Urgent: Save the Teaching American History program

I see that the American Historical Association has issued a Call for Action regarding the endangered Teaching American History grant program. This post over at the National Coalition for History provides additional details.

The short version is this: The Department of Education is about to eliminate the Teaching American History program. The money will be reallocated to another funding pool. History programs may apply to that pool, but so will math and reading and everything else. We can safely predict that history will be all but forgotten.

To date the government has invested almost a billion dollars in history education. The money has revitalized the teaching of American history. The program has benefited far more people than public school teachers and their students. Participation in the TAH program has connected a whole generation of academic of academic and public historians to public school teachers and forged a nationwide community of history advocates. Those of us in the historical community need to rally and fight for this program.

Please take a moment to contact your local congressional representative and senator. You might send a copy of your email to President Obama and Secretary Duncan as well. Below is a sample of what your email might say--feel free to adapt, alter, or copy it outright:

Dear Congresswoman XX:

I am writing to encourage you to support continued funding for one of the most important educational initiatives of the last decade, the Teaching American History program at the Department of Education.

The Teaching American History program was championed by the late Senator Robert Byrd, and since its inception in 2001 has improved the teaching of American history for tens of thousands of students across the nation. It is the ONLY program at the Department of Education specifically targeted at history education.

Please support continuing the Teaching American History program as a stand-alone budget item in the Department of Education budget. Only by keeping history education as a separate item in the budget can the integrity of the program be maintained.

Your Constituent,

XX

Serve as a TAH Grant Reviewer!

If you read this blog, you are probably qualified to serve as a proposal reviewer for the Teaching American History program. And I wish you would!

The TAH program is the largest federal program to improve the teaching of American history. To date, the Department of education has awarded over $800 million dollars to schools districts across the nation to fund programs to improve history education. I have been involved in quite a few of these projects and I think this is one of the best things that the DOE does.

Every year there are many hundreds of grant proposals, and the Department of Education relies on external reviewers to read the proposals and help to decide which ones get funded. It is an important job and a big responsibility, and it needs people who are knowledgeable about history and about education and can be relied on to actually read every page of the proposals (they are 25 pages, plus appendices, you will read about 9 of them) and comment upon them critically and fairly. And they will pay you! The full announcement seeking reviewers is below and includes contact information, but feel free to get in touch with me if you want to know more as well:

Subject: Call for 2010 TAH Application Reviewers

The 2010 U.S. Department of Education's Teaching American History (TAH) grant competition is upon us and we NEED your help to review TAH grant applications.

The anticipated grant review dates are April-May, 2010.

You may serve as a TAH grant reviewer if you meet at least (1) one of the following qualifications:
.     A degree in history
.     K-12 history teacher
.     History professor
.     TAH grant director
.     TAH grant partner
.     History scholar
.     Other history-related professional
.     Professional development provider
.     Evaluator or evaluation specialist

Please email your abbreviated résumé (5 pages maximum) to Yianni Alepohoritis at Yianni.Alepohoritis@ed.gov or Adam Bookman at Adam.Bookman@ed.gov no later than February 12, 2010. Please specify in your email whether you are a history, professional development, or evaluation specialist.

If selected, you will serve on a panel with two other reviewers.  This process includes one week of reading applications on your own and two weeks of telephone meetings with your panel.  An honorarium is given to those who complete the grant review. Each reviewer will review about 10 applications. If you are involved in a current 2010 application, you may not serve as a reviewer.

For more information on the TAH program, please visit the program website at http://www.ed.gov/programs/teachinghistory/index.html.

Adam Bookman
Management and Program Analyst
U.S. Department of Education
Office of Innovation and Improvement
Teaching American History Grant Team
Phone (202)-205-5427
Fax (202)-401-8466

Digital Textbooks?

Interesting NY Times article: As Classrooms Go Digital, Textbooks Are History. "Textbooks have not gone the way of the scroll yet, but many educators say that it will not be long before they are replaced by digital versions — or supplanted altogether by lessons assembled from the wealth of free courseware, educational games, videos and projects on the Web."

