America has a crisis in history and civic education. As previous articles in this special section have detailed, the evidence abounds.
What are the causes of this crisis? Certainly boring and biased textbooks. Fewer classroom hours dedicated to American history and civics is also a problem. While we should not necessarily look to the federal government for the solution to this problem, federal funding for civic and history teacher education programs has been almost eliminated in the past few years. As a nation, we focus on literacy, math, and science to stay innovative and create jobs. But we have largely forgotten that we must also develop educated citizens citizens capable of preserving this experiment in self-government.
Another cause is that university education schools over-emphasize coursework on how to teach and spend too much time creating teacher-researchers. This has been done at the expense of courses in the content area, and it has created a couple generations of teachers with a limited background in American history and government. Although universities require students preparing to teach American history and government to take courses in these subject areas, these programs do not create teachers who are masters of the depth and breadth of American history and civics.
The best teachers I ever met knew their subject well and they loved it. This was obvious in their classes. So how do we create teachers like this?
From 2006 to 2011, the US Department of Education offered grants for Presidential Academies in American History and Civics. Senators Lamar Alexander and Roger Wicker created the programs to “offer workshops for both veteran and new teachers of American history and civics to strengthen their knowledge and preparation for teaching these subjects.” Ashbrook won one of two competitive grants to run these Presidential Academies.
Ashbrook’s Presidential Academy took 50 teachers, one from each state, on a three-week seminar to Philadelphia, Gettysburg, and Washington, DC each year. It included an extensive evaluation conducted by an independent evaluation firm. This was one of the most extensive evaluations of a program of this type. It evaluated the effects of the program on teachers both what they learned and how they applied it in their classrooms. It was a blind study, with the alternates to the program who did not participate also included in the evaluation. Most importantly, it provided data on the effects on their students, a rare component of these evaluations because of its cost.
The results were impressive. On average, students of Academy teachers increased their history test scores on eras and events from a failing score of 62% to a score of 72%. AP student scores increased by 12%.
Ninety-three percent (93%) of Academy teachers “significantly” increased their use of primary sources in the classroom and all of the Academy participants currently use primary sources in class, 85% at least weekly, and 98% at least monthly. Teacher daily textbook use among 2011 participants dropped nearly three fold. (There are many other results, and the full evaluation report is available online at https://tah.org/pa.)
Why was the program successful? Rather than teaching through textbooks or teaching about pedagogy, this Academy, like all of Ashbrook’s programs for teachers, directs them to primary-source documents and engages them through conversations about these documents to deepen the teacher’s knowledge of American history and constitutional principles. No sage on the stage, Ashbrook faculty offers teachers the opportunity to engage directly with the great ideas and people who have shaped the American mind. We engage with our teachers as equals with us in devotion to the truth and to understanding the documents we study as their authors understood them.
At Ashbrook we talk with teachers, rather than at them, because that is how free and equal individuals converse with one another. Our manner implies, in brief, that our classrooms are small republics.
Our manner encourages everyone involved to raise their expectations of themselves, making themselves better students, teachers, and citizens than they would otherwise be. At its best, an American history and government class strengthens the American republic by inculcating the manners, understanding, and inclinations self-governing citizens require. This is how we help teachers to prepare their students to understand what it means to be an American.
As we reconsider the role of history and civics education, there is much at stake. After the American founders established their experiment in self-government, many of them turned to creating schools. They knew that creating an educated citizenry would be key to the success of their experiment. These evaluation results show that the kind of education provided by Ashbrook and other organizations that are a part of the National Constitutional Literacy Campaign actually moves the needle on what happens with student learning.
As we work to improve our schools to build a stronger and smarter American workforce, we also need to set aside a little more time and energy to creating a stronger and smarter citizenry.
• Roger Beckett is Executive Director of the Ashbrook Center at Ashland University.
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