The AHA initiated this study in response to a series of highly visible controversies over the teaching of US history in our public schools. The assumptions underpinning these debates, even when codified into legislation, were just that—assumptions, based more on anecdote than evidence. Without clear agreement about the source of the problem, the prescriptions offered to save history instruction channeled ideological formulations and political ambitions rather than careful and informed analysis of the education landscape.
This report—and the research it summarizes—provides a starting point for new, evidence-driven conversations about history instruction in middle and high schools across the country. The AHA’s participation in these “history wars” led us to think about how noise and outrage can distract from productive discussion about what teachers, schools, and districts actually need to prioritize: student learning. We do not doubt the sincerity of the passions shaping public debate, but the extremely limited data available has left these controversies firmly anchored in the realm of fury and fear rather than constructive conversation.
Speculation and outrage do little to address the many real challenges our schools confront on a daily basis. It is time to get serious about history education.
Meaningful solutions must account for the social context in which students learn. As we began to speak with teachers and administrators, we realized that tensions and conflicts within a school community rarely matched the conflagrations depicted in national or social media. Shouting matches certainly echoed loudly and harmfully in some places, and teachers who followed bad news in other states sometimes felt a vicarious discomfort. But the most acute problems and pressures of teaching typically came with a local accent. Within the same school district, teachers reported starkly different experiences, even if they worked just a few miles from each other. When we asked teachers to talk about their communities, they described the social worlds that their students came from: the closed meatpacking plant, the new Amazon distribution center; their favorite site for local field trips; the languages spoken by the newest migrants; the rising rents; the military base; the open-air drug market; the disappearing countryside; the jobs at the ski resort; the unequal status clinging to either side of the school district boundaries. These are the realities that shape history instruction in public schools.
Much like the communities they serve, history teachers bring diverse political sensibilities and varied experiences to their classrooms. They might be strongly conservative, strongly liberal, or some idiosyncratic blend of preferences and ideas. Their interest and passion for history probably inform their personal politics (and vice versa), but they appear strongly committed to keeping their contemporary policy preferences from skewing how they teach. We heard repeatedly about the need for neutrality and balance.
History teachers are committed to teaching students how to think, not what to think. They are committed to teaching both inspirational and hard histories and weighing multiple perspectives. These attitudes and commitments outline a politics of history education grounded in evidence as well as empathy, tolerance, and respect for the values and ideas of other people, past and present. The majority of teachers with whom we interacted display pragmatic self-awareness about the need to tell history honestly and to maintaining their professional reputations as trusted members of their communities.
Teachers also express concerns when manifestations of the wider culture wars interfere with their professional obligations in the classroom. We spoke with conservative teachers in Iowa who were frustrated with the negativity stirred up by a Republican-sponsored divisive concepts bill. We also talked to self-described social justice-focused teachers in Washington who were equally disappointed with the trendy and performative race talk that their district’s progressive administrators had pushed forward. These instances are reminders that historians, teachers, and administrators need to articulate a rationale for good history that can be understood irrespective of partisan identities and political commitments. So long as history is promoted as part of an education for informed citizenship, as 94 percent of teachers we surveyed believe it is, then we also need to take time to distinguish history’s insights from civic or political debates.
While there remains considerable room for improvement, the edifice of secondary history education in the United States rests on solid foundations: a diffuse national culture grounded in shared professional norms, an ambition to cultivate historical thinking and provide core knowledge that accords broadly with recent scholarship, and many passionate and dedicated classroom teachers.
Unanswered Questions and Shared Conclusions
Readers of this report will undoubtedly take note of what it does not do. To return to our culinary cliché, this study of menus and recipes (standards and curriculum) makes no claims about the table service, digestion, and nutrition (how lessons are delivered, what students learn and value from them). Nor does it describe the culinary schools that train the chefs or the health departments that issue certificates (teacher preparation programs and licensure processes).1 We also acknowledge that aside from standards and legislation, our study could not capture conditions outside of our nine sample states.
