Historic(al) NAEP Results

New NAEP history & civics results were released yesterday. To the seeming surprise of many, history scores were up across the board, while civics scores are up in grade 4 and flat elsewhere.

I'm guessing a lot of pre-written newspaper articles and blog posts beginning with some basic historical fact that most students don't know, followed by a general bemoaning of our collective ignorance of our shared past, heritage, etc., etc., are sitting in various electronic and physical dustbins this morning.

The New York Times still went with the overly-pessimistic "Students Gain Only Marginally on Test of U.S. History." That's real glass-is-half-emptyism, no?

The top-line policy context is, as always, NCLB. Along with the recent upswing in 4th grade NAEP science scores, these results seem to, if not puncture, at least fail to support the widely held notion that NCLB's focus on reading and math is creating collateral damage in other subjects, as teachers make time for the basics by cannibalizing subjects like history and science.

The consensus unverified speculative opinion is that because NCLB is helping more students with reading, they're learning more in other subjects, because it's awfully hard to learn if you can't read. Which makes perfect sense, that's why NCLB was designed to focus on core subjects in the first place. What's interesting is the begrudging, backhanded way this gets discussed. For example:

Peggy Altoff, president of the National Council for the Social Studies, suggested that the intensified reading instruction in primary grades might disguise a failure to teach much history and civics in fourth grade. Social studies test scores might be climbing, she said, because fourth-graders are more likely to understand simple questions that do not require much knowledge of history, such as interpreting pictures.

Or:

“It’s heartwarming that the test organizers have found positive things to say, but this report is not anything to break out the Champagne over,” said Theodore K. Rabb, a professor of history at Princeton who advocates devoting more classroom time to the subject.

Look, if it turns out that history and science instruction in this country have been fatally hamstrung by a more generalized lack of reading skills, then shouldn't advocates for those fields be first the barricades to support NCLB-like reforms, given the initially paradoxical yet increasingly plausible idea that increasing basic skill instruction at the expense of history and science may actually lead to more learning in those subjects? Or is this just all about using the public policy arena to jockey with the other disciplines for status?