University of Washington



A History of the California Framework for History-Social Science:

Promise and Paradox

This summer marks the twentieth anniversary of the History-Social Science Framework for California Public Schools. Adopted on July 10, 1987, the Framework initiated a reform of history education in the state of California; moreover, it marked one of the early successes of the standards and accountability movement that emerged out of the 1980s. Initially, this document broadly suggested the content of history classes for grades K-12. During the 1990s, the Framework expanded from 120 to 234 pages; in the process, it became a more prescriptive curriculum guide, defining hundreds of grade specific standards. Today, the Framework is the central component of California’s system of accountability for history education. Its standards define the specific skills and historical content for every grade level of the state’s public schools and are the basis for alignment of local, district and state curricula and assessments.

The following paper offers a brief, analytical history of the History-Social Science Framework. It begins by examining the goals and intentions that fueled the initial creation of the Framework in the 1980s. Then, through tracing the development of California’s system of accountability for history education in the 1990s, this paper highlights how the Framework changed over time as it became the centerpiece of this system. Finally, this paper provides short content analyses of the Framework and the California Standards Tests for History-Social Science and argues that, today, the Framework not only falls short of the goals that led to its creation in the 1980s, but that it may reinforce what research shows to be some of the most ineffective ways to teach and learn history. Overall, the history of the Framework is an interesting case study of the standards-based reform movement as it developed from A Nation at Risk to No Child Left Behind. Like most education reforms, it is a story of promise and paradox, potential and unintended consequences.

Good intro

The 1980s: History Reform and the California Framework

Over the past twenty-five years, the standards and accountability movement has evolved to define American public education at the local, state, and federal level. A Nation at Risk helped initiate this movement in 1983 when it declared that American schools, after decades of diminishing achievements, were in need of fundamental reform. A benchmark of neo-conservative thought, the report cited declines in SAT and NAEP scores to backs it claim that lowered expectations and graduation requirements created a “rising tide of mediocrity” in American schools. Such realities threatened not only the country’s international standing, but its very future as a prosperous democracy. In order to keep the United States internationally competitive, A Nation at Risk called for a focus on the “new basics” – English, science, math, social studies, and computer science – and an increase in standards and accountability.[1]

A Nation at Risk was soon followed by the call for fundamental reforms in history education. Two publications, Diane Ravitch’s and Chester Finn’s What Do Our 17 Year-Olds Know? and the Bradley Commission’s Building a History Curriculum: Guidelines for Teaching History in Schools, defined the main issues and prescriptions of this burgeoning movement. Ravitch and Finn, in the same vein of A Nation at Risk, sounded alarm bells by asserting that high school students constituted a “generation at risk” for their lack of basic knowledge in history and literature. They based this assertion on the unimpressive results of multiple-choice, NAEP assessments administered to 7,812 high school juniors. Pointing to the fact that the national average on the history test was 54.5 percent, Ravitch and Finn warned that it was “fatuous to believe that students can think critically or conceptually when they are ignorant of the most basic facts of American history” and concluded that Americans were “at risk of being gravely handicapped” by such shortcomings.[2] Within a year of the publication of What Do Our 17 Year-Olds Know?, Ravitch and Finn helped form the Bradley Commission on History in the Schools – a group of professors, historians and public school teachers – to investigate the shortcomings of history education and to make recommendations for reform.

In the introduction to Bradley Commission report, historian Kenneth Jackson blamed “the current crises in history education” on progressive models interesting choice of words of social studies education. He claimed that social studies, with its multi-disciplinary emphasis, diluted, and in some instances, totally eclipsed the study of history. At its worst, this led to “do it yourself formlessness” where “high school students could satisfy their social studies requirements for graduation by taking such diverse, disconnected courses as current events, drug education, sex education, civics, values education, economics, and psychology and never take a history course at all.” Jackson traced this “balkanization” to the Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education, which emphasized vocational training and citizenship for its social studies curriculum, and claimed that the Committee of 10 Report, which focused on history education, was a better model for American schools to emulate.[3]

