IS APUSH REALLY NEW AND IMPROVED?

The purpose of Advanced Placement history courses is to prepare students for college-level work. Students take AP for mercenary reasons, too: if they score well on the exam, they expect to receive college credits. This creates a difficulty for my colleagues and me at Augustana: our department does not accept AP credits toward completion of the major. Our policy is not popular with students and parents. But one student who doesn't have a problem with it is Patrick Lenz, the current president of the Augustana History Club. In high school Patrick steered clear of AP U.S. History when a teacher warned him the AP course was “memorize this, memorize that.” But if he took the regular U.S. history course, Patrick was told, he would experience debates, simulations, field trips, and spirited discussions about controversial events and values. “That sounded way better,” Patrick recalls.

My department's policy of no credit for AP history, along with Patrick's thumbs down for the old version of the course, seems warranted by what AP teachers remember about the course. Lopez describes taking students on a “forced march … through endless memorization.” Santos recalls “the race through the textbook.” And Straussman testifies students avoided APUSH because “they were not good at memorizing date and names.” “The focus,” reports Strausmann, “was on factoids (names, dates, places) over context, depth, and connections to change over time.” This kind of pedagogy is called “coverage,” a generic form of instruction in which teachers convey essential information in a textbook or list of standards. For teachers, the race to cover a table of contents usually leads to teaching by mentioning. For students, 180 days of mentioning feels like trying to get a drink of water from a firehose. Or, in the case of APUSH, with its thick, college-level textbooks and an exam that could test for anything and everything, like trying to take a sip from Niagara Falls. Creative teachers such as Lopez, Santos, and Straussman found ways to enrich the old APUSH course. But one can see how the coverage framework pressured teachers to conform to a failed model of instruction.

And there can be no doubt that coverage is a broken model.Footnote ² We don't need to get into the weeds of research on teaching and learning to concede its failures. Let's just ask: where are the college history professors who are grateful to the College Board for sending half a million well-prepared students our way every year? (I haven't met any.) We can also ask: what national history assessments show improvement in student scores over the period that enrollment in AP History swelled? (Answer: none.) The dearth of thank you notes and higher test scores is predictable. Most of the material that students stuff in their heads for the May AP exam vanishes from their minds afterwards like dry ice on a warm day. More troubling, with all that history getting covered, something important got covered up: the analytic thinking moves that lie at the heart of historical mindedness and are so valuable for democratic citizenship. The teachers in this forum testify that the old APUSH course had no provision for training students to assess significance or to analyze the testimony of sources or to frame good historical questions. That is why history departments such as mine decline to accept AP history credits.

But now we may have to reconsider our policy. The new exam and curriculum framework designed by Lawrence Charap and his colleagues is better—very much better—than the older course. The new APUSH is better calibrated with how adolescents learn. It builds on decades of research by cognitive scientists on historical thinking. It harmonizes better with the expectations of college history professors for what high school graduates should know, value, and be able to do. The essence of the revision comes down to this: whereas the old APUSH course rewarded students for knowing other people's facts, the revised course expects students to justify what they claim to know about the past. In the old course, history was one fact after another, a list of subjects to be familiar with. The new APUSH presents history as a murky domain of knowledge in which protocols and habits of mind are necessary to distinguish sense from nonsense and know anything about the past at all. The old test smelled like remember-ology. The new test measures how good one is with the intellectual discipline of history.

There will be professors who say the test makers have “spoiled everything,” deemphasizing content knowledge in order to promote mushy “thinking skills.” I have less sympathy for this view than I do critiques of the test by conservatives. At least conservatives begin with a truth: that ideas matter, that the stories people tell have consequences. But defenders of coverage begin with a falsehood: that facts can be stored in the head like furniture in an attic, there to be pulled down some day when a situation calls for it. But that's not how memory works. We remember what we do on a regular basis. If we want students to know who did what when, we must ask them to do something with that knowledge again and again. The new APUSH requires students to do history even with the multiple choice questions. So I believe it has a much better chance than the old “drill and kill” to produce both a discerning historical mindedness and a retentive grasp of factual information.

