What Happens When History Teachers No Longer Understand the Founding?
Sandra Stotsky
Published in Academic Questions
Summer, 2004, pp. 21-51

The Problem

Many K-12 teachers who teach history today suffer from a crippling defect-a minimal knowledge of history. But in the Alice in Wonderland world created several decades ago by schools of education and state departments of education, they are nonetheless licensed to teach history.

In its application for a Teaching American History (TAH) grant, one large county in a relatively poor state candidly admitted that "even though all its teachers of American history are certified, few elementary and middle grade teachers are qualified to teach it." In grade 8, it explained, teachers of U.S. history may hold an elementary license for grades 1-8 that does not require one course in U.S. history, or they may have a social studies major-a major that does not focus on U.S. history. It further pointed out that those who teach United States history in grade 5 may not have taken a single U.S. history course in college.

Are wealthy counties much better off? In an application for a TAH grant from one of the wealthiest counties in the country, school officials provided a chart showing that 52% of its grade 8 U.S. history teachers have neither a history nor a social studies license, that 38% of its grade 9 U.S. history teachers have neither a history nor a social studies license, and that a whopping 86% of the English as a Second Language teachers who teach U.S. history classes for ESL students at eight county high schools have not had a single course in U.S. history. The latter teach students who are new to this country. The applicants didn't say these teachers were unlicensed. Most if not all are probably licensed to teach students in grade 8 or 9 or ESL classes any subject that could be taught in those grades. The teachers are simply academically unqualified to teach them. The requirement in the No Child Left Behind legislation for teachers to be "highly qualified" is finally compelling school districts across the country to pay attention to the academic deficiencies of their staff, especially in the middle school. These two counties reflect a nationwide problem.

In this essay, I explain how we got to the point in public education where teachers can be licensed to teach subjects in K-9 they are not academically qualified to teach. My chief purpose is to suggest where energies might be directed at a time when most of those who teach U.S. history in grade 8 or 9 may have little or no understanding of our founding documents, political principles, and political institutions. I draw on my experience as a reviewer of applications for Teaching American History grants, as the administrator in the Massachusetts Department of Education in charge of revising the state's licensing regulations for teacher training programs and the teacher tests based on these regulations, and as the director of a We the People summer institute for history and government teachers for the past five years, co-sponsored by the Lincoln and Therese Filene Foundation and the Center for Civic Education in California. .

Evidence of Minimal Knowledge

Are large numbers of history teachers really ignorant of history even if academically unqualified to teach it? After all, they can still read history on their own. The Stealth Curriculum: Manipulating America 's History Teachers , a report released by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation in April 2004, presents both indirect and direct evidence to answer that question. In this report, I described the contents of a range of published curriculum materials that history teachers across the country are using to supplement their classroom textbooks. I also presented an analysis of the lesson plans prepared by a group of Massachusetts teachers after they had attended professional development workshops on early American or Islamic history.

The following episode provides indirect evidence. In a set of curricular materials on Islamic history highly recommended by professional educators for secondary school students, Arab World Study Notebook , an article co-authored by the editor of the Notebook claims not only that Muslims from Europe were the first to sail across the Atlantic and land in the New World, starting in 889, but also that they reached Canada where they intermarried with the Iroquois and Algonquin nations so that, much later, English explorers met "Iroquois and Algonquin chiefs with names like Abdul-Rahim and Abdallah Ibn Malik." In November 2003, the Quebec-based Algonquin Nation Secretariat finally found out about the information that was being given out on its tribal history and issued an "alert" requesting an apology for, and correction of, "such nonsense." According to its website, the Notebook has been distributed to 1200 teachers in workshops in 155 cities across the country in the past five years. Yet, so far as can be determined, not one of these 1200 teachers has ever issued a complaint about the Notebook or notified a local newspaper editor. In response to my query, a staff member at the National Council for the Social Studies indicated that it has no mechanism for responding to complaints about errors its members find in the teaching materials they use, or for informing members of errors reported to it.

