A fresh battle in the history wars is brewing over the recently-revised AP U.S. History exam course framework, which goes into effect this fall. Opening salvos came from the right, prominently from Stanley Kutz at National Review and Paul Mirgenoff of Powerline, who charged that the reformed course reflected a left-wing bias. Not so, shot back Michael Hiltzik in the LA Times—if anything, lefties would say the new revisions don’t go far enough, as Jamelle Bouie pointed out in Slate.
Each side has been backed by heavy artillery — Peter Wood of the National Association of Scholars and Ron Radosh, versus James Grossman of the American History Association. Judging by the increasingly acrimonious tone, a number of American scholars are working themselves up to re-enact the last meeting between Hamilton and Burr.
As someone who has spent several years tutoring high school students who are actually prepping for the AP history test, and who still works with students when the editorial hounds of The American Interest aren’t baying at my heels for more posts, I believe that both sides are missing the point. The new revisions aren’t objectionable because the history they teach is left-wing. They’re objectionable because they don’t teach much history at all, good or bad. For all its faults—and the old system had its share—the old framework grounded students in the basic knowledge they need to take on more advanced and complex historical topics. The new framework guts one of the last solid survey courses in the liberal arts and replaces it with an airy-fairy mix of vapid “themes” and “topics” that will leave most students bored, confused, and completely unprepared for further college study in history.
The old, unreformed AP U.S. History Exam is valuable because it creates the incentives for a rigorous, one-year survey course in American history. The period—from the founding of Jamestown in 1607 to the present, plus our Native American, British, and Spanish backgrounds—works really well as a one-year course. While high school students can’t be expected to acquire a deep understanding of American history, it is well within the abilities of reasonably bright, motivated students to master a solid command of the basic facts of American history in a single year. That’s a good thing, and it means that when students get to college they will have a useful background for more specialized and demanding courses in American history, literature, and politics.
In AP U.S. history (or APUSH as high schoolers often call it), students have to comprehend and synthesize a large volume of information. Often this is the first time they have done so in a liberal arts setting: without the rigid formulae of the sciences, bound by distinct facts, but not subject to uniform conclusions. Some vital academic skills can only be learned through processing a large, diverse amount of advanced concepts. Differentiating between the facts that best bolster your case and those that are extraneous, learning to identify important patterns in complicated and sometimes contradictory streams of data, even simply comprehending and synthesizing a firehose of information—these are essential skills in college, and they can only really be learned through survey courses.
Secondly, a thorough knowledge of American history is necessary preparation for a wide range of college courses, from economics to African-American studies. With the increasing rarity of college American history survey courses (and general education requirements as a whole), most universities are implicitly relying on high schools to cover this information, as well they should. There has to be a place in American education where students get a basic grounding in facts, and as much of that grounding as possible needs to take place in the pre-college years. We don’t need more K-12 courses on “theories of orthography” and “alternative grammars,” but at some point the little darlings do need to learn some spelling and grammar.
Finally, the U.S. history course fills an important civic role: as citizens, we must have a good grip on where we are coming from to understand where we are going. With about 400,000 students taking the APUSH exam every year (roughly one-fifth of all college-bound students in America), this curriculum is the closest thing we have to a nation-wide program to ground future leaders in American history. Few other single courses matter as much for the future of American democracy.
The old AP test ensured that teachers could teach U.S. history in any manner they wanted (that their schools and local communities would tolerate)—Marxist, Reaganite, libertarian anarchist, whatever. It only mattered that they taught it all, because at the end of the year their students would be tested on knowledge of a wide spectrum of facts. The College Board provided teachers with an eight-page chronological list of events in American history that students sitting the exam would have to know, but how the teacher taught these was left to his or her discretion.
Now the College Board has drastically revised the course, issuing a new “Course Framework” that both waters down the test and restricts the way in which teachers can teach the course. The new, 80-page framework prescribes conclusions that the teacher must teach while explicitly dropping chronological, factual requirements. “Beginning with the May 2015 AP U.S. History Exams,” the new framework states, “no AP U.S. History Exam questions will require students to know historical content that falls outside this concept outline.” So what is in the concept outline? It consists of broad statements like “Supreme Court decisions sought to assert federal power over state laws and the primacy of the judiciary in determining the meaning of the Constitution”—but the actual cases by which this process happened, such as Marbury v. Madison, lie outside of it. They are listed merely as examples that could be used, but are not required knowledge. This results in an approach where students are taught to think like the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland: Conclusions first, facts afterward—and then, only optionally.
This change was thought to be necessary not because of factual revelations in the study of U.S. history, but because the Board wanted a conceptual shift away from a survey course and toward a topical approach. Perhaps the best defense comes from a history teacher commenting on Bouie’s Slate piece:
“As a person who teaches AP US History, I think the new test is better. It’s far less blind memorization of ALL THE FACTS and places much more emphasis on actual historical thinking skills that historians would use.”