WILL THE NEW APUSH IMPROVE HISTORY INSTRUCTION?

Defenders of coverage and “teaching by mentioning” are on the defensive these days. Still, Jonathan Zimmerman worries that bad habits by college instructors will make the APUSH redesign a fruitless effort. “Put simply,” writes Zimmerman, “many college-level historians do not teach undergraduates in a way that promotes the kind of thinking 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.” Ten years ago I would have agreed with Zimmerman's pessimistic assessment. But not now.

Zimmerman is right about one thing: higher education is riddled with deep pockets of poor teaching and backwaters of illiteracy about history teaching and learning. But, fortunately, the times they are a-changing. Last year, sixty history departments completed the American Historical Association's Tuning Project, a collaborative process in which participants harmonize or “tune” the core goals, assessments, and instructional practices of the discipline with curricula to support those goals. Another one hundred departments have signed on for Tuning Round II. New pedagogies such as “Reacting to the Past” and “uncoverage” circulate widely and are inspiring instructors to adopt more effective instructional practices. With leadership from the AHA, graduate schools are taking more responsibility for the training of future college history teachers. Sure, there are still plenty of lecture halls where a professor sashays on stage while the students swipe through Facebook. But the buzz being generated by legions of creative instructors in higher education gives me hope that the redesign of AP will not be in vain.

Zimmerman should not, however, be construed as saying that high school history instruction will only improve when academic historians become missionaries to the high schools with the gospel of historical thinking and the medicine of good teaching practices. If anything, innovation and reform has been working the other way around. One might list six or seven good books on history teaching written by and/or for secondary teachers, such as Bruce Lesh's Why Don't You Just Tell Us the Answer? and the materials offered by the Stanford History Education Group (a website that every teacher, at any level, should bookmark).Footnote ³ With no resources of similar scope and quality available for college instructors, pedagogical reformers at the college level have been poaching from secondary teachers for a long time. I can testify that the experience of being an exam reader at APUSH's June readings was transformative for my teaching. I'm not sure I would have seen the limitations of being a “sage on the stage” if not for conversations I had with high school teachers at the exam readings. It was at APUSH readings that I became aware of “backwards design” and learned how to use rubrics. So I expect that the good sense that has gone into the revised APUSH curriculum framework will work its way out and up to improve history education at all levels.

Still, we might wonder if AP teachers are prepared to take on what Lopez calls “an incredible challenge.” Santos suspects some teachers, perhaps especially those who did not major in history in college, will revert to skimming the surface and assessing only lower-level thinking. Straussman and Lopez believe students who don't know very much history need a narrative arc to make sense of the past. They worry that the AP curriculum framework doesn't provide one. All of these are plausible concerns.

But again, I'm hopeful. I'll say more about the need for narrative anon. But I think what Larry Cuban called “persistent instruction”Footnote ⁴—the surface-skimming, teacher-centered coverage mode of teaching referenced by Santos—will be dealt a significant blow by the new expectations built into APUSH. “We value what we assess.” If the truism is true, teachers now have a powerful incentive to redesign their courses on the model of inquiry-based approaches. If they do not, their students are going to receive mostly 1s and 2s when the AP results come back. Here, “teaching to the test” may do a world of good.

Teachers, of course, will need quality professional development if they are to make the “mindset shift” described by Santos and retool their courses. Santos, Lopez, and Straussman are inspiring examples of what this guidance could look like. Their enthusiasm for the incredible challenge is infectious. If we could clone them and send copies to every high school history department in the nation, our problems here would be solved. Now that the College Board has stepped up to provide leadership in history education, would that we could see a return of funding for improving history education on the level of the suspended Teaching American History grants!

