Comment on "Women's History and the National History Standards"

Comment on "Women's History and the National History Standards" Joan W. Scott I have been asked to comment on these papers presumably both because I was a member of a panel organized by the Council for Basic Education to review the National History Standards and because I am a historian of women. Having read the papers, I must first clarify what actually occurred and then offer some comments on the criticisms they contain. Background Although Christie Farnham's introduction provides some of the history of the process, more information seems needed. Joan Hoff 's contribution is so full of factual errors (in a paper that insists that history is primarily about facts) that the record must first be set straight. As Farnham indicates, the National History Standards were pubUshed first in 1994 by the National Center for History in the Public Schools at UCLA. There was immediately an outcry against them, orchestrated by conservatives and led by Lynne Cheney (who as head of the National Endowment for the Humanities funded the Center's effort in 1991). When the Standards were first funded, as part of a general push by the governors of the fifty states and President George Bush to raise national levels of educational attainment , conservatives were behind the effort, which they hoped would further their campaign to go "Back to Basics." By 1994, on the eve of a presidential election, conservatives had changed their strategy and were now attacking "big government" and calling for decentralized community control of the curriculum. It was in this context that Cheney and others launched their campaign against the National History Standards. In response, a number of foundations sought to rescue not only the history Standards, but the very idea of national educational standards. The history Standards represented several years of collaborative effort by professional historians, classroom teachers, and civic leaders. They had already been in use successfully in classrooms aU over the country when the conservative outcry arose. Officials at the Pew Memorial Trust, the Ford Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation thought it worth the effort to review the controversy and see whether and how the history Standards might be improved. They asked the Council for Basic Education (CBE), an independent, non-profit group devoted to the principle of national standards, to organize a panel of "experts" to review the Standards © 1997 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 9 No. 3 (Autumn) 1997 In the Classroom: Joan W. Scott 173 and make proposals for their revision. (The CBE, contrary to Joan Hoff's assertion, was never an "outraged critic" of the Standards.) Two panels were convened, one for world history, the other for American history. There were 22 members in all, representing a range of political and methodological approaches. The majority of us were professional historians, though there were representatives of the teaching, business, and political communities on the panels as weU. There were six women on the panels, of whom two (Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham and I) were historians of women. The Teaching Examples The major recommendation of the panels was to drop teaching examples from the Standards. These examples had taken up almost 70 percent of the original text. They had been included in the first edition to give teachers ideas about how to implement the Standards and also about how to teach material not usually addressed in existing texts. For example, whUe it was assumed that teachers would routinely include references to George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, this would not necessarily be the case for Harriet Tubman or W E. B. DuBois. Despite the usefulness of this approach , there were problems with the examples. First, they gave the false impression that the Standards were inclusive, covering everything that needed to be covered in history courses. Second, the examples seemed to be singling out some topics as more important than others, when in fact they were merely trying to extend coverage to neglected areas. Third, some of the examples were tendentious, directing students to preconceived conclusions and, in this way, they fueled the Right's charges about "political correctness." And fourth, the examples suggested that a full curriculum was being offered when, in fact, the Standards in history (as in...