while seniors at the two lowest-ranked
colleges . . . took an average of 2.9 history and political science courses." Similarly,
higher ranked colleges spent more time on homework, 20 hours a week at fourth-ranked
Grove City College and 14 or 15 at low-ranked Georgetown and Berkeley.

Parental education and family discussions of current events contribute to better civic
learning as well. The study found that "73 percent of seniors' families at Grove City and
Harvard [ranking 4th and 25th, respectively] discussed current events or history on a
weekly or daily basis," whereas only half did at low ranked Berkeley and Johns Hopkins.

So what should be done about our colleges' failure to offer sound educational courses on
America's constitutional republic? Obviously they must improve the quantity and quality
of their teaching, and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute recommends building "centers
of academic excellence on college and university campuses for the teaching of America's
history and institutions."

That would help people become, as Jefferson put it, "enlightened enough to exercise their
control" over governmental matters. Many constitutional policy issues are before the
Congress, from adding a line-item veto to the president's powers (a proper constitutional
question) to regulating how many dollars a candidate for federal office may spend in a
campaign or guaranteeing everyone a right to a home (improper ones).

Such issues must be understood by our citizens, for as Thomas Paine said after the
original constitution was ratified by the states, "Government is only the creature of a
Constitution. The Constitution of a country is not the act of its Government, but of the
people constituting a Government."
Mr. du Pont, a former governor of Delaware, is chairman of the Dallas-based National
Center for Policy Analysis. His column appears once a month.

Copyright © 2006 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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