As direct evidence, the lesson plans produced by 23 Massachusetts teachers after they had attended an institute on Islamic history in 2002 indicated that were planning to teach their students, among other things, that Mohammad's life and revelation are historical knowledge, that "Peoples of the Book" refers to Muslims, Christians, and Jews, and that the Koran includes the Old and New Testament. These teachers also planned to have their students learn about the religious beliefs and practices of Muslims by building classroom mosques, making prayer rugs, listening to tape recordings of the Koran being chanted, learning how to make a hajj, writing from memory the Five Pillars of Islam, and dressing up as a Muslim from a country of their choice for a class presentation. In addition, they planned to culminate classroom units on Islam with museum-like projects "celebrating the rise of Islam." These history teachers apparently did not realize that they had learned fake history from the experts on Islam they had been exposed to at an institute co-directed by two Harvard graduate students, one the Outreach Coordinator at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard. Nor did these teachers seem to be aware that they were proposing to teach about Islam in ways they would never use (or dare to use) to teach about Christianity, Judaism, or any other religion.

Can Teachers' Lack of Knowledge Be Ignored?

Intellectual vacuums can easily suck in civic poison from the some of the numerous organizations that provide professional development workshops on citizenship education. Facing History and Ourselves (FHAO), for example, regularly provides scrupulously accurate and comprehensive information about the Holocaust to thousands of social studies, history, and English teachers across the country. But its basic thrust is to make sure that American students see the task of confronting white racism in America as the chief reason for studying the Holocaust. To do so, FHAO makes false analogies to a catastrophic historical event, setting up a moral equivalence between Nazis and white Americans. It makes explicit and frequent comparisons in its 1994 resource book not only between 20th century America and 20th century Germany but also between 19th century America and 19th century Germany-comparisons that teachers apparently accept as valid. (I knew of no complaints during the years I worked at the Massachusetts Department of Education.) By using the Holocaust to portray America 's blacks as Europe 's Jews, FHAO manages to reduce murder to an act of bigotry as well as to equate white Americans with Nazis.

The purpose of the supplementary resource book FHAO published in 2002, titled Race and Membership in American History: The Eugenics Movement (RMAH), is even more poisonous. RMAH makes it clear that few American scientists subscribed to the eugenics movement by World War II. Nevertheless, the chapters on "The Nazi Connection" so cleverly connect Hitler's use of the ideas of German scientists on racial "eugenics" to an acknowledgment of the leadership of American scientists, educators, and policy makers in the eugenics movement that Americans appear almost directly responsible for the "Final Solution." While science teachers are unlikely to address the eugenics movement in science classes because it had no real influence on German or American science, scientifically and historically illiterate social studies, history, and English teachers can easily inflate its importance in their classes and unwittingly encourage students to infer that Americans and American science, however indirectly, were responsible for Nazi Germany's extermination policies. Today, historical ignorance is dangerous to our civic health.

The chief reason why teacher ignorance cannot be ignored is that the major casualty may be Western political history-the evolution of the political principles and institutions characteristic of Western civilizations-and, in particular, the Founding, its philosophical and historical antecedents, its basic political principles, and the form of government it established. Older secondary school history teachers still teach it; that is what most of them studied as the core of U.S. history. But a new generation of teachers may be contributing to cultural amnesia about the Founding if what was in seven of the ten applications for a TAH grant my three-person team reviewed in April 2004 is indicative of what is being taught in many undergraduate or graduate history courses and in much of the professional development coursework for K-12 teachers across the country. In those seven randomly assigned applications, no political principle was ever mentioned. Indeed, the word itself never appeared in the applicants' own texts, which was what initially caught my attention. Nor were any seminal documents listed for study.

Content in a Random Group of Applications for a Teaching American History Grant

Political principles and founding documents were clearly mentioned in the Federal Register. It asked for

"projects that address traditional American history, meaning for example, projects that teach the significant issues, episodes, and turning points in the history of the United States , and how the words and deeds of individual Americans have determined the course of our Nation. This history teaches how the principles of freedom and democracy, articulated in our founding documents, have shaped-and continue to shape-America's struggles and achievements, as well as its social, political, and legal institutions and relations. Applicants are invited to propose projects that enable students to gain an understanding of these principles and of the historical events and people that best illustrate them."