Much 0f the focus of the article is on California, where the Governator has decreed that the public schools will go to open source digital textbooks in the near future. But it won't stop with California, or with the public schools. Every professor I know resents the textbook companies and their monopolistic practices. We would dump the textbook companies in a minute if there were a decent alternative.

And yet ... what professors and textbook companies have in common is that we provide content. How long until digital textbooks morph into full-fledged digital courses, good for college credit?

New Bill to Boost History Education, Reignite Culture Wars

Senators Robert Byrd, Edward Kennedy and Lamar Alexander have introduced a bill titled "Restoring American History and Civics to Classroom Prominence." Alexander (pictured here) described the bill in his floor speech, saying it "will help to put the teaching of American history and civics back in its rightful place, in our classrooms, so our children can grow up learning what it means to be an American. The legislation which we have introduced would expand summer academies for outstanding teachers, authorize new teacher programs, require States to set standards for the teaching and learning of U.S. history, and create new opportunities to compare the tests that students take on U.S. history."

Alexander's office also issued a press release which boiled the legislation down to bullet points, stating that the legislation would:

• Authorize 100 summer academies for outstanding students and teachers of U.S. History and align those academies with locations in the national park system, such as the John Adams House or Independence Hall
• Double authorization for funding “Teaching American History” programs in local school districts, which today involve 20,000 students as a part of No Child Left Behind
• Require states to develop and implement standards for student assessments in U.S. History, although there would be no federal accountability requirement as there is for reading and mathematics
• Allow states to compare history and civics test scores of 8th- and 12th-grade students by establishing a 10-state pilot program that would expand the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP)

The most exciting parts of the bill are the first two items. One hundred summer academies is a lot! Tying them to the National Park Service is an interesting idea, and a tribute the NPS lobbyists, who deserve a big raise. Summer academies or institutes have been among the most successful parts of many, many Teaching American History projects, and the model is also used by the NEH and Gilder-Lehrman Institute. If one goes to the NPS History pages, and begins exploring the many historic National Monuments, historic trails, and National Heritage Areas (and when were those created, anyway? I had not heard of them) you can see the many possibilities for these institutes. I am already thinking of the NPS historic sites in my region, and the possibilities of summer institutes.

The second item, doubling the funding for the TAH program, is wonderful news. The Teaching American History program is designed to improve the teaching of American history in the schools by bringing together teachers, historians, and enough resources (by which I mean funding) for them to do some interesting collaborations. I have been deeply involved in the TAH program from the beginning, writing grant proposals, teaching the teachers, and most recently as an evaluator and consultant.

I really dislike the third item. I can see the goal here, making states develop history standards will help to ensure that history is taught and valued in the public schools. But who writes the standards? I see these standards becoming a political football and reigniting the culture wars of the 80s and 90s on the state level. Remember the disastrous reception to the 1994 National History Standards? This was a top-down attempt by an idealistic but politically naive history profession to impose a new set of historically sound standards on the nation's schools. Denounced (unfairly, but predictably) by Rush Limbaugh and Lynne Cheney as being politically correct, they were condemned by the U.S. Senate, 99 to 1. Lets pick that scab, shall we?

The last item, using NAEP to roll out a pilot project for standardized testing in history, also runs the risk of politicization. The great dilemma here is that in the era of NCLB high-stakes testing, that which is not tested does not get taught. And that which does get tested is "taught to the test"--stifling the teacher creativity that is one of the great strengths of our system.

Overall this bill is great news. Thank you, Senators!

Historians: Let's get out in front of this. Go to the NPS site and see what historic site matches your specialty and pick up the phone. But then make contact with your university School of Education (I know, I know) and find out how to get involved in the drafting of those state standards. This kind of bureaucratic work is time consuming and unrewarding. But not nearly so time consuming and unrewarding as teaching your survey classes in ten years if you do nothing and your class is full of young people who were taught all sorts of incorrect historical mischief in the public schools!

