A History of the California Framework for History-Social Science:
Promise and Paradox
This summer marks the twentieth anniversary of the History-Social Science Framework for California Public Schools. Adopted on July 10, 1987, the Framework initiated a reform of history education in the state of California; moreover, it marked one of the early successes of the standards and accountability movement that emerged out of the 1980s. Initially, this document broadly suggested the content of history classes for grades K-12. During the 1990s, the Framework expanded from 120 to 234 pages; in the process, it became a more prescriptive curriculum guide, defining hundreds of grade specific standards. Today, the Framework is the central component of California’s system of accountability for history education. Its standards define the specific skills and historical content for every grade level of the state’s public schools and are the basis for alignment of local, district and state curricula and assessments.
The following paper offers a brief, analytical history of the History-Social Science Framework. It begins by examining the goals and intentions that fueled the initial creation of the Framework in the 1980s. Then, through tracing the development of California’s system of accountability for history education in the 1990s, this paper highlights how the Framework changed over time as it became the centerpiece of this system. Finally, this paper provides short content analyses of the Framework and the California Standards Tests for History-Social Science and argues that, today, the Framework not only falls short of the goals that led to its creation in the 1980s, but that it may reinforce what research shows to be some of the most ineffective ways to teach and learn history. Overall, the history of the Framework is an interesting case study of the standards-based reform movement as it developed from A Nation at Risk to No Child Left Behind. Like most education reforms, it is a story of promise and paradox, potential and unintended consequences.
Good intro
The 1980s: History Reform and the California Framework
Over the past twenty-five years, the standards and accountability movement has evolved to define American public education at the local, state, and federal level. A Nation at Risk helped initiate this movement in 1983 when it declared that American schools, after decades of diminishing achievements, were in need of fundamental reform. A benchmark of neo-conservative thought, the report cited declines in SAT and NAEP scores to backs it claim that lowered expectations and graduation requirements created a “rising tide of mediocrity” in American schools. Such realities threatened not only the country’s international standing, but its very future as a prosperous democracy. In order to keep the United States internationally competitive, A Nation at Risk called for a focus on the “new basics” – English, science, math, social studies, and computer science – and an increase in standards and accountability.[1]
A Nation at Risk was soon followed by the call for fundamental reforms in history education. Two publications, Diane Ravitch’s and Chester Finn’s What Do Our 17 Year-Olds Know? and the Bradley Commission’s Building a History Curriculum: Guidelines for Teaching History in Schools, defined the main issues and prescriptions of this burgeoning movement. Ravitch and Finn, in the same vein of A Nation at Risk, sounded alarm bells by asserting that high school students constituted a “generation at risk” for their lack of basic knowledge in history and literature. They based this assertion on the unimpressive results of multiple-choice, NAEP assessments administered to 7,812 high school juniors. Pointing to the fact that the national average on the history test was 54.5 percent, Ravitch and Finn warned that it was “fatuous to believe that students can think critically or conceptually when they are ignorant of the most basic facts of American history” and concluded that Americans were “at risk of being gravely handicapped” by such shortcomings.[2] Within a year of the publication of What Do Our 17 Year-Olds Know?, Ravitch and Finn helped form the Bradley Commission on History in the Schools – a group of professors, historians and public school teachers – to investigate the shortcomings of history education and to make recommendations for reform.