Given this definition, we expected applicants to spell out a few of these principles and founding documents, especially since they had admitted that the participants would likely be teachers who had had little or no coursework in U.S. history.

Instead, circumlocutions abounded. In three applications, teachers were going to learn the "values of American history," whatever this mysterious phrase means. In one of them, "traditional facts" would also be taught. (One wonders what non-traditional facts might be.) Another found a different way to avoid using the key words when it listed its criteria for selecting topics: "application to a local-regional-national continuum, impact on American citizens, contribution to an understanding of contemporary issues, judgment of relevance by the profession, some aspect of historical significance, and issues related to the development of American democracy." "Issues," not political principles or founding documents, it seems, would help guide the choice of topics.

In two more applications, use of the word "principles" was avoided by the claim that they would "focus on the ideals that unify us as a nation." Drawing on very prestigious partners, one of them went on to say that it would give participating teachers an opportunity to "share the founding challenges, events, and beliefs of U.S. history" with a "new generation of Americans." What were the founding challenges or events it planned to share about the Revolutionary War period? The Boston Massacre, changes in clothing production, and Revolutionary War currency. The day devoted to the U.S. Constitution would stress the role of the president and Washington 's Farewell Address , with a follow-up meeting titled "Creating a Foreign Policy." No details were provided on the time period this last lecture would cover. Only Washington 's Farewell Address was highlighted for study, not the Constitution or the Bill of Rights.

Several other applications simply listed the names of traditional historical periods to be addressed as if this took care of the task of spelling out content. They would teach about Colonization and Settlement, Revolution and the New Nation, Expansion and Reform, and the Civil War and Reconstruction. But not a word about principles or founding documents.

Yet another planned to teach about the Colonial Period, the Civil War, and the Twentieth Century but from the perspective of a particular mid-western state. It would thus emphasize the "French, who [according to the applicants] settled the interior of North America and the Mississippi Valley at the time that the British were colonizing the east coast," helping teachers understand how "each of these colonies" interacted with "the Native American and African American populations." Needless to say, no principles or founding documents were mentioned in this application, either.

In another application, the Founding had simply vanished from its historical period. The titles of the three thematic eras it planned to address were: "Contact, Colonialism, and the Meeting of Cultures, 1492 to 1676," "Slavery, Revolution, and Civil War in America, 1676 to 1877," and "Race, Civil Rights, and the National Security State, 1877 to 2007." The applicants indicated that they would "emphasize the historical importance of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and other leading Virginians, as we simultaneously discuss the growth and importance of the slave family in African American life." Runaway slaves would be the major focus of study during the Revolutionary Period, with slave oral histories as the primary documents to be read. The applicants also promised to discuss the "role of Indians in pushing the founding fathers to Revolution." They would then move from the "intersection of slavery and the American Revolution" directly to the "early national period and the market revolution."

If it weren't for three applications that set forth what the Federal Register requested, we might have been tempted to conclude that its definition of Traditional American History wasn't clear enough. One planned to emphasize "the framing documents of American government and their relevance today," with the "foundation and organization of representative democracy in the United States " as its primary focus. Finally, a clear political principle-representative government. The application also listed ten clearly seminal documents it would include for study. A second planned to emphasize the "Foundations of American Democracy," listing the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights as the primary documents for study. (Interestingly, it was the only one of the ten applications that actually mentioned the Bill of Rights.). A third openly confessed to taking "an overall positive view of Western Civilization in general and American History in particular" after assuring its readers that it would "by no means ignore the negative aspects of History." It also promised to discuss two Post-World War II topics that never appeared in the other applications: "The Challenge to Liberal Democracy" and "The Place of the United States in a World of Terror."

I cannot know how generalizable the proportion is. But by the third annual TAH competition, it is not a healthy sign if only three of the ten applications randomly assigned to my team were interested in teaching what the Federal Register was requesting. If only about one third of all the applications received are worth funding, and even if only the right one-third are funded, the higher education history faculty and the museum staff who had partnered with the other two-thirds of the applicants are probably teaching little or nothing about our founding principles or documents to prospective or current history teachers, wherever they are located.

