Preparing History Teachers and Scholars?: Content Exams and Teacher Certification from the Progressive Era to the Age of Accountability

In recent decades states have mandated brief, multiple-choice exams to assess the content knowledge of history teachers for certification. Despite the efforts of college professors to assess student learning through research papers, essay exams, and other assignments, the ability of college students to graduate and become certified to teach history depends on a passing score on a small number of multiple-choice questions. The overlooked story of how standardized testing came to shape the certification of history teachers began at least 80 years before federal legislation such as No Child Left Behind (NCLB). Used in almost every state, such exams undermine the work of historians in teacher education and promote a narrow view of the discipline that emphasizes consensus and historical facts at the expense of diversity and historical thinking. The exams also highlight the persistent problem of preparing history teachers in an educational climate that has long asked more of its students than its teachers. While historians have often overlooked developments in secondary education and advocates of history education have emphasized curriculum reform, standardized testing continues to play a significant role in history teacher education. The origins of the current relationship between history education and standardized testing began at Columbia University soon after World War I as educators, rather than historians, began applying the experience of the U.S. military in testing to undergraduate history courses. Pioneers of using standardized testing to measure content knowledge such as Ben Wood and William Learned soon conducted, with the help of the Carnegie Foundation for Teaching, an ambitious ten-year study of high school and college students in Pennsylvania which revealed that undergraduates preparing to teach performed especially poor on exam questions related to history. Although Wood and Learned acknowledged that their assumption that effective teachers should master content knowledge was far from a given within teacher education in the thirties, their recommendations that teacher education stress performance on standardized exams rather than curriculum provided the foundation for current testing. As standardized testing came of age in American education, the National Council for the Social Studies and the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education increasingly replaced the historical profession as the central players in history teacher education. At the same time, historians ranging from Charles Beard and the Progressive historians to the so-called New Left historians of the sixties abandoned the narrow methodology and grand narratives necessary for encapsulating American and world history in brief standardized exams. The ironic legacy of such developments is that just as most historians dismissed the comfort of older narratives as hopelessly reductionist, educators became increasingly committed to holding history teachers accountable for a small number of particular historical facts. The result is a contemporary educational climate of accountability and accreditation that leaves little room for the discipline of history.