THAT'S HISTORY: MEDIA GOT STANDARDS STORY WRONG
by Anne C. Lewis for America Tomorrow

Two years ago proposed history standards for grades K-12 hit the headlines in a big way. The criticisms were loud from the conservative side, so loud in fact that the Senate eventually passed a resolution, 99-1, condemning the standards. Lynn Cheney, former head of the National Endowment for the Humanities under President Reagan, was a leader of the opposition (she criticized the omission of some basic historical facts and leaders, but, it was pointed out later, these had been covered in elementary grades). Anyway, the controversy forced the standards back to the drawing board. The Council on Basic Education did a modest rewrite, and the standards drifted out of the news.

The problem, education reporters learned at a recent seminar, is that there really was no controversy in the profession, among teachers or with anyone except conservative critics. Researcher Joyce Appleby of the University of California at Los Angeles said that more than 30 groups participated in the writing of the history standards and had thrashed out all of the problems they were criticized for ignoring. These included such issues as how much non-Western cultures should be emphasized and the emphasis on history rather than social studies.

The media, however, quoted only the attacks on the standards. It didn't point out, she said, that the history standards represented an "unprecedented" collaboration among many groups. "They distorted the opposition, never spoke to teachers, never discovered the extraordinarily broad group of people who had developed the standards in the first place," she said.

The English standards, on the other hand, never got off the ground because of the lack of agreement among those drawing them up. Miles Myers of the National Council of Teachers of English, one of the groups participating in developing the standards, said the effort produced broad principles. These weren't enough to please the U.S. Department of Education, which withdrew funding from the coalition working on English standards.

The reporters were attending the first seminar sponsored by the new Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media at Teachers College/Columbia University. A report of the seminar appears in the current issue of the Education Reporter published by the Education Writers Association.