by Catharine Williams
In the fall of 2015, I started my freshman year of high school. My World Cultures I class was the honors variant of the typical world history course that every freshman was designated to take. The school only had one history teacher that had stayed for the upcoming 2015-2016 school year: Mr. John Brown. Because of this shortage, Portsmouth Public Schools shifted the positions of multiple employees to teach history. One janitor at another high school in the district, Mr. Calvin Jarrett, had minored in history when he was in undergraduate school. He was my history teacher that fall.
As much as I’d love to say that the history department at Woodrow Wilson High School has improved, it has not. Of course, the people working there are different, but the issue is still the same. No one in the history department has a degree in history (except for Brown, but he retired last school year). This issue, history teachers having no experience in history as a science, is prevalent in American public schools today.
Most high schools do not require their humanities teachers to be educated on the subjects they are teaching. According to a study published by the Organization of American Historians, only nine states require their high school educators to have a major in history. Bailey Jones, a history major at Sweet Briar College, says most, if not all, of her high school history teachers were coaches. She says “My freshman American history teacher was the soccer coach for the girls team. He would read from the textbook, and he would avoid questions because he didn’t know the answers. My senior world history teacher was the girl’s basketball coach. She read from the textbook too and would go off into a tangent about basketball almost every class. So yeah, I didn’t learn much from her.”
Dwala Waugh, a history professor at Sweet Briar College with a doctorate in American History, started her career teaching 11th grade history courses. When asked about history as a subject, she said, “In learning history, it is very important to have the knowledge and the skill to determine bias and look past the bias. Most teachers, especially in high school and elementary schools, can’t do that. My colleagues, and even myself when I first started, couldn’t do that. It wasn’t until I started going for my Master’s in history that I really learned that in order to see bias and read through it, you have to be knowledgeable on the subject at hand.”
In a scholarly journal, E.L. Woodward writes that the average man intends “the bias of history to fall in their direction, and it has never been very difficult for them to have their way.” Zac Roush writes for the Pepperdine University Graphic that only 34% of teachers instructing history have a certification or a major in the subject. He draws from an article written by Alia Wong for The Atlantic when he states “This leaves an enormous gap for students in history classes, one that could be solved through the certification of more teachers and by schools ensuring that their teachers are knowledgeable about the subject they wish to teach.”
Rachel Davis, a freshman at Sweet Briar College in Lynn Laufenberg’s entry-level class, took a government class just last semester at her high school. “My senior year, the government teacher was a man named Mr. Kallus, who was very passionate about the subject but he was very, very conservative and biased because he couldn’t stay neutral when he was teaching,” she told me. When I asked about her experience in Laufenberg’s class, she said “Oh, Lauf is great! She isn’t neutral by any means, but she tells us before going off into a tangent about American politics.”
Davis told me about her sophomore year World History class, immediately using air quotes to describe the title of the class. “Yeah, it was really bad. The teacher’s name was Mitch fucking Neil, who got fired for discussing his pot habit with students. Before that, though, I heard that he was sliding in some girl’s DMs when she had just finished her junior year of high school. She told me about that directly, actually, and showed me the screenshots.” Davis goes on to say, “This is the same man, who in class once, I think didn’t know the definition of a word and yelled ‘Hey Siri, what does this mean?’”
When asked about the difference between high school history and college-level history, she says that “I am a liberal from a very conservative area; I mean I’m from fucking Ohio, dude. So I can’t say that it’s because I was taught to distinguish bias or if it’s because I am inherently liberally biased, but you could definitely tell the bias of your teachers from the way they teach certain areas of history. Here, you really can’t. You’re able to discern from a tangent about politics and what you’re supposed to be learning very easily. And I think it’s because college professors are better about drawing that line than high school teachers are.”
Why is there such a clear-cut difference between college education and high school education? Why is it so clear-cut that even teachers can see the difference? And why aren’t people striving to make this difference change? Teachers blame the No Child Left Behind Act.
NCLB was passed in 2002 with major support from both the House of Representatives and the Senate, respectively with votes of 381-41 and 87-10, states a 2007 article from ThoughtCo. The legislature was passed for a maximum of 5 years before being reinstated but has since been extended despite the lack of a reauthorization.
In a journal written by a Ph.D. applicant for Stanford University, Thomas Dee (with help from Brian A. Jacobs), NCLB is “arguably the most far reaching education policy initiative in the United States over the last four decades.”
Many critics of NCLB are alike in their reasons for their critique, Dee states. Critics claim that NCLB has led educators to devote more time and more money to the “tested subjects,” which include math, science, English comprehension and writing, and history, in favor of the “untested subjects” such as art, music, and social studies. One specific critic, James E. Schul Ph.D., claims that a large flaw of the NCLB Act is that teachers have become unprofessional. “NCLB’s infatuation with SBR (scientific based research) leans toward telling the teacher what to do versus suggesting certain practices to the teacher.”
The bottom line: teachers know their students best and should be able to adapt to situations fit for individual students. But they are not able to adapt.
E.L. Woodward writes that a history teacher must first “interest his audience.” Otherwise, we can only presume, there is no point in teaching. “Now if he is to interest his audience, he must talk to them in a language which they can understand about subjects in which they will be interested.” With NCLB’s refusal to allow teachers the freedom to teach the way the students learn best, teachers are unable to interest their audience. The fast-paced status of NCLB does not leave much time for teachers to determine the students’ interests and the “languages which they can understand.” And so teachers just go with the formula that NCLB gives them, which is based off of the majority of students, but not all students (according to James E. Schul).
So what about the student that doesn’t learn best with that formula, whatever that formula may be? What about the student that doesn’t learn well when the teacher is just reading from the textbook?
The teacher is supposed to help that student, but NCLB requires that students pass the standardized test administered at the end of the term. The teacher must choose between the majority failing the test or the one student failing the test. Which one would you choose?