In this week's Chronicle of Higher Education, Princeton professor Theodore Rabb reflects on the role the No Child Left Behind Act is playing in guaranteeing the continued decline in students' interest in and understanding of the past:

Anyone who has taught history to college students for more than 40 years, as I have, has watched a steady decline in the background they bring to the subject. Increasingly, their studies have been geared to contemporary issues like global interactions rather than a sustained immersion in the rich variety of the past.

Why has this happened? To a large degree, it is a byproduct of schools' new commitments --Ýclasses in character education, conflict resolution, or international holidays; the move from Western Civilization to global studies, which concentrate on the recent past --Ýaccelerated by students' growing attention to sports, community service, and other nonacademic interests. The results, as shown by the Department of Education's National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, tests are dismal.

Appalled by what has happened to historical literacy, three years ago Sen. Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia persuaded his colleagues in Congress to support a program, Teaching American History, to enable school districts around the country to enhance teachers' knowledge and skills, refresh curricula, and in general improve history instruction. That was certainly a promising move, but it is now being undermined by another Washington initiative: the No Child Left Behind Act.

[...]

No Child Left Behind is draining academic substance out of the classroom. Increasingly, Americans are being taught skills, not content; they are being trained, not educated.

Here, I would argue, is the most insidious effect of the law: not its financial, pedagogic, or constitutional shortcomings, but its devastation of subjects other than reading and math in the first eight grades.

That outcome is clear and widespread. Because so much money is at stake, school districts are shifting primary- and secondary-school class hours to reading and math, the only subjects tested by the law. The Council for Basic Education, a nonprofit group founded in the 1950s to shore up democracy through quality public education, has documented the change, as has testimony from states as diverse as Indiana, Maryland, New Mexico, New York, and Tennessee. In response to a survey I conducted in New Jersey, one superintendent reported: "We have double periods of mathematics and language arts each day in grades 3-6, and sometimes only three periods a week of social studies and science." "When extra practice time is needed for test-taking strategies," another superintendent notes, "it is taken from social studies or science classes." A gathering of superintendents in January told me that 90-minute social-studies classes are regularly cut in half or even by two-thirds, while reading and math gobble up the time.

The consequences a few years hence are predictable: a further (possibly precipitous) drop in students' familiarity with their heritage. Denuded of history in the first eight grades, how can they possibly redress the balance in high school, when new subjects and activities clamor for attention, and one-year classes are forced to scamper through the entirety of state, U.S., or world history?

Critiques of K-12 education and critiques of higher education don't take one another into account as often as they should. Critics of higher education in particular are often working in a bit of a vacuum when it comes to assessing why the curriculum looks like it does, what students do and don't know, how college coursework follows from high school and prepares for the workplace, and so on. (The common assumption on the part of college teachers, for example, that people arrive at college awash in conservative ignorance, and that the job of college teachers is thus to "enlighten" their students politically, shows a remarkable ignorance of the prevailing liberalism of K-12 curricula, especially in public schools.) Rabb's essay stops short of drawing out the implications of NCLB for college teachers and college students, but it does open the door for that discussion to take place.

It's hard to disagree with prioritizing reading and basis math at the top of the list...if you don't get these down, nothing else is going to help very much. But there's also such a thing as a law of diminishing returns. It's hard to imagine that teaching math and reading 6 hours a day would be any more effective than teaching them 3 hours a day.

I expect that the problem *really* has more to do with the greatly increased emphasis on fuzzy subjects than it does with excessive emphasis on reading and math. And I also suspect that it has a lot to do with the phenomenon that I call "chronological bigotry"..the belief that we have nothing to learn much to learn from people of earlier times.

Here's an example about what I mean by "chronological bigotry" (actually, I called it "temporal bigotry" before.)

http://www.blogger.com/app/post.pyra?blogID=3873546&postID=106995259984640812

"It's hard to imagine that teaching math and reading 6 hours a day would be any more effective than teaching them 3 hours a day."

It's hard to imagine that any educational institution worth the name would HAVE to double up in order to meet BASIC competency requirements. I find it odd that those who bemoan NCLB for forcing schools to neglect certain subjects never bother to question the ones who implement these policies, thos who assert that it is necessary to ruin the curriculum in order to teach kids to read at grade level, or do basic algebra by their senior year.

1. David F - FYI your blog link required a username and password and I was not able to access.
2. If History is an afterthought - then the study of Geography in the U.S. must be still born.
3. As to today's school system - I can only speak with experience of the public school system in Fairfax County, Virginia. Virgina has mandatory Standard of Learing (SOL) tests that commence in third grade and go on through high school. The SOLs are supposed to be a measurement of school performance and relate to the on-going accrediation of public schools. However, the tests are not limited to math and english but include History, Social Science, and Science. AT this point I suspect they are similar in importance to the Regents tests required in New York State high schools. [don't know if this is still the case]
4. Since the introduction of SOLS in about 1998 the public school curricula in Fairfax County has evolved to the point where they are designed almost solely to prepare students for the SOLS. Some think this serves the county schools better - and helps them maintain accreditation than the students.
5. My child is in [public school] 7th grade. I have spent a lot of time with her on her studies - history in particular. I have to say that I think her studies this year contain more in terms of the immersion in the past than the author of the article seems to find common. Fairfax County's school system is quite large and the curriculum does not vary from middle school to middle school.