The Bradley Commission laid out a number of suggestions for the reform of history education. The most pressing problem, and the easiest to address, was the dearth of history courses offered in American schools. The commission called for the introduction of history in grade school, recommended the study of American history, Western Civilization, and world history, and suggested that students take no fewer than four years of history between grades 7 and 12. In addition to increasing course requirements, the commission proposed a number of principles for history education: that the study of history “should focus on broad, significant themes and questions, rather than the short-term memorization of facts”; that it should be “uncomplicated, clear in its scope and sequence, as opposed to the overloaded, overambitious curricular instructions common in social studies”; and, that it should “provide an ordered developmental sequence of increasing challenge and sophistication, based on current knowledge of learning styles and stages of intellectual development in students.” In addition, the Commission encouraged the teaching of “inclusive history encompassing women, ethnic minorities, and men and women of all classes and conditions”; and, finally, pointed out that “for too long, educational policy has been mandated from the top down” and thus stressed the need to include teachers in curriculum development and the policy making process.[4] A radical concept

In between the publication of What Do Our 17 Year Olds Know? and Building A History Curriculum, the California State Board of Education adopted The History-Social Science Framework for California Public Schools. Written primarily by Ravitch and Charlotte Crabtree – a professor of education at UCLA – the Framework quickly became, as Linda Symcox describes, “a model and rallying point for history-centered curricula nationwide.”[5]

In many ways, the California Framework actualized the claims and prescriptions of Ravitch, Finn, and the Bradley Commission. It mandated three history curriculums: primary (K-3), middle (4-8) and secondary (9-12) with American history studied in grades 5,8, and 11 and world history/Western Civilization in grades 6,7, and 10. As State Superintendent of Education Bill Honig proudly stated in the forward, “This framework places history at the center of the social sciences and the humanities where it belongs.”[6] Indeed, the Framework presented chronological history as the means to promote a number of “literacies” (historical, ethical, cultural, geographic, economic, sociopolitical), nurture democratic citizenship, and develop critical thinking skills. The bulk of the Framework was devoted to “course descriptions” for each grade level – narrative summaries of the different themes and units covered during the year. Overall, the Framework urged the “study of major historical events in depth as opposed to superficial skimming of enormous amounts of material” and claimed to offer “a sequential curriculum, one in which knowledge and understanding are built up in a carefully planned and systematic fashion from kindergarten through grade twelve.”[7]

By most accounts, the development of the Framework was a relatively harmonious process. In a review of the adoption, Dianne Massell noted that the 20 members of the Framework’s Criteria Committee worked within a “narrow zone of consensus.”[8] The committee consisted of a balance of policy makers, academics, curriculum specialists, school administrators, and teachers united in the goal of replacing the state’s social studies curriculum with narrative history that emphasized American and western “ideals.” Certainly, this was the objective of the primary authors Ravitch and Crabtree. Tells you something about the makeup of the commission. According to Massell, this resulted in “limited deliberation” and greatly facilitated the creation of the Framework’s first edition. This is not to suggest, however, that the Framework was free from public scrutiny. The Curriculum Commission distributed 550 copies of the Framework to schools, districts, county offices, and universities across the state and received 1,700 reviews from teachers, administrators, professors and parents during the adoption process. Moreover, in order to discuss and promote the Framework, the State Department of Education sponsored 11 conferences, attended by over 500 people. The vast majority of the feedback and public discussions, Massell claimed, were enthusiastic and supportive.

Opposition to the Framework focused almost exclusively on the document’s patriotic conceptions of history. Critics such as professors Ronald Evans and Catherine Cornbleth, and journalist Dexter Waugh argued that the Framework stressed the progress, unity, and Christian values of American history but downplayed diversity and overlooked racism, economic inequality, and the costs of American expansion and imperialism. In a critique appearing in the Educational Researcher, Cornbleth and Waugh dismissed Honig, Ravitch and Crabtree as “neo-nativists” ouch! attempting to force “a happy brand of multiculturalism that cast everyone into the same immigrant mold” on California’s diverse student population. Honig, a self-described liberal, defended the Framework’s “balanced picture” of history and claimed it focused “both on the struggle to make American ideals a reality as well as when that reality has fallen short” and dismissed Cornbleth and Waugh as “extreme multiculturalists.” [9]

