Correcting the course: the assessment loop.(Essay)

Background

In January 2002 President George W. Bush signed into law "An Act to close the achievement gap with accountability, flexibility, and choice, so that no child is left behind." (1) This "No Child Left Behind" (NCLB) law expanded federal jurisdiction of elementary and secondary schooling in the United States, which, from the founding of this country until the Lyndon B. Johnson administration, had been under the sole jurisdiction of state and local governments. NCLB also mandated the states to set standards for students from kindergarten through twelfth grade and to develop standardized assessments of student learning in mathematics, English, and science. The law required improvements in schools where the majority of students were failing, and it also required states to provide for student transfers from schools with failing records to schools where students were meeting statewide assessment standards.

While the discipline of history was not part of NCLB, history and social studies had been included in earlier and ongoing federal initiatives to evaluate student learning, in National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests developed as a result of Reagan administration initiatives in the Department of Education. (2) The NAEP tests did and still do include testing of students' knowledge of history facts. However, with the adoption of NCLB and its additional provisions for transfers and for attaching school funding to student performance levels in NCLB-mandated state tests, the result is that many teachers in school districts across the country teach to the English, math, and science tests and neglect history and the rest of the curriculum that is not subjected to NCLB scrutiny. The Department of Education provides Teaching American History (TAH) grants to fund programs proposed by local education agencies and their history partners to promote "traditional American history." (3) But TAH programs often have limited application, and nowhere do they compensate for the losses that social studies teaching and learning have suffered from programs that redirect curriculum, teaching time, and educational resources to meet NCLB standards. While all these programs deal with federal standards and state and local oversight of K-12 learning, post-secondary assessment plans are underway that will affect the teaching and learning of history and other disciplines and interdisciplinary studies in American colleges and universities.

In the fall of 2006 the United States Department of Education, headed by Secretary Margaret Spellings, issued a lengthy report, "A Test of Leadership: Charting the Course of American Higher Education." (4) The report begins by noting that the federal government has made no significant decisions on American higher education since World War II when Congress passed the GI Bill of Rights and that American college and university graduates are falling behind graduates in math and the sciences at peer institutions in other countries, including nations with considerably fewer resources and far less stable pasts than the U.S. Then it calls for American colleges and universities to improve performance levels and to demonstrate that they are doing so. The report also recommends tying institutional accreditation--which ties to federal funding--to overall assessments of student learning in these public and private colleges and universities. Implicit in the Spellings Report is the message that if colleges and accrediting agencies continue to fail in their mission to ensure competitive learning in America's post-secondary institutions, then the federal government should take measures to correct this problem. Also implicit in the report is the suggestion that poorly- and non-performing schools should lose federal funding.

Recently the National History Center, with support from the Teagle Foundation, has convened several extraordinary conversations on history and history teaching and the differences in how history departments and history professors and how history education departments and education professors perceive what is and should be taught in the history classroom. (5) These meetings have suggested there are common grounds shared by some members of history and education departments, and that, if we historians do not embrace assessment on our own terms, others will impose assessment standards--and teaching agendas--upon us and our colleagues in the other academic disciplines. These standards will be enforced by accrediting agencies and those who choose to ignore them will risk losing accreditation and federal funding tied to accreditation.

Those of us who teach history at the post-secondary level know full well that our students are learning ...