In the introduction to Bradley Commission report, historian Kenneth Jackson blamed “the current crises in history education” on progressive models interesting choice of words of social studies education. He claimed that social studies, with its multi-disciplinary emphasis, diluted, and in some instances, totally eclipsed the study of history. At its worst, this led to “do it yourself formlessness” where “high school students could satisfy their social studies requirements for graduation by taking such diverse, disconnected courses as current events, drug education, sex education, civics, values education, economics, and psychology and never take a history course at all.” Jackson traced this “balkanization” to the Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education, which emphasized vocational training and citizenship for its social studies curriculum, and claimed that the Committee of 10 Report, which focused on history education, was a better model for American schools to emulate.[3]
The Bradley Commission laid out a number of suggestions for the reform of history education. The most pressing problem, and the easiest to address, was the dearth of history courses offered in American schools. The commission called for the introduction of history in grade school, recommended the study of American history, Western Civilization, and world history, and suggested that students take no fewer than four years of history between grades 7 and 12. In addition to increasing course requirements, the commission proposed a number of principles for history education: that the study of history “should focus on broad, significant themes and questions, rather than the short-term memorization of facts”; that it should be “uncomplicated, clear in its scope and sequence, as opposed to the overloaded, overambitious curricular instructions common in social studies”; and, that it should “provide an ordered developmental sequence of increasing challenge and sophistication, based on current knowledge of learning styles and stages of intellectual development in students.” In addition, the Commission encouraged the teaching of “inclusive history encompassing women, ethnic minorities, and men and women of all classes and conditions”; and, finally, pointed out that “for too long, educational policy has been mandated from the top down” and thus stressed the need to include teachers in curriculum development and the policy making process.[4] A radical concept
In between the publication of What Do Our 17 Year Olds Know? and Building A History Curriculum, the California State Board of Education adopted The History-Social Science Framework for California Public Schools. Written primarily by Ravitch and Charlotte Crabtree – a professor of education at UCLA – the Framework quickly became, as Linda Symcox describes, “a model and rallying point for history-centered curricula nationwide.”[5]
In many ways, the California Framework actualized the claims and prescriptions of Ravitch, Finn, and the Bradley Commission. It mandated three history curriculums: primary (K-3), middle (4-8) and secondary (9-12) with American history studied in grades 5,8, and 11 and world history/Western Civilization in grades 6,7, and 10. As State Superintendent of Education Bill Honig proudly stated in the forward, “This framework places history at the center of the social sciences and the humanities where it belongs.”[6] Indeed, the Framework presented chronological history as the means to promote a number of “literacies” (historical, ethical, cultural, geographic, economic, sociopolitical), nurture democratic citizenship, and develop critical thinking skills. The bulk of the Framework was devoted to “course descriptions” for each grade level – narrative summaries of the different themes and units covered during the year. Overall, the Framework urged the “study of major historical events in depth as opposed to superficial skimming of enormous amounts of material” and claimed to offer “a sequential curriculum, one in which knowledge and understanding are built up in a carefully planned and systematic fashion from kindergarten through grade twelve.”[7]
By most accounts, the development of the Framework was a relatively harmonious process. In a review of the adoption, Dianne Massell noted that the 20 members of the Framework’s Criteria Committee worked within a “narrow zone of consensus.”[8] The committee consisted of a balance of policy makers, academics, curriculum specialists, school administrators, and teachers united in the goal of replacing the state’s social studies curriculum with narrative history that emphasized American and western “ideals.” Certainly, this was the objective of the primary authors Ravitch and Crabtree. Tells you something about the makeup of the commission. According to Massell, this resulted in “limited deliberation” and greatly facilitated the creation of the Framework’s first edition. This is not to suggest, however, that the Framework was free from public scrutiny. The Curriculum Commission distributed 550 copies of the Framework to schools, districts, county offices, and universities across the state and received 1,700 reviews from teachers, administrators, professors and parents during the adoption process. Moreover, in order to discuss and promote the Framework, the State Department of Education sponsored 11 conferences, attended by over 500 people. The vast majority of the feedback and public discussions, Massell claimed, were enthusiastic and supportive.