Flash Over Substance: The National Archives Experience

As deep databases of primary sources become more common, the traditional public providers of online historical content (the Library of Congress, various universities and historical societies) are being challenged by commercial newcomers such as Footnote.com and Google Book Search. Commercial developers seem to have more resources for site design and have produced databases that are often more attractive than their public counterparts. Also the commercial sites tend to be more interactive, allowing users to save, annotate, manipulate and share what they find online. The older public sites are far more static, based on a 19th century museum model of look, don't touch.

The new National Archives Experience attempts to bring the National Archives into the Web 2.0 world. When you arrive at the site you are met with a flash animation of dancing words, inviting us to "Unlock the Digital Vault!" and that the National Archives has selected 1,200 records for us to explore online.


1200? Did they forget a couple of zeros? Alas, they did not.

The default interface is similarly designed to impress rather than educate. A set of eight icons twirl around a bit then settle down in an oval around a text box that invites us to "Select a starting point to begin exploring." But the images are not labeled--you will be exploring on your own. What does that picture of some geometric shapes stand for? Hovering the cursor over the images produces a box with a cryptic bit of text meant I suppose to intrigue, in this case "Claim Rejected." Ah, so that is what this is about! Some sort of claim by some person or person for something during some period of time that was rejected. I clicked on the icon for more information. Here is the next screen:

What the hell is this? The avocado colored navigation aid on the left offers us a choice of six "tags": Families, Fraktur (?), Illustrated Family Record, Pennsylvania, Revolutionary War, or Soldiers. It is by no means clear what any of these have to do with our document--since we still don't know a single fact about the "Claim Rejected." And clicking on the tags just makes the background dance around some more and the icons to change. This, my friends, is horrible, arrogant web design.

It turns out that you click on the little unlabeled plus sign to see the document. At which point I discover that the claim rejected was a claim for a widow's pension from Margaret Schwartz, whose late husband had served in a unit of Pennsylvania Artillery during the revolution. I would quote directly from the document description, but the flash interface prevents me from copying and pasting from the site. Grrrr. Here is a screenshot:


As you can see, the document itself appears in a frame on the left. We can zoom in on the document and even print it out, but cannot copy it (except with a screenshot as I have done here). We still do not know the date of the document, or the place where it was written, or any other basic bibliographic information. And in fact, the document is in German, and no translation is provided.

The search function is primitive, non-intuitive and allows only basic keyword searching. And the results are displayed in a long band of unlabeled icons along the bottom of the screen. Below are the results for a search for "revolution." What are these documents? You tell me:


In fairness, there are a couple of neat features at the National Archives Experience that I have not seen anywhere else. The "Create" tab takes us to screens where we may create posters and movies from items in the collection. The movie maker is like a stripped-down online version of Microsoft's free Photostory software, which is very popular with educators. But you cannot add sound, or text beyond a title page, or a thousand and one other things you could do with some free software on your own computer if only you could save the darned images from the National Archives site. Also you can create a "Pathway Challenge," a sort of web quest through the documents.

The National Archives Experience is what can happen when digitization projects go bad. The designers apparently became enamored of all the pretty things they could do with their documents and flash, and forgot to make the site useful or to give it a purpose. You can't do historical research on the site, it is not useful for teaching, and you can't grab the images and documents to use in a presentation.

Amazingly, the National Archives Experience has won a “Best of the Web” award from the Museums and the Web conference, recognizing “the best work in museum web design and development.”

Schoolhouse Rock--Elbow Room

I recommend a stiff drink before watching this one:



Most of the Schoolhouse Rock cartoons can be found on YouTube, or you can just order the lot of them on a DVD from Netflix. But should we use them in the classroom? "Elbow Room" may be the worst of them, with a whitewashed version of westward expansion that would embarrass the coarsest Turnerian and a raft of historical errors. It might work very well in a college classroom, where students are used to picking things apart. I would hate for the teacher of my 8-year-old son to use it though.