Sorry..here's the correct URL for temporal bigotry:

http://photoncourier.blogspot.com/2003_11_01_photoncourier_archive.html#106995259984640812

My daughter's public school history classes have been outstanding.

One reason why kids might require 6 hours of English and math instruction is that they may have NO opportunity to study outside school: nowhere they can go after school where they are safe and undistracted, to work on homework, read, and think. You have to have time to digest or you cannot learn. Focussing on two subjects instead of six is a good idea too, for those who need a lot of remedial help.

We do not know yet how No Child Left Behind will affect the learning of history. The last NAEP test on US History was in 2001, the same year NCLB was passed. On that, a whopping 57% of high school seniors scored "Below basic" (essentially, a D or F), and only 15% reached "Proficient" (roughly a B). Ten years earlier, on the same test, seniors scored the same, 57% Below basic. Go back to A Nation at Risk (1983) and you find similar concerns about historical knowledge in students.

This is to say that Rabb's essay isn't really about historical decline at all. If it were, we might hear more about the decline of social studies (or rather, the politicization of social studies in a-historical directions), or the thin historical knowledge of teachers. Instead, it's a rap against No Child Left Behind. Let's see what happens when we get some concrete numbers on how history, foreign language, and the arts are faring under the new dispensation.

MB

Naming government programs is a great idea. It lets us all know that the effect of the program will be exactly the opposite of the name.

But I'm usually suspicious of reports of the most extreme cases. The other question is, why are rural schools closing? Is it strictly a matter of funding?

I am very much in agreement with the poster who wondered why they needed to double up on the math and English. If the subject is taught well in the first place, doubling up should not be required. If it is not taught well, then doubling up would accomplish nothing but reinforcing bad teaching.

I think that the author of the article really should take a longer look at what is being taught and why his pet subjects are being shortchanged. I agree with him that history is definitely being shortchanged. The question is what is it being shortchanged in favor of. Touchy, feely, feel good about yourself classes don't do much to aid in the passing on of knowledge, whether of history, geography, literature, science, civics, or anything else. I think that is where the problem lies and I also think that the teaching establishment (the NEA) knows it full well but the NCLB Act came in under President Bush and they will do anything to get rid of him so they say nothing.

I do know that since I came from a small farming community where most of the students had to do chores before and after classes, as did I, and the teachers there were fully able to teach English, history, science, agriculture, civics, etc full well within the regular classtime without having to double up on anything, teaching can be done to students who would not naturally seem to be good at the subject. I think the professor is drawing the wrong conclusions when he writes the article and he needs to take another look before he casts blame where he does.

Reading the good professor's comments reminds me of the gulf between the collegiate and pre-collegiate world. Most academics live in splendid isolation and are vastly ignorant of the Orwellian, thoroughly anti-knowledge and anti-intellectual cult that pervades the pre-collegiate educational establishment. This cult variously goes by names like ìprogressiveî education, constructivism, best practices and so on. This cult ñ a type of naturalistic romanticism ñ has a long pedigree and can trace its distant roots to such incongruous luminaries as Comenius, Montaigne, Rousseau, Froebel, Pestalozzi, and the unlikely pair of Herbert Spencer and John Dewey.

In this country, the cult began to spread its nefarious tentacles from the enormously influential Teachers College at Columbia University over a hundred years ago. One of its most influential members was one William Heard Kilpatrick who purported to be the only one who could decipher John Dewey and took it upon himself to spread the gospel of ìprogressiveî education. The cult is the dominant credo in education schools and prospective teachers are thoroughly indoctrinated in its ways. The cult mandates that teachers may not impart knowledge; that pupils must waste endless time with ìhands-onî projects and activities in order to ìconstruct their own knowledgeî (supposedly Piaget tells the cultists so) and achieve what is termed ìhigher-order thinking skills,î a total perversion of Benjamin Bloomís taxonomy. The cult is fond of false dichotomies. So, for example, itís either learning academic subject matter OR ìhigher-order thinking skills.î Since HOTS (as the jargon has it) is infinitely more important, subject matter must go down the drain, according to this false dichotomy. Even though HOTS and simimar mantras are invoked ad nauseam, the cultists are incapable of a single critical thought.

So I suggest that the good professor take a look at what is actually going on in the pre-collegiate educational world. A good start would be a book by education historian Diane Ravitch. I suggest her book called Left Back, a history of ìprogressiveî education that is now all-pervasive and doing so much damage.