Opposition to the Framework focused almost exclusively on the document’s patriotic conceptions of history. Critics such as professors Ronald Evans and Catherine Cornbleth, and journalist Dexter Waugh argued that the Framework stressed the progress, unity, and Christian values of American history but downplayed diversity and overlooked racism, economic inequality, and the costs of American expansion and imperialism. In a critique appearing in the Educational Researcher, Cornbleth and Waugh dismissed Honig, Ravitch and Crabtree as “neo-nativists” ouch! attempting to force “a happy brand of multiculturalism that cast everyone into the same immigrant mold” on California’s diverse student population. Honig, a self-described liberal, defended the Framework’s “balanced picture” of history and claimed it focused “both on the struggle to make American ideals a reality as well as when that reality has fallen short” and dismissed Cornbleth and Waugh as “extreme multiculturalists.” [9]
Despite such rancorous exchanges, debate over the Framework remained, for the most part, relegated to a few isolated journal articles.[10] While it featured arguments reflective of the larger cultural debates of the late 1980s and early 1990s, pitting neo-conservatives against the politically correct, it never approached the degree of enmity that surrounded the development of the national history standards.[11] Most of the literature and debate surrounding the Framework were not focused on the nature of its historical content, but rather on how to implement the new curriculum in the classroom.[12]
The 1990s: California’s System of Accountability for History Education
While California policymakers promoted the new Framework’s history curriculum, the standards based reform movement gained momentum at the national level. In 1989, at the Charlottesville Governor’s Summit, President Bush and a bipartisan group of governors met to discuss the problems identified by A Nation at Risk. The conference concluded by issuing six goals that became the hallmark for both the Bush and Clinton administrations’ educational policies: these included increasing high school graduation rates by 90%, increasing assessments in core subjects across grade levels, and, by the year 2000, achieving the best scores in the world for math and reading.
The Governors conference spurred a series of national events and legislation aimed towards achieving these objectives. After formally announcing the conference’s goals in his 1990 State of the Union address, Bush created the National Education Goals Panel (NEGP) and the National Council on Educational Standards and Tests (NCEST) to help develop voluntary national standards and assessments. In 1994, President Clinton, who had played a central role in the Charlottesville conference, signed the Goals 2000: Educate America Act, which, amongst other things, allocated funding for the development of state standards and assessments in order to spur and measure progress on the goals devised at the Governor’s summit. Later that year, Clinton strengthened this legislation by requiring states to develop and implement subject-specific standards and assessments in order to receive Title I funds through the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary School Act.
In California, Governor Pete Wilson followed suit and accelerated the movement towards standards and accountability in the state by signing into law the California Assessment of Academic Achievement Act in 1995. This measure called for the State Board of Education to oversee the creation of “academically rigorous content standards” and to “adopt tests that yield valid, reliable estimates of school performance and statewide pupil performance that assess basic academic skills.”[13] By 1998, the Academic Standards Commission had developed specific content and analysis standards for history that aligned with the History-Social Science Framework. The Department of Education adopted the History-Social Science Content Standards for California Public Schools on October 9, 1998 and integrated these standards into the Framework in 2001.
The adoption and addition of the History-Social Science Content Standards fundamentally changed the Framework. For one thing, it made the document less suggestive and more prescriptive. Instead of providing general “course descriptions” to guide instruction, the Framework now included hundreds of specific items - content standards - to be taught at each grade level: 134 for grades K-5, 175 for grades 6-8 and 203 for grades 10-12. The Standards Commission also created “analysis standards” to help students develop “the critical thinking skills that historians and social scientists employ to study the past.”[14] These standards were divided into three categories - “Chronological and Spatial Thinking,” “Historical Research, Evidence, and Point of View” and “Historical Interpretation”- and split into three levels: twelve analysis standards for grades K-5, twelve for grades 6-8, and fourteen for grades 10-12.
As State Superintendent of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin described, the content and analysis standards were intended to facilitate the implementation of the Framework’s history curriculum. The original course descriptions lacked precision and were therefore subject to different interpretations. The content standards addressed this problem by “explicitly” defining “the content that students need to acquire at each grade level from kindergarten to 12th grade.”[15] This in turn clarified for teachers exactly what to teach and for the state and districts to align curriculum and resources with the content of history courses with more precision. In addition, the content standards made it easier to align traditional forms of standardized tests with the history curriculum and therefore provide efficient means for assessing student knowledge of history.