Despite such rancorous exchanges, debate over the Framework remained, for the most part, relegated to a few isolated journal articles.[10] While it featured arguments reflective of the larger cultural debates of the late 1980s and early 1990s, pitting neo-conservatives against the politically correct, it never approached the degree of enmity that surrounded the development of the national history standards.[11] Most of the literature and debate surrounding the Framework were not focused on the nature of its historical content, but rather on how to implement the new curriculum in the classroom.[12]

The 1990s: California’s System of Accountability for History Education

While California policymakers promoted the new Framework’s history curriculum, the standards based reform movement gained momentum at the national level. In 1989, at the Charlottesville Governor’s Summit, President Bush and a bipartisan group of governors met to discuss the problems identified by A Nation at Risk. The conference concluded by issuing six goals that became the hallmark for both the Bush and Clinton administrations’ educational policies: these included increasing high school graduation rates by 90%, increasing assessments in core subjects across grade levels, and, by the year 2000, achieving the best scores in the world for math and reading.

The Governors conference spurred a series of national events and legislation aimed towards achieving these objectives. After formally announcing the conference’s goals in his 1990 State of the Union address, Bush created the National Education Goals Panel (NEGP) and the National Council on Educational Standards and Tests (NCEST) to help develop voluntary national standards and assessments. In 1994, President Clinton, who had played a central role in the Charlottesville conference, signed the Goals 2000: Educate America Act, which, amongst other things, allocated funding for the development of state standards and assessments in order to spur and measure progress on the goals devised at the Governor’s summit. Later that year, Clinton strengthened this legislation by requiring states to develop and implement subject-specific standards and assessments in order to receive Title I funds through the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary School Act.

In California, Governor Pete Wilson followed suit and accelerated the movement towards standards and accountability in the state by signing into law the California Assessment of Academic Achievement Act in 1995. This measure called for the State Board of Education to oversee the creation of “academically rigorous content standards” and to “adopt tests that yield valid, reliable estimates of school performance and statewide pupil performance that assess basic academic skills.”[13] By 1998, the Academic Standards Commission had developed specific content and analysis standards for history that aligned with the History-Social Science Framework. The Department of Education adopted the History-Social Science Content Standards for California Public Schools on October 9, 1998 and integrated these standards into the Framework in 2001.

The adoption and addition of the History-Social Science Content Standards fundamentally changed the Framework. For one thing, it made the document less suggestive and more prescriptive. Instead of providing general “course descriptions” to guide instruction, the Framework now included hundreds of specific items - content standards - to be taught at each grade level: 134 for grades K-5, 175 for grades 6-8 and 203 for grades 10-12. The Standards Commission also created “analysis standards” to help students develop “the critical thinking skills that historians and social scientists employ to study the past.”[14] These standards were divided into three categories - “Chronological and Spatial Thinking,” “Historical Research, Evidence, and Point of View” and “Historical Interpretation”- and split into three levels: twelve analysis standards for grades K-5, twelve for grades 6-8, and fourteen for grades 10-12.

As State Superintendent of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin described, the content and analysis standards were intended to facilitate the implementation of the Framework’s history curriculum. The original course descriptions lacked precision and were therefore subject to different interpretations. The content standards addressed this problem by “explicitly” defining “the content that students need to acquire at each grade level from kindergarten to 12th grade.”[15] This in turn clarified for teachers exactly what to teach and for the state and districts to align curriculum and resources with the content of history courses with more precision. In addition, the content standards made it easier to align traditional forms of standardized tests with the history curriculum and therefore provide efficient means for assessing student knowledge of history.

Despite the profound impact it made upon the History-Social Science Framework, the development and adoption of the California content standards received little attention and generated almost no debate. In a report commissioned by the Center for the Study of Evaluation (CSE) to assess the “democratic nature” of the Academic Standards Commission, Lorraine McDonnell and Stephen Weatherford noted that while the establishment of content standards for math and science was marred by tensions between the commission and the State Board of Education, philosophical disagreements between commission members, and negative newspaper coverage, the history standards “were prepared with little controversy.” [16]

The authors attributed this to several factors. For one thing, the Standards Commission accepted the existing History-Social Science Framework and agreed to supplement it by drawing from Virginia’s and Massachusetts’s state standards. Further, there were apparently “no major differences in curricular philosophy” among commission members concerning history education; in fact, the report argued that the only disagreements arose over specific content items, and that these were easily settled. Finally, McDonnell and Weatherford noted that while the commission held five regional hearings on the history standards, only 54 people testified and 70 percent of the comments received by the commission related to these standards were positive.

Overall, it appears that by 1998, debates over what history to teach in California schools had largely cooled and taken a backseat to arguments regarding math and science standards. Good point Since 1998, in fact, there have been only a small handful of publications regarding the History-Social Science Framework. Most of them continue to focus on ways to implement the standards.[17] In general, the Framework, continues to receive high marks – particularly from those associated with its creation. In The Language Police, published in 2004, Diane Ravitch deemed the California standards simply “the best” because they identify the ideas, events and individuals that students should learn about.”[18] The Fordham Foundation continually rates the Framework’s history standards “as the best in the nation,” and even the American Federation of Teachers ranks them highly due to the specificity of the content standards.[19]

In the spring of 1998, the Department of Education further consolidated standards based instruction in California by initiating the STAR (Standardized Testing and Reporting) Program. Created by Senate Bill 376 in October of 1997, the STAR program relied upon the national, norm-referenced Stanford 9 tests to assess the history/social science skills of 9th, 10th, and 11th graders as part of its broader mandate to test reading, math, language, and spelling for all public school students in grades 2 through 11. In 1999, the Public Schools Accountability Act (PSAA) formalized California’s accountability system by creating the Academic Performance Index (API) - a 1000-point measure of school performance levels based on the results of statewide testing. The PSAA made the STAR program “high stakes” by authorizing the publication of school test results and state interventions for underperforming schools. Today, the API helps determine if a school makes AYP (Adequate Yearly Progress) under the No Child Left Behind legislation.[20]

In 2002, the Department of Education introduced the California Standards Tests (CSTs), which completely replaced the Stanford-9 in the spring of 2003. This marked the consolidation of provisions set forth by the Assessment of Academic Achievement Act of 1995: content standards in each core curriculum with tests developed specifically to measure student and school progress on the standards.

Today, the system of standards based history instruction and accountability is firmly in place. At its foundation are the content and analysis standards of the History-Social Science Framework. Three California Standards Tests measure the teaching and learning of the history standards: the 8th grade exam consists of 75 multiple choice questions covering the standards for grades 6-8 while the 10th and 11th grade tests each include 60 multiple choice questions to assess the 10th and 11th grade standards respectively. Results of these tests account for approximately 15-20 percent of a school’s API.

Promise, Problems, and Paradox

So far, California’s system of accountability for history education has not received a significant amount of public scrutiny or criticism. The system is relatively new and its various impacts have yet to be measured. Most of the literature on the Framework continues to revolve around how to “teach the standards”; moreover, the California Standards Tests have, so far, avoided major criticisms. In fact, to the best of my knowledge, there are no published analyses of the California Standards Tests for History-Social Science.[21] However, while there are both vociferous critics and supporters of high stakes testing, studies have shown that, for the most part, the general public approves of standards based accountability and instruction.[22] Supporters of California’s history standards and tests claim that the standards are “world class” and “rigorous” and that the tests are reliable, valid and fair.[23] At its best, this system of standards based accountability promotes history education by mandating that students in California public schools receive significant amounts of history instruction. In this regard, the system fulfills a major promise of the movement for history reform as it emerged in the 1980s.

Nonetheless, there are several problems with standards-based history education as it now exists in California. Some of the system’s shortcomings, in fact, may be significant enough to undermine the teaching and learning of history. Interesting A number of issues warrant consideration – in particular, the amount, complexity, and organization of material covered by the Framework and assessed by the CSTs, and the alignment of the history-social science test questions with the content and analysis standards they purport to measure.