While this seems like a good idea in theory, in practice it’s just as hard to apply “historical thinking skills” without those pesky facts as it is to swim without water. You can know how the muscles should work, but there’s nothing there to push off of. Furthermore, the jump to the the level of “actual historians” sounds academic, but is actually a little nutty, like high school physics teachers jumping ahead to quantum mechanics without the math. Here, the AP similarly wants to skip a survey to jump directly to the skill sets of college history majors in advanced courses. It’s bad enough for the budding historians, who will miss the factual grounding they need; what about the budding mathematicians who might want to understand their country’s place in the world?
The justification is that, “This course framework thus relieves the pressure for teachers to cover all possible events and details of U.S. history at a superficial level.” The “superficial” knock here is a red herring. All introductory courses—whether on biology or U.S. History—have to be superficial to some degree. Another word for superficial is foundational. And if you skip the foundations for the showy bits of the building, sooner or later the building will collapse. It’s a problem that I’ve seen a lot as basic courses have become increasingly theoretical and specialized. One student’s trouble with trigonometry, for instance, turned out to be based on the fact that he never properly understood early algebra.
This shift from having to know the facts to having to know only the conclusions turns the central idea of liberal arts education on its head. The liberal arts are liberal—that is, “freeing”—because they empower the mind to think critically and draw its own conclusions. But a student who learns to recite a bunch of conclusions without knowing the facts behind them learns no critical skills and in fact probably does not really understand what he or she is saying.
Tutoring students who are taking the AP class or preparing for the test has given me a somewhat different perspective on the course than many teachers. For one thing, I operate in the ultimate marketplace: if I don’t succeed, I’m shown the door. For another, I often teach students who are already struggling. To my surprise, I’ve found that the old methods often work best. What the College Board knocks as understanding “all possible events…at a superficial level” is often the missing link for those frustrated by their inability to tackle a specific question. The trick is to place a large volume of historical events within a narrative, with each event becoming a pebble within a mosaic. Without an understanding of the overall narrative, one cannot grasp the significance of each event; without all the events (or as many as possible), one cannot see the picture as a whole.
The new framework removes both the facts and the overall picture. In switching over to “themes”, it eschews not just lists of acts and court cases, but important historical data from significant statistics to the lives of great men. The framework took a lot of stick from right-wing critics for omitting the Founding Fathers. But it’s hard to label as “left-wing” an 80-page survey of the history of the United States that does not mention Martin Luther King, Jr., any more than it mentions Benjamin Franklin. One might even say it’s hard to call it a history.
It is not true, either, that advanced college history courses do not require students to know “all the facts.” Quite to the contrary: they require you to know even more than high school courses. You can’t become an expert in the American labor movement, for instance, without at some point mastering all the union leaders, court cases, labor acts, and strikes, and seeing how they all fit together. The alleged phenomenon of the “Google Age”—wherein facts are said to be dodge-able because we can always look them up—is more a paradigm shift for trivia enthusiasts than it is for serious historians. Without a firm factual background, an “apprentice historian” (what the AP now calls its target audience) won’t know what to look up, where to begin, or even what the question is in the first place.
Teaching the same material year-in, year-out must be frustrating at times, especially for those teachers whose degrees prepared them for advanced historical work. But this is high school, not grad school, and the truth is that the basic facts of history don’t change. They need to be taught to each new class just as algebra and chemistry are, changing only with major revolutions in thought, not because the teacher gets bored.
It seems the teachers involved in these revisions gave in to the temptation to make their jobs more varied and interesting. At the end of the day, this creates teacher-based learning, not student-based learning. There are definitely days when I would rather talk about the Peloponnesian War rather than Jackson’s National Bank fight for the twelfth time; the difference is, if I were to do that, I would be fired.
Speaking of personal preferences, some full disclosure: I’m The American Interest’s house Neanderthal right-winger. I think the facts of life are, as Margaret Thatcher said, basically conservative. I also think that if more high school and college students were taught those facts, more kids would probably emerge from school conservative—rather than becoming so after taking a few years’ battering from an unforgiving world. But that’s beside the point. Many great minds have come to diametrically opposite conclusions as myself—including some of the test’s defenders. What’s important is that we’ve all had the chance to examine the facts before reaching our own conclusions.
It’s a little puzzling as to why the College Board thought a new test was necessary. What we definitely did not need was a revision that made one of our few remaining national, rigorous high school courses substantially worse. The old test should be reinstated as a stopgap. The College Board should make a virtue of necessity by using the controversy to convene a more thorough, ecumenical revision. Throw in the facts the lefties want, the facts the righties want, but above all, keep in all the facts—and make the students learn them.