The effort to discredit the Constitution itself is already apparent in schools of education. A dean of a school of education in Massachusetts with a Ph.D. in American history told me in a recent conversation that I was perceived as biased towards the Constitution because of my involvement in the We the People program. In response to my request to explain what he meant, he said that in his eyes the Constitution should be viewed negatively because "it legalized slavery."

Where the Founding Period Is Taught in K-12 Today

Whether or not the Founding is disappearing from many undergraduate and graduate history curricula and from many professional development activities (except for those funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Center for Civic Education, and TAH grants), its historical and philosophical background may now be taught chiefly at grade levels where in-depth understanding is not possible for most students and, a cynic might observe, not necessary for the teacher.

Grade 5 usually provides students with their first course in U.S. history covering the Constitutional Period. The course may stop at about 1800 or go as far as the Civil War if the teacher is eager to spend a lot of time on slavery, thus treating the Constitutional Period quite skimpily. Whatever the coverage, the average fifth grader is incapable of bringing much depth of understanding to our basic political principles.

Students study U.S. history and the Founding Period again in grade 8. The placement in grade 8 is due to more than the fact that grade 8 was once the stable of that dull warhorse, civics. It is also due to the theory behind the "spiral curriculum," a way of designing a K-12 curriculum that, when applied to the study of history, made some sense at the time it was proposed decades ago. Educators believed that it made little sense to teach U.S. history from 1492 to the present in grades 5, 8, and 11, the three years that might be devoted to national history. Students never got very far into the 20 th century in grade 11. So, proponents of the spiral curriculum suggested that grade 5 go from 1492 to the War of 1812, grade 8 from the Founding Period to Reconstruction after a review of the Revolutionary War, and grade 11 from Reconstruction to the present after a review of the Founding Period. The problem is that grade 8 by default may be where the most intensive study of the Founding in a historical context takes place unless the high school provides a U.S. history survey course in grade 11 that begins with the discovery of the New World or 1620. Needless to say, if the grade at which students study the Founding Period is grade 8, it is unlikely that they will learn much if anything about the Enlightenment, John Locke, or Montesquieu, and read the Federalist Papers.

However, there is one bright star in the heavens. The Founding Period may be taught in U.S. government courses. Over half of the states now require such a course. So do many school districts in states that don't require it. In Massachusetts , 17% of the high schools require such a course. It is usually a one-semester course in grade 12, although it may be taught as a civics course in grade 9. Currently, the most popular textbook for the U.S. Government course, I am told, far exceeding the old best seller, Magruder's American Government , is Richard Remy's United States Government: Democracy in Action, published by Glencoe McGraw-Hill.  It includes chapters on the Founding Period, the Constitutional Convention, the English legal tradition, the Enlightenment era, and American colonial era antecedents to the Founding. 

Why Study of the Roots of our Civic Culture Is Shrinking in K-12

Although non-ideological reasons account for the placement of the Founding Period in grade 8, study of the origins of our civic culture is shrinking in K-12 for ideological reasons. The history of Western political thought is diminishing because of the comparative socio-cultural approach now frequently used for the study of history. The roots of Western civilization may be rendered invisible in the elementary and middle school by substituting study of early man, Neolithic communities, and a cross-cultural comparison of the River Valley Civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, and China for the traditional course of study in ancient and classical civilizations. These new topics can't be criticized on the grounds that they are not intellectually challenging. In fact, teachers complain there are few readable materials available on them for young students, struggling readers in particular. But the curricular effect of substituting a comparison of the River Valley Civilizations for the traditional course in ancient and classical civilizations is to leave no rationale for studying two significant culture-specific phenomena that helped shape Western civilization-the development of monotheism and the alphabet-and to reduce drastically the amount of time students used to devote to Ancient Greece and Rome. The Phoenicians, Israelites, Romans, and Greeks didn't live in river valleys. And when Athens and Rome are studied, attention is apt to be focused on the role of slaves and women and on the Empire period. English political history itself may be given very short shrift in world history courses that subscribe to the multiculturalist dictum that equal attention must be given to all cultures or civilizations.