BUT: IS THE NEW APUSH POLITICALLY SUSTAINABLE?

Pushback from conservatives alarmed by the revised APUSH program triggers unpleasant memories of the mid-1990s “history wars.” When in 1994 Assistant Secretary of Education Diane Ravitch urged federal funding for voluntary national history standards, she called on UCLA's National Center for History in the Schools to draft and circulate the proposed standards. In January 1995, after weeks of furious debate among historians, policy elites, and media commentators, the United States Senate voted 99–1 to reject the UCLA standards for presenting “a disproportionately pessimistic and misrepresentative picture of the American past.”Footnote ⁵ No one wants to go there again.

But maybe we should. Passionate, morally charged, occasionally rancorous deliberation is what participatory democracy looks like. If we think that conversations about history education are too compromised by the uninformed, the ill-educated, and the overly partisan, the alternative is a more elitist deliberative republic such as that envisioned by the American Founders, men who sought ways to insulate the good judgment of supposedly wise elites from undisciplined public passions.

But I think it's a mistake to try to sneak improved history education in quietly through a back door, claiming a professional expertise that comes from knowing our subject better than any beautician or plumber (or witless red state legislator) possibly could.

To be sure, some of the criticism from conservatives is ill-informed. As Jeremy Stern persuasively argues, there is a pervasive misunderstanding about the authority of the curriculum framework, approaching what seems to be a willful misreading of the document's examples as requirements. But not all the concerns are outlandish. The issue of localism versus national control is a real and persistent political issue in this country about which intelligent people disagree. And one might well wonder, as some conservatives do, whether it's a good thing for a private corporation such as the College Board to exercise so much power over how history will be taught in schools. It's not like experts were ever wrong about something, you know? (The Left used to remember that.)

The concerns of conservative critics should be welcomed and addressed. And especially in two places, I submit. In the public sphere, defenders of APUSH should take a lesson from Cold War history and remember that the opponent is not monolithic. Even on an issue such as history education, conservatives do not all think alike. Rush Limbaugh may think that history is “what happened,” but Bill Bennett and Paul Johnson would disagree with him about that.Footnote ⁶ Many conservatives like to think of themselves as the party of reasoned deliberation as opposed to the Left's alleged preference for indoctrination through political correctness. This means that by their own logic, conservatives have nothing to fear from a multiperspectival history classroom, so long as the teacher doesn't put her thumb on the scale. Defenders of APUSH should invest more time in reassuring conservatives that the classroom is a free zone for respectful debate. Would it be so hard for the College Board to throw conservative critics a bone and include in the curriculum framework examples of historical study with an appeal to conservative moral intuitions such as gratefulness, liberty, and authority, to balance the Left's preference for values of care and fairness? It might take an anthropological mind to engage conservatives in this way, but surely it can be done.

The other place conservatives' worries should be addressed is in the history classroom. Here I disagree with Brenda Santos who writes, “for me at least the political controversy does not seem particularly relevant to the classroom.” Au contraire, I want to say. The political controversy may well be the answer to a problem raised by all three AP teachers. Santos criticizes the new framework for “its lack of a concrete or dominant structure.” Straussman says he is trying to figure out “how to supplement my students' sense of the basic structure of a historical narrative.” And Lopez wonders how she can present the myriad events and overlapping historical trends and issues of the new curriculum “in a sensible way to students who are first encountering them.”

The answer—I should say, an answer—to concerns about how to bring coherence to the APUSH course is to “teach the conflicts.”Footnote ⁷

To be coherent, courses need Big Questions. Our ongoing culture war therefore suggests a good master question for a survey U.S. history course would be “what is the story of American history?” With a big question like this tying every unit together, the culture war–instead of just being a problem for U.S. AP—actually could offer a solution for bringing intellectual unity to the course in a way that promotes understanding that history is an “argument without end.”Footnote ⁸

So if I were teaching AP history, I would say something like this to students on the first day: