Last year, between sessions at a conference, I asked a long-time high school teacher in New York City about changes in the U.S. History Advanced Placement examination. Like most AP teachers, he was generally supportive of the College Board's effort to restructure the exam around historical thinking skills. But he was doubtful about whether it would make much of a difference. “If colleges don't teach you how to think like a historian,” he asked, “do you really think high schools can?”

I thought of this exchange as I read Lawrence Charap's eloquent defense of the new AP test, which has been brought into closer accord with professional historians' conception of their discipline. To foes on the Right, of course, that's precisely the problem: academic historians are a left-leaning bunch, by and large, so the new exam allegedly tacks leftward as well. But I'd like to suggest a very different kind of obstacle, which speaks less to historians' political commitments than it does to their professional ones. Put simply, many college-level historians do not teach undergraduates in a way that promotes the kind of thinking that we purport to prize. So it's highly unlikely—although surely not impossible—that our high schools will institute such instruction on a mass scale.

And I do mean “mass,” because more people are taking AP tests than ever before. Born over a half-century ago in an effort to identify and cultivate a narrow intellectual elite, Advanced Placement now caters to a wide swath of American students. Thirty-three percent of public high school graduates took at least one AP exam in 2013, up from 18.9 percent just ten years earlier.Footnote ¹ That would be fine—indeed, it would be fantastic—if we could provide these students with “college-level skills,” as Charap calls them. But many colleges don't teach college-level skills, at least not in their history classes. And as products of these same colleges, many teachers do not acquire the skills that the AP program wants them to transmit to their students. Contrary to what you might have heard on Fox News, the new AP exam isn't a vast left-wing conspiracy to wean our kids on big-government bromides. Instead, it's a good-faith effort bring high school teaching into line with what the colleges are supposed to be doing, but don't do nearly enough.

Let's be clear: there are thousands of dedicated, creative, and hard-working teachers in our college classrooms. But there are a lot of people who shirk or neglect their teaching duties, too. Faculty spend an average of just eleven hours per week on instructional matters, including teaching, class preparation, grading, and advising. Graduate students and adjuncts perform an increasing fraction these duties, freeing up the full-time faculty to focus on other things. And at every type of institution, from community college to “Research One” university, the amount of time that faculty spend on teaching is inversely related to their salary. The more you devote yourself to teaching, the less you earn; but the more effort you expend on research, the more you earn. Meanwhile, students are doing much less academic work than earlier generations did. And their grades keep climbing! About 43 percent of college letter grades in 2011 were A's, up from 31 percent in 1988 and 15 percent in 1960. And over roughly the same span, the average amount of studying by people in college declined almost 50 percent, from 25 hours to 13 hours per week. In a recent survey of 23,000 undergraduates at 24 widely varying institutions, half of the students said they were not taking a single course requiring a total of 20 pages of writing.Footnote ²

In history classes, meanwhile, much of the instruction that does take place diverges sharply from our stated goals and rhetoric. Citing historians who reviewed the new AP exam, Charap asserts that the redesigned test reflects “the expectations of college level survey courses in American history”: that is, it focuses on habits of historical inquiry, logic, evidence, and argument. But how many survey courses at college really do that? According to a study published in 2005, one-third of undergraduate American history survey courses used a textbook as their only assigned reading; on the average, these classes also assigned over two-thirds of their final grade to examinations. Neither practice promises to yield much in the way of historical thinking, as a growing scholarship on teaching and learning (STL) confirms. But most historians have probably not encountered the STL literature, because pedagogy is still not a standard part of our professional training. Back in 1999, a survey of graduate students in history showed that just 2.7 percent of them had access to any kind of formal preparation for classroom instruction. The fraction has surely crept up since then, but the vast majority of future historians still don't receive any sustained training in how to teach. The “real” work—the work that gets valued, recognized, and rewarded—is research.Footnote ³