The chief beneficiaries of a comparative socio-cultural approach to history are the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas and what became the United States . For the Colonial period, children may learn about only those (trivial) cultural features of the English colonies that can be compared to those of the Wampanoag and Powhatan people-their food, clothing, homes, games, etc. This approach conveniently lends itself to teaching nothing about the political, legal, and educational institutions the English created in this country because they are culture-specific. Students may also study in detail the highly developed indigenous cultures in the Americas -the Aztec, Mayan, and Incan civilizations-on the grounds that they should see native cultures in the New World (even if extinct by 1620) as more advanced than the early colonies. Topics like "Explorers and Indians" are also popular in the early grades with teachers who believe that social justice requires making sure that the Indians are seen as the victims of cruel European invaders and unknown diseases. In effect, socio-cultural approaches tend to obliterate the origins and development of our civic culture, to devalue the groups that advanced individual rights, and to create sympathy for cultures, extinct or not, that don't value individual rights.

Why Most Grade 8 History Teachers Are So Poorly Trained

Why are so many grade 8 history teachers licensed but so poorly trained? The history of the middle school is a significant part of the problem. The traditional junior high school (grades 7, 8, and 9) generally had teachers with a major or at least a minor in the subject they taught, usually to a different group of students every period. As its name suggests, it was seen as preparation for high school. Not surprisingly, educators came to view the junior high school as too academically oriented and impersonal in its organization. The middle school (most often grades 6, 7, and 8 but sometimes including 5) was proposed as a "reform" of the problematic junior high school. Young adolescents, it was claimed, needed a learning environment with more stability, more like the one they had had in elementary school. As middle schools became the dominant reality (few junior high schools are left today), most of the academically strong junior high school teachers moved up to the high school level to continue teaching. They were not interested in teaching fifth or sixth graders. Or in teaching in self-contained classrooms, teams, or clusters-ways to reduce the impersonal organization of the junior high school. The net result of this "reform" was the eventual replacement over time of academically qualified teachers by academically under-qualified teachers licensed as middle school teachers.

The middle school generalist came into being as a way to address what educators saw as the unique social and emotional needs of the young adolescent in these new middle schools, a case of function following form. The license required many courses in child development and a pot pourri of academic course work across all the subjects typically taught in 5 to 9 so that the middle school teacher could function in a self-contained classroom if that kind of classroom organization was wanted. Although the subject matter traditionally taught in each discipline in grades 7, 8, and 9 was apt to be much too demanding for this teacher, the license was popular with school administrators because it gave them flexibility to address staffing holes in the face of high teacher turnover in the middle or junior high school. As a consequence, many teachers came to be legally licensed to teach subjects in 5 through 9 for which they had few or no academic qualifications. In Massachusetts, I discovered, most of the many hundreds of teachers holding the middle school generalist license had simply "added" it to an existing elementary license-they hadn't even taken the smattering of arts and sciences courses the actual middle school licensure program required. According to the prevailing regulations, all they had to do to add the license was to take one course in adolescent psychology. That is why most if not all of the history teachers teaching grade 8 or 9 students in the wealthy county mentioned at the beginning of this essay are probably licensed but without course work in U.S. history. How could such an academically impoverished teacher have ever been justified for grades 6, 7, 8, and 9? It is a classic example of social goals and administrator convenience trumping academic standards.

Getting the Founding Period Taught in High School and by Knowledgeable Teachers

I propose a number of suggestions here, most of which could be enacted by a state board of education. Some might be encouraged by further revisions of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act or the Higher Education Act, especially under Title II provisions. Perhaps some could be considered under a new National Defense in Education Act.

1. Abandon the middle school concept : The middle school concept should be abandoned as a unit of curricular and instructional organization. Grades 7 and 8 should be conceptualized as the beginning of a curricular sequence going from grade 7 to grade 12, not the end of a curricular sequence going from kindergarten to grade 8, whether or not the grades are physically housed with grades 9-12. The idea of putting K-8 into one, albeit small, physical structure, recently floated by some professional educators, should be regarded with a jaundiced eye. Dysfunctional middle schools are a serious problem, but that is not the solution. It ties the curriculum to the elementary school, not the high school, and removes a major source of pressure on the need to increase academic demands in the elementary school curriculum, especially in reading, mathematics, and science.

2. Eliminate the spiral curriculum : The spiral curriculum has outlived its usefulness in history education as well as in other subjects. The solution we found in designing the new Massachusetts history standards was to allow for and encourage two consecutive years of study of U.S. history in grades 10 and 11, from the pre-Revolutionary War period to the present. Many U.S. history teachers in Massachusetts told department of education staff that this was the best gift they could ever have been given, whether or not they liked the new standards.

3. Require a U.S. government course addressing Western political philosophy and the Founding in-depth in grade 12 in every state. This course and the teachers who teach it need much more attention than they have received. A strong one-semester course addressing the Founding in a historical context in grade 12 will compensate for its diminished coverage in grade 10 or 11. No student should graduate from an American high school without a high school level understanding of such basic political principles as limited government, consent of the people, balance of powers, checks and balances, and an independent judiciary.

4. Create a license for teaching U.S. government and political philosophy in states where it does not exist. When licensing regulations in Massachusetts were revised in 2000, we created a new license called Political Science/Political Philosophy, and it is the license new teachers must now hold to teach U.S. government. The licensure program and the corresponding teacher test should reflect an undergraduate major or graduate coursework in government and political philosophy. Prospective teachers can easily take courses equivalent to a minor in U.S. history so that they can be licensed in both subjects and be more employable in small high schools. Today, it is not clear that a social studies or history major necessarily addresses Western political history and thought.

5. Eliminate the social studies license and, wherever it still exists, the middle school generalist license as well. Teachers licensed to teach history at the high school level should be history majors, and middle school teachers who teach history should have either a history license or a content-rich middle school license.

6. Require re-accreditation of a the history education programs in a state's institutions of higher education by a professional association dedicated only to the discipline of history if program approval is carried out jointly by a national organization (e.g., NCATE or TEAC) and a state's own re-accreditation agency. Similarly for U.S. government education programs.

7. Require demanding teacher tests in U.S. and world history and in U.S. government that stress the history of Western political thought and the Enlightenment . Most existing teacher tests in history or social studies could easily be passed by a good high school student. At present, the two major companies that construct teacher tests use professional peers-teachers and faculty in higher education (including schools of education)-for reviewing test items and determining cut scores. Use of professional peers is usually recommended by technical consultants. However, test items and cut scores for teacher tests are more likely to reflect fear that demanding tests will produce high failure rates with political and economic consequences for the profession and a state's training programs than to reflect high academic standards.

8. Require public officials and other representatives of the public to set cut scores. Cut scores should be set by legislators, school board members, and members of the public, not higher education faculty in schools of education or the arts and sciences, or secondary school teachers. The level of knowledge and the kind of knowledge desired in a teacher of history or government should be a matter of public policy, not a judgment of professional peers.

Telephone conversation with Michael Simpson at the National Council for the Social Studies on May 20, 2004.

Today, an ideological flavor can be detected in this grade 9 course. For example, although Educational Testing Service offers a two-semester Advanced Placement course on U.S. and comparative government for grade 12, one large Michigan school district has just moved the semester on U.S. government to grade 9 and combined it with the study of contemporary issues, leaving the semester on comparative government in grade 12 so that the students who take it compare other governments only to each other, not to our own.

The middle school generalist license was eliminated in the revision of the licensing regulations in Massachusetts in 2000. At first, we planned to require, as North Carolina had recently done, 24 academic hours in two different subjects taught in the middle school for a new content-rich middle school license (roughly equivalent to the number of academic hours required for a traditional major with a minor). Just before the final version went to the Board of Education, the president of Lesley University called the Department and, after a long conversation with me, insisted that this requirement be reduced. Lesley University had been preparing a large number of middle school teachers, and this requirement, I inferred, would threaten enrollment or survival in their program. Even though I carefully explained why this requirement was needed, she went over my head. The compromise-the McKenna Amendment, as I openly called this particular regulation afterwards-requires only 36 (not 48) academic hours in all for the two subjects.