Will Fitzhugh: Why There's Not Much to Cheer About in the Results of the Latest National History Test

One of the most misleading aspects of the just-released National Assessment of Educational Progress report on American students’ knowledge of United States history in the schools, is the NAEP practice of reporting how many students performed at the levels of “Basic or Above.”

I am sure their figures are correct, but performing at the Basic level is not at all acceptable for students of history, unless we really do prefer the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” Mastery at the Basic level means the student knows very little U.S. History and understands even less. For example, the Korean War is truly the “Forgotten War” for U.S. 12th graders: 86% could not identify even one significant factor that led to U.S. involvement in Korea.

A more honest report would say how many students score at the Basic and Below Basic levels, and here the figures are less cheering: At the fourth grade level in 2006, 80% of our students of United States History tested by NAEP scored Basic or Below. Of 8th grade students tested, 82% scored Basic or Below, and of the 12th grade students, 86% scored Basic or Below. That means that at least 4 out of every 5 history students cannot name one impact of the cotton gin, or relate the Lewis and Clark expedition to the Louisiana Purchase.

Among 12th grade students—high school seniors—a shocking 39% scored Below Basic, which means they knew just about nothing of American history. Among 8th graders, 17% finished in the lowest tier, and among 4th graders, 10% did. The longer students stay in school, it seems, the worse their performance in history.

But high school seniors can, in fact, do exemplary work. Over the past two decades, I have had the privilege of publishing high-school history research papers in The Concord Review, the journal I founded in 1987. The forthcoming issue (Summer 2007) will include serious 6,000-word papers on the Russian Voucher program disaster, the failures of the Industrial Revolution in France, and British Rule in Egypt. Recent issues have had very good papers on the invention of the laser, Students for a Democratic Society, and Civil War medicine. You would never know it from the NAEP, but with diligence and good teachers, 12-graders are capable of producing first-rate history essays.

Sadly, NAEP is touted as “America’s Report Card,” and certainly NAEP scores have shown that many state tests have much much lower academic testing standards than they should. But I served recently on a Steering Committee for the NAEP Writing Assessment for 2011, and in spite of the efforts of a bunch of bright, well-meaning people, that assessment will be as meaningless as the SAT Writing Test.

The NAEP tries to put a brave face on things, but the inescapable conclusion is that a very large proportion of our students have retained almost nothing from their years of exposure to the history of their country, with the oldest students remembering the least.

Why is this? One reason is that History students in our high schools are rarely expected to read a complete history book. A national survey done for The Concord Review found that 62% of public high school students are never assigned even a 12-page history paper. Even at the famous old [1635] Boston Latin School, according to Walter K. Lambert, chair of the school’s History Department, teachers no longer assign “the traditional term papers.”

If most of our history students in high school are not reading a history book or writing a serious history research paper, they will not remember much of our history. Unless their teacher is an entertainer, they are usually bored in history classes, and in every case, very little hard academic work is asked of them.

This may be the source of such appalling (86%) Basic or Below scores in history by HS Seniors on the most recent NAEP Assessment. While the NAEP sets higher standards than many states, and deserves credit for a serious effort to evaluate the academic progress of our students, the tendency to paint a rosy face on these sad results is not helpful.

We must decide how important it is for our students to do well academically in history, even if that might mean subtracting some time from their video games, social life, jobs, arts and theater programs, sports, and other time-consuming but favored activities that lead to the recent finding of the Indiana University Survey of High School Student engagement that 49% of our HS students spend only three to four hours a week on homework and still get As and Bs.

We have tolerated a laissez-faire—or laissez-fail—attitude toward student academic achievement for far too long. Our students can learn a lot of history, if asked to do so, and come to enjoy it as well. But If we never encourage them to undertake the work of learning history, most will never do so. We will continue to turn out graduates who know little or nothing about the past—and are consequently less than prepared to face the future.