The size and organization of the content domains prescribed by the Framework pose a number of problems. Take, for example, the amount of history covered at the middle and high school grades. In middle school, 6th graders study ancient history from the “lifestyles of prehistoric peoples” to the Roman Empire, 7th graders cover world history from AD 500 to 1789, and 8th graders explore American history from the Colonial Era to World War I. At the high school level, 10th graders study world history from the early 1700s to the present, and 11th graders explore American history from the Industrial Era to the present. There are 48 content standards for 6th grade, 69 for 8th grade, 48 for 10th, and 70 for 11th. These numbers are somewhat misleading, however, for most of the individual content standards include multiple items. Take, for example, 8th grade standard 8.9.5:

Analyze the significance of the State’s rights Doctrine, the Missouri Compromise (1820), the Wilmot Proviso (1846), the Compromise of 1850, Henry Clay’s role in the Missouri Compromise and the Compromise of 1850, the Kansas Nebraska Act (1854), the Dred Scott v. Sanford decision (1857), and the Lincoln-Douglas debates (1858).[24]

Such density is representative of the vast majority of the content standards in the Framework; students and teachers are therefore accountable not for dozens, but rather hundreds of specific historical items at every grade level.[25] Sounds like the makings of a possible convoluted mess

In addition to the amount of history covered by the Framework, there are issues concerning the organization and complexity of the standards. Beyond the subject matter covered, few differences distinguish the content standards by grade level. The density and sophistication are, for the most part, static between the middle and secondary grades (appendix A); these standards ask students across grades to learn comparable amounts of historical content and perform similar types of tasks. In this regard, the Framework’s content standards fail to consider the cognitive, emotional, social, and physical maturity of students at different grade levels.

The California Standards Tests reflect and reinforce these shortcomings. The fact that the CSTs consist entirely of multiple choice questions asking, almost exclusively, for students to recall information makes the level of complexity between the tests almost indistinguishable (appendix B). Further, these multiple-choice questions align poorly with the Framework’s standards. All of the questions relate to specific standards; however, where the vast majority of the content standards call for students to “analyze,” “explain,” “examine,” “understand,” “discuss,” and “describe,” most of the test questions push students to do little more than identify and associate a wide range of names, dates, places, and ideas (appendix C).[26] wow; that certainly seems problematic An increasing body of research suggests that teacher’s tend to align their instruction to the content and format of high stakes tests.[27] If this is the case, then the CSTs may reduce the Framework to little more than a compendium of historical facts geared towards short-term memorization. Is this type of critique where you’re going for the dissertation? Could be interesting if it hasn’t been done before

Throughout the development of California’s system of accountability, numerous policymakers stressed the importance of formulating policy informed by research. Indeed, the authors of the Framework claim its content is based “on current and confirmed research.”[28] However, there is little evidence that the Framework has been informed by the research on historical thinking which, ironically, proliferated over the past twenty years.[29] Indeed, while the Framework expanded and became more prescriptive, empirical studies confirmed, for example, that in order to develop historical understanding students must cover material in depth and revisit concepts several times; that inquiry, rather than the memorization of facts, develops the conceptual frameworks necessary for retaining historical knowledge; that students are more likely to engage in history if they find it relevant to their lives; and, that students pass through different levels of sophistication in terms of historical thinking and understanding.[30] The quantity, complexity, and organization, of the Framework’s content standards simply do not correlate with these findings. The fact that the content standards have developed to become the central component for history accountability in the state illustrates one of the central paradoxes of the standards-based reform movement for history education as it developed over the past twenty years in California: In attempting to insure that significant amounts of history are taught in public schools, we have created a system that may promote some of the worst ways to teach and learn history.

Conclusions

Overall, the California Framework, as part of a system of accountability for history education, has departed from, and in many instances, contradicts the central goals and intentions of the history reform movement that led to its creation in the 1980s. In fact, today, the Framework may undermine virtually every recommendation of the Bradley Commission: it encourages the short-term memorization of facts; its “inclusiveness” is questionable; it is primarily a top down reform, forced upon schools by national and state mandates; it is complicated and dense in scope and organization, developmentally unsound, and not informed by the latest educational research. Some of these contradictions existed within the first edition of the Framework; however, on its own, the original Framework was a suggestive document that allowed teachers a large degree of choice in deciding what topics to study. Such flexibility has been lost over the past twenty years, first with the adoption of content standards, then the development of the STAR testing program, and finally with the enactment of the California Standards Tests.

In attempting to implement the Framework, increase achievement, and hold teachers and schools accountable, California’s system of standards-based history education developed over time, a product of various policymakers working at both the national and state level. This process illustrates many of the trade-offs, compromises, and unintended consequences of educational reform. In this instance, the history reform movement that emerged in the 1980s, as represented by the History-Social Science Framework, developed and morphed within the national and state movements towards accountability in the 1990s. The result has been a system of standards-based history education that could benefit from some of the reforms advocated by its founders.

This year marks the twentieth anniversary of the Framework; it is thus a fitting time for a reappraisal of this landmark document and a discussion of how we can devise a better system for promoting history instruction in California.

A

Appendix A: Examples of content standards from the California Framework for History Social Science.

• 7.1.1: Study the early strength and lasting contributions of Rome (e.g., significance of Roman citizenship; rights under Roman Law; Roman art, architecture, engineering, and philosophy; preservation and transmission of Christianity) and its ultimate internal weaknesses (e.g., rise of autonomous military powers within the empire, undermining of citizenship by the growth of corruption and slavery, lack of education, and distribution of news).

• 8.9.5: Analyze the significance of the States’ Rights Doctrine, the Missouri Compromise (1820), the Wilmot Proviso (1846), the Compromise of 1850, Henry Clay’s role in the Missouri Compromise and the Compromise of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854), the Dred Scott v. Sanford decision (1857, and the Lincoln-Douglas Debates.

• 11.5.2: Analyze the international and domestic events, interests and philosophies that prompted attacks on civil liberties, including the Palmer Raids, Marcus Garvey’s “back-to-Africa” movement, the Ku Klux Klan, and immigration quotas and the responses of organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the Anti-Defamation League to those attacks.

Appendix B: Sample Questions from the 8th, 10th, and 11th grade California Standards Test for History-Social Science respectively.

States’ rights played a major role in all of the following except

a) Kentucky and Virginia Resolves

b) Missouri Compromise

c) Nullification Crises

d) Monroe Doctrine

Unlike the French Revolution, the American Revolution produced

a) women’s suffrage

b) short-term military rule

c) a lasting constitution

d) strategic alliances

Social Security was a New Deal Program designed to

a) foster the growth of trade unions

b) promote recovery through economic development

c) give direct aid to American businesses

d) provide a minimum retirement income

Appendix C: Alignment of the California Standards Test questions with the Framework’s content and analysis standards.

|Content Standard 11.5.2: Analyze the international and domestic events, interests and philosophies that prompted attacks on civil |

|liberties, including the Palmer Raids, Marcus Garvey’s “back-to-Africa” movement, the Ku Klux Klan, and immigration quotas and the |

|responses of organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored |

|People, and the Anti-Defamation League to those attacks. |

| |

|Test question used in 2004 to assess student knowledge of this standard: |

| |

|Marcus Garvey’s program in the 1920s emphasized |

|a) vocational training |

|b) a back-to-Africa movement |

|c) integration into mainstream society |

|d) separate-but-equal doctrines |

|Content Standard 6.7.8: Discuss the legacies of Roman art and architecture, technology and science, literature, language and law. |

| |

|Test question used in 2003 to assess student knowledge of this standard: |

| |

|The origins of checks and balances in the United States can |

|be traced to: |

| |

|a) the French Republic |

|b) the Roman Republic |

|c) the Greek Aristocracy |

|d) the Aztec Empire |

|Analysis Skill CS2: Students analyze how change happens at different rates at different times; that some aspects can change while |

|others remain the same; and understand that change is complicated and affects not only technology and politics but also values and |

|beliefs. |

| |

|Test question used in 2003 to assess student knowledge of this standard: |

| |

|Which religious group has had the greatest increase in |

|membership due to the increasing immigration from |

|Latin American countries to the United States over the |

|last fifty years? |

| |

|a) Catholics |

|b) Muslims |

|c) Jews |

|d) Protestants |

|Analysis Skill HR4: Students construct and test hypothesis; collect, evaluate, and employ information from multiple primary and |

|secondary sources; and apply it in oral and written presentations. |

| |

|Test question used in 2004 to assess student knowledge of this standard: |

| |

|The streets were hot and dusty on the summer day. Stokers emerged from low underground doorways into factory yards, and sat on |

|steps, and posts, and palings, wiping swarthy visages, and contemplating coals. The whole town seemed to be frying in oil. There|

|was the stifling smell of hot oil everywhere. |

| |

|-Charles Dickens, Hard Times, 1854 |

| |

|The historical era most likely referred to in this quotation is the: |

| |

|a) Industrial Revolution |

|b) Great Awakening |

|c) French Revolution |

|d) Enlightenment |

-----------------------

[1] National Commission on Excellence in Education, A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform (Washington D.C.: GPO, 1983).

[2] Diane Ravitch and Chester Finn, What Do Our 17-Year-Olds Know? A Report of the First National Assessment of History and Literature (New York: Harper and Row, 1987), 200.

[3] The Bradley Commission on History in Schools, “Building a History Curriculum: Guidelines for Teaching History in Schools” in Historical Literacy: The Case for History in American Education, ed. Paul Gagnon (New York: Macmillan, 1989), 21, 26-27.

[4] ibid., 36-38.

[5] Linda Symcox, Whose History: The Struggle for National Standards in American Classrooms (New York: Teachers College Press, 2002), 69.

[6] California State Department of Education, History-Social Science Framework for California Public Schools (Sacramento, CA: California State Department of Education, 1988), vii.

[7] ibid., 4-7.

[8] Dianne Massell, “Setting Standards in Mathematics and Social Studies,” Education and Urban Society 26 no.2 (February 1994), 129.

[9] Catherine Cornbleth and Dexter Waugh, “The Great Speckled Bird: Education in the Making,” Educational Researcher 22 no.7 (October 1993), 31-37; Bill Honig, “An Exchange of Views on the ‘The Great Speckled Bird’,” Educational Researcher 24 no.6 (August 1995), 22-27

[10] For another example of such an exchange see Evans’ “Diane Ravitch and the Revival of History: A Critique” and Ravitch’s response, “The Revival of History: A Response,” The Social Studies 80 no.3 (May/June 1989), 85-92.

[11] For the definitive account of the ill-fated attempt to develop national history standards, see Gary Nash, Charlotte Crabtree, and Ross Dunn’s History on Trial: Culture Wars and The Teaching of The Past (Westminster: Random House, 1998).

[12] For example in the Fall of 1988 The Social Studies Review dedicated an entire edition to the Framework, featuring articles focused on issues of implementation.

[13] California Assessment Academic Achievement Act. A.B. 265, Chapter 975, February 6, 1995.

[14] California State Department of Education, History-Social Science Framework (Sacramento, CA: California State Department of Education, 2001), vi.

[15] California State Department of Education, History-Social Science Content Standards for California Pubic Schools (Sacramento, CA: California State Department of Education, 1998), iv.

[16] Lorraine McDonnell and StephenWeatherford, “State Standards Setting and Public Deliberation: The Case of California,”CRESST Report No. 506 (Los Angeles: Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing, 1999), 41.

[17] The one notable exception to this is Stillman and Sleeter’s “Standardizing Knowledge in a Multicultural Society,” which quietly appeared in the Curriculum Reader 35 no. 1( 2005), 27-46. In a critique of the history content standards, Stillman and Sleeter quantified the demographic characteristics of people mentioned, and found the Framework’s multiculturalism lacking. They reported that of all the people appearing in the standards, 82% were male, 18% female, 77% white, 18% African-American, 4% Native American, 1% Latino, and 0% Asian American .

