The Thomas B. Fordham Foundation has issued "flunking" reports to 23 states, including Mississippi, that were based on the "comprehensive historical content, sequential development, and balance in each state's history curriculum."
One professor says she's not surprised:
"Our state standards are very vague in terms of giving teachers guidance in what history content should be taught," said Mary Beth Farrell, a University of Southern Mississippi professor who supervises student teachers who teach social studies in grades 7-12.
"If the state gave more guidance and the standards were clear teachers would know what needs to be covered. You don't want the curriculum to be too specific, but you don't want it vague like the way Mississippi has it."
Mississippi's score was 40 percent, mostly because the state emphasizes "a very vague thematic approach," rather than chronology in its American history curriculum, said Kathleen Porter, the institute's associate director of research.
"Usually, what happens with thematic approaches, the focus is not on history, but on themes," Porter said. "A cultural interaction theme might mention a few events while teaching culture ... It's not really teaching solid American history."
No, doesn't sound like it is. What on earth is a "cultural interaction theme," anyway? And why is that considered by educators to be a better way of learning history than learning facts, dates, and the chronological unfolding of events in the US or in the world?
These grades, by the way, are part of the recent Fordham Institute project, "Back to Basics: Reclaiming Social Studies" that has been so much in the news lately. In case you're wondering, the six states that recieved A's in History are Alabama, Arizona, California, Indiana, Massachusetts, and New York.
Pennsylvania, where I live, got almost the lowest possible score, and its standards begin with the claim that:
History...is a narrative—a story. In order to tell the story it is not sufficient
to simply recall facts; it is also necessary to understand the context of the time and place and to apply historical thinking skills.
However, the state then goes on to teach history in chronological fashion by grade, so that students don't study colonial history after 6th grade, and don't study much that happened after 1890 until they reach 10th grade. To further complicate things, the study of History is divided up into twenty somewhat arbitrary categories, and students study only small "thematic groupings" of people from long periods of time, so that the historical context and sense of time is lost.
Alabama, on the other hand, which got a very high score, begins teaching students about slavery and its legacy in the fourth-grade, going from the country's origins to the civil rights movement. In fifth and sixth grades, students cover much of the same material, much more thoroughly, and their studies again take them from colonial days to the present. Thus, the chronology of history is drilled into young Alabamians from the start, before they've even reached high-school level history.
And what was so bad about Mississippi's History standards? The Mississippi Social Studies Framework mission statement states that social studies is meant to "promote an understanding of the world, human interaction, cultural diversity," which apparently requires a lot of poster-making. And Mississippi also suffers from what seems to be part of the definition of a bad History program, which is to say that their program is organized in a thematic, rather than chronological, manner.
Also on the site, for you interested (or alarmed) parents, here are six questions to ask on the first night back at school. And don't miss the report, "Where Did Social Studies Go Wrong?"
Posted by kswygert at September 24, 2003 01:21 PM