The AHA hopes readers of this report will use its evidence and analysis to inform attempts to support student success in public education. The typical tensions of a teacher’s job emanate from neither parents nor politics. Instead, difficulties stem from fundamental struggles over authority and autonomy: adolescents who aren’t necessarily interested or motivated by what teachers have to offer, and teachers whose view of their work doesn’t always match their administrators’ expectations.
This report does not speculate on what will endear teachers or their classwork to students. It does, however, offer an informed rejoinder to the declarations of crisis and confrontation in history classrooms that dominate the news. Panic and controversy generate political energy around education reform; they also feed rumor and disable the will for democratic deliberation.
The AHA’s research raises skepticism about reforms that rely on overbearing standardization or micromanagement of instruction—whether undertaken in the name of test prep, racial equity, or patriotism. These impulses run counter to the foundational goals of social studies: to train young people for independent thinking and self-government. It is unreasonable to expect students to achieve these outcomes if teachers are censored, too constrained, or too intimidated to model them in the classroom.
We also offer a critique of the overly broad or overly narrow questions that sometimes separate inquiry from narrative interpretation. A curriculum arranged as a series of inquiry modules probably can more effectively enact the mental moves of history than a series of lectures or videos. But if the “big story” is left out or left blurry in classrooms—because the textbook is gone, the political climate is too touchy, or the teacher isn’t sure what the plot points should be—students’ appetite for narrative might plausibly be filled later in life by well-produced stories whose accountability to historical evidence is less scrupulous. Historical thinking requires historical knowledge.
Finally, our research justifies a call for history-rich professional development for social studies teachers through a variety of means. Since the expiration of the Teaching American History federal grant program in 2011, there has been a desperate need for renewed professional development opportunities for K–12 history teachers. Social studies teachers report uneven access to the high-quality, content-specific programs essential to maintain their qualifications as historians and their enthusiasm for history. Some states require that teachers fulfill a specific number of hours of programming in this vein. Some others have no requirements at all. A targeted program of professional development would help teachers gain confidence in moving between inquiry and narrative synthesis.
We propose a deliberate, mundane process: restore, reinforce, and reinvest in teachers’ confidence as experts in their subject matter. This work applies across American history but is especially true for areas in which teachers noted their own calls for help: Native American history or anything after the civil rights era. Other vibrant historical fields that are largely missing from K–12 classrooms include environmental history, histories of women and gender, and the United States in a global context. Teachers can benefit from participating in professional learning communities online, at conferences, and through the work of local, state, and national organizations.
Even more than at the AHA’s founding 140 years ago, academic historians today cannot and should not lay exclusive claim to insight or control over curricula. K–12 teachers, local parents, education reformers, journalists, political activists, social studies specialists, publishers, tech companies, nonprofits, philanthropies, and school administrators all expect a seat at the table.
For two centuries, the basic rationale for teaching US history in public schools has been consistent: to instill in students a sense of belonging to the nation and to prepare them for participation as citizens of a republic. As the political realities of who was allowed to fully belong and what it has meant to fully participate have changed, so also has the language that Americans use to frame the value of history education. Watchwords of successive eras—a tolerant patriotism, global awareness, college readiness, equity and inclusion—imply a shifting admixture of civic values and individual benefits, but they all tend toward a certain shallowness in terms of their application to instruction. Historians might have their own opinions about the value of citizenship, belonging, or “readiness,” but most would agree that history is a thrilling way for students to learn about their communities, whether understood locally, nationally, or globally.
Still, historians must periodically play the counterweight to a narrow civic imperative that often arises in these debates. Advocating for history with integrity sometimes means resisting calls to define history as something urgently relevant, lest it simply become a way of ratifying contemporary ideologies—whether national, partisan, or educational. The value of history education also rests on more humanistic justifications: the encounter with strangers from distant pasts; an appreciation for their ideas and creations; the reconstruction of their sense of surprise. These are adventures that humble the ego and stir the soul; their civic value may not be immediately apparent, but our shared humanity is undoubtedly the better for it.
At the root of recent debates is a welcome affirmation that history matters, in contrast to the testing trends that have made social studies an “afterthought.” A healthy public school system requires public deliberation and administrative oversight over what American students should know and be able to do. History’s special contribution remains similar to the notion that historians offered over a century ago: “the invaluable mental power that we call judgment.”2
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