So it's hard to imagine how future high school history teachers—or, by extension, their students—are going to obtain the kind of “college-level skills” that the AP test demands. A growing number of states are now requiring teachers to major in the subject they instruct, which is exactly as it should be. But it won't do much good if these pre-service teachers aren't encountering good models of the instruction they're supposed to provide when they enter their own classrooms. Again, we all know that there are some excellent college history teachers out there; I had a few of them, and I'm sure you did as well. But most institutions don't make any serious effort to discover who they are. We rely instead on student evaluations, which are a notoriously poor measure of teacher effectiveness. Indeed, there's some evidence to suggest that professors who receive high evaluations are actually worse teachers than their peers! In a 2010 study at the Air Force Academy, where a standardized curriculum allows for convenient natural experiments, professors who got high student evaluations tended to give out higher grades—but their students did worse in subsequent classes. For the more demanding professors, it was the opposite: they generally got lower student evaluations, but their students did better later on.Footnote ⁴ That's not to assume that the solution to our pedagogical woes is merely to load on more work (although that would be a good start, given how little studying seems to be going on). It's simply to say that we'll never know who is teaching historical thinking—as opposed to names and dates—without new systems for evaluating it.

Peer review of teaching would be a good place to begin. And several institutions are already doing it, requiring professors to submit arguments and rationales for their instruction just as they do for their research.Footnote ⁵ Teachers have to explain how their reading assignments, writing exercises, classroom activities, and examinations will develop the kind of practices that their disciplines hold dear. These peer-review systems do not rely heavily on classroom observations, which only provide a snapshot of a professor's instruction—and not necessarily a representative one at that. If you were asked to evaluate my work as a researcher, you wouldn't watch me in an archive and then file a report on how many boxes I requested or how many notes I took; you'd look instead at the essay or book that I produced afterwards, asking whether it met the standards of our profession. So we shouldn't judge each other's teaching based on one or two observations of randomly chosen classes, which is pretty much what passes for peer review at most of our institutions.Footnote ⁶ Instead, we need systems that look holistically—and, most of all, analytically—at the depth, sophistication, and rigor of our pedagogy. That's the only way to determine if college teachers are providing college-level instruction.

And what of our beleaguered high school teachers, who have been charged with providing this instruction before students get to college? Back when AP was a more elite endeavor, only a few teachers—and, as a rule, only the most accomplished ones—taught it. Indeed, a common critique of the program was that it “skimmed” off the best instructors and left the less able students with worse ones. But today, with a wider range of students taking AP, a broader array of teachers are called upon to instruct it as well. And that makes any shift in the program even more of a challenge. The bigger the AP ship, the harder it is to change the AP course.

But perhaps there are grounds for a bit of optimism, too. Drained by the so-called Long March of details that AP traditionally demanded, teachers as a whole seem eager to embrace the new skills-based approach. And, as Charap reports, there is already some “anecdotal” evidence that teachers are revising their practices in accord with the revised exam. That doesn't mean they're making our students into flaming liberals or even into terrorist recruits, as pediatric neurosurgeon Dr. Benjamin Carson half-seriously suggested. (“I think most people, when they finish that course, they'd be ready to sign up for ISIS,” said Carson, who is currently running for the presidency in 2016).Footnote ⁷ Instead, these teachers have reorganized their pedagogy around the skills and practices that define our discipline: how we ask questions, how we generate answers, and what's left to know after that. Alas, teachers' own college history instruction has often resembled the Long March more than the critical, skills-based instruction that AP envisions. But the AP program has done an admirable job of organizing workshops and other professional development activities for the teachers, in an effort to ready them for the revised test. Maybe these efforts can compensate for the poor teaching so many of us gave them.

And maybe, just maybe, they'll end up rubbing off on us as well. Over the past century, American education reform has mostly been a top-down affair: from the Committee of Ten (1893) and the Cardinal Principles Report (1919) through Harvard's Report on General Education (1945) and the Holmes Report (1986), professors have told our teachers how things are supposed to be done. The new Advanced Placement approach in United States History presents a historic opportunity to reverse this dynamic, placing the teachers in the vanguard of reform. I still think it's a long shot. But if it works, high school teachers will be modeling the practices that we know we should practice ourselves. They will school us, not the other way around. And we will change.