[18] Diane Ravitch, The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn (New York: Random House, 2004), 138.

[19] Chester Finn and M. Pertrilli (eds.), The State of State Standards (Washington, D.C.: Fordham Foundation, 2000), 34.

[20] Expanding the role of federal government in education, the Bush administration’s reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Schools Act in 2002, the No Child Left Behind Act, applied pressure to states, districts, and schools to implement standards by tying federal funding to school performance on standards-based assessments. Good use of footnotes

[21] This is not surprising. For one thing, the tests are relatively new; for another, they are fairly inaccessible due to the secretive and closed nature of high stakes testing. Another good use of footnotes

[22] Richard Phelps, “The Demand for Standardized Student Testing,” Educational Measurement: Issues and Practices 17 no. 3 (Fall 1998), 5-23; “Whiplash From Backlash? The Truth About Public Support for Testing,” NCME Newsletter 9 no. 3 (September 2001).

[23] Quote from State Superintendent of Instruction Delaine Eastin in History-Social Science Content Standards for California Pubic Schools, iv.

[24] California State Department of Education, History-Social Science Framework (Sacramento, CA: California State Department of Education, 2001), 114.

[25] In grade 7 students and teachers are held accountable for approximately 276 specific items; 251 in 8th grade, 206 in 10th, and 267 in 11th grade. This is not to suggest that the Framework focuses exclusively on content. The analysis standards are geared towards the development of historical thinking skills and tend to be more developmentally appropriate than the content standards. This sequence of standards promotes an increasing sophistication of historical thinking skills from elementary classrooms to high schools. However, the analysis skills sections of the Framework constitute a small fraction of the state’s history standards. In fact, they are hardly noticeable - a mere three pages in a two hundred and thirty four page document.

[26] Due to such problems the validity of the CSTs is questionable. This is particularly true for the 8th grade test, which covers all of the standards (175) for grades 6,7, and 8 and thus measures student knowledge of thousands of years of history, from the Paleolithic Era to the First World War.

[27] For examples of such research see Sandra Cimbricz, “State-mandated Testing and Teachers’ Beliefs and Practice, Educational Policy Analysis Archives, 10 no.2 (January 2002), 1-22; William Firestone, D. Mayrowetz, and J. Fairman, “Performance-based Assessment and Instructional Change: The Effects of Testing in Maine and Maryland” Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 20 no. 2 (1998), 95-113; A. Segall, “The Impact of State-mandated Testing According to Social Studies Teachers: The Michigan Educational Assessment Program (MEAP) as A Case Study of Consequences,” Theory and Research in Social Education, 31 no.5 (2003), 287-325; Kenneth Vogler, “Impact of a High School Graduate Examination on Mississippi History Teachers' Instructional Practices,” in S. Grant (Ed). Measuring History: Cases of High Stakes Testing Across the States, ed. S. Grant (Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing, 2006).

[28] History-Social Science Framework (Sacramento, CA: California State Department of Education, 2001), vi.

[29] For the two definitive collections of this research see: Mario Carretero and James F. Voss, eds., Cognitive and Instructional Processes in History and the Social Sciences (Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, 1994); and, Peter N. Stearns, Peter Seixas, and Sam Wineburg, eds., Knowing, Teaching, and Learning History: National and International Perspectives (New York: New York University Press, 2000).

[30] Peter Seixas, “The Community of Inquiry as A Basis for Knowledge and Learning: The Case of History,” American Educational Research Journal, 30 (1993) 305-324; R. Caine and G. Caine, Making Connections: Teaching and The Human Brain (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1994); Isabel Beck and Margaret Mckeown, “Outcomes of History Instruction: Paste-up Accounts,” in Mario Carretero and James F. Voss, eds., Cognitive and Instructional Processes in History and the Social Sciences; Denis Shemilt, “The Caliph’s Coin: The Currency of Narrative Frameworks in History Teaching,” in Peter N. Stearns, Peter Seixas, and Sam Wineburg, eds., Knowing, Teaching, and Learning History: National and International Perspectives; Sam Wineburg, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past (Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 2001).

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