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Moving Quickly Through History
BY MICHAEL WINERIP TODAY, more than 100,000 New York high school students will take the state global history exam. Richard P. Mills, the state education commissioner, has such faith in this test - and the state tests in English, math, American history and science - that in recent years, he has made passage of all five exams mandatory for a high school diploma. New York now has one of the most test-driven education systems in the nation. For global history teachers like Dalia Hochman at La Guardia High School in Manhattan, it's a whirlwind tour through the centuries as she tries to cover everything on the state test. "In one stretch," Ms. Hochman said, "we do the scientific revolution, French Revolution, revolution in Haiti, Simón Bolívar and Latin American independence movements, the Napoleonic period, 19th-century nationalism in Italy and Germany, Zionism, back to the Industrial Revolution - it's a race to finish." Nor does the state commissioner take kindly to high schools that want to teach history differently or test students' knowledge in other ways. Two dozen schools in the state use the International Baccalaureate, a curriculum that teaches history by emphasizing a more in-depth look at fewer eras, requires students to do research with primary sources and uses international specialists to grade the work. The program is considered so rigorous that students often accumulate enough credits to skip their freshman year of college. But it's not good enough for Dr. Mills. He has refused to approve the International Baccalaureate history program as an alternative to state tests. Dr. Mills has also rejected a request by a consortium of 32 small high schools, including Urban Academy in Manhattan, to assess their students' history research and oral presentations by using real historians - like Eric Foner of Columbia University and Mikal Muharrar of the New-York Historical Society - instead of state tests. Urban Academy may be a national model for small, successful high schools, featured most recently in Newsweek magazine; it may take minority children who have failed at other New York City high schools and get virtually all of them into four-year colleges. But that is not good enough for Dr. Mills. So Ann Cook, co-director of Urban Academy, wondered: Since the state is so dismissive of other assessment approaches, just how good are the state's own tests? Using a Gates Foundation grant, Ms. Cook assembled several panels of specialists to critique the New York State Regents exams. In global history, the panelists, mainly history professors, actually took recent state tests. They were struck by the gap between how rigorous state standards sound (students must "evaluate evidence," "probe ideas and assumptions," "ask and answer analytical questions") and how "vapid" the test essay questions were. The state uses a document-based question, an excellent testing exercise, panelists agreed. Students write an essay based on excerpts from several historical documents. Two of the panelists - Carol Berkin, a history professor at Baruch College, and William Everdell, dean of humanities at St. Ann's School in Brooklyn - have created document-based questions for the College Board Advance Placement test and they correct AP history essays. They thought the state document-based question essay was hopelessly broad, the documents weak and misleading. A recent AP world history document-based question asked students to discuss the fall of slavery and rise of indentured servitude in the 19th and 20th centuries. The nine documents (spanning 1850-1920) included a newspaper editorial, photographs of indentured laborers on a sugar plantation, an indentured labor contract and a laborer's written protest about the number of hours worked. A recent state global history document-based question said, "Compare and contrast the role of women in different societies throughout history." The seven documents (spanning 202 B.C. to 1980) were mostly quotations about women, often with no context of who the speaker was - aristocrat or peasant, revolutionary or reactionary. Fred Smoler, a professor at Sarah Lawrence College, called them "pseudo documents, tiny little fragments, small paragraphs" and a "grotesque distortion" of what a document-based question should be. One document, a day in the life of a rural Sierra Leone woman (5 a.m. carry water and firewood; 6 a.m. light fire, heat water) was undated, and it was impossible to tell if it was hundreds of years old or modern. The state answer key said students could presume it was any date they wanted it to be, and panelists said this was the worst, the antithesis of what you wanted to teach students about historical research. "The panel was generally appalled," the members' report said. As for the multiple choice section, while several panelists, including Barbara Winslow, a Brooklyn College professor, thought 2 to 3 questions of each group of 50 had more than one right answer, they were more concerned about a test that ranged from the rise of the hominid to the North American Free Trade Agreement. "My heart goes out to anyone teaching to this test," Professor Smoler said. "I'm not sure how you could do it." State education officials defend the test. Tom Dunn, a spokesman, said, "We did not hear negative feedback from teachers in the schools." Ms. Hochman of La Guardia High, a 2000 Yale graduate in history, spent a recent weekend writing comments on 170 term papers that examined an international response to a world problem - like AIDS in Uganda. The papers were brilliant and deep, she says, but it bothers her that they are not part of the state evaluation of her students or her school. Though she loves their lively classroom discussions, she feels constant pressure to cut it off, to keep up with a test-driven curriculum that, she believes, goes a mile wide and an inch deep. After Sept. 11, 2001, her students begged for special lessons on Islam. But at a Regents training conference, she said, a veteran mentor teacher warned her, "Honey, spend two days on the Byzantine Empire and three days on Islam, and then you've got to move on." And though she has bright students (virtually all pass the state test) so much is crammed in, Ms. Hochman says, "it's unbelievable how little they remember a year later." Several sophomores she had for global history are now juniors in her American history class. "When we got to World War I, they said, `Is that the one with Mussolini?' " |
