Wineburg and standardized testing

One more academic has indicted "No Child Left Behind" for the heinous gutting of historical inquiry now forced upon uninterested students. Yet Sam Wineburg's attack on the cult of testing begins not with his own advocacy, but a challenge a related study indicting student ignorance on a major era in this nation's history.

Following a recent study sponsored by the Southern Poverty Law Center, Wineburg castigates the false conclusion that students are not learning enough about the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.

He correctly faults the study for not investigating school staff and student knowledge directly. Relying exclusively on a content analysis of a wide variety of school-based resources, the Southern Poverty Law Center abruptly assumed that young people in this country are not getting a thorough vetting on the tumultuous period of U.S. History that gave us bus boycotts, mass arrests in the face of non-violent protest, the culmination of which incited Congress to pass Civil Rights and Voting Rights legislation, as well as creating an irreparable schism between the Southern Baptist Christian League and the more violent and vocal Black Panthers.

What has engendered students' perceive limitation of history? Standardized testing run amok, all in the wake of the fetish to cure the education crises holding back our students.

History as a long series of "Five W's and an H" does very little to aid students in appreciating the pass, its pressure in the present, and their role in channeling this knowledge into affecting power and purpose in their own and their country's future.

Instead of decrying how little students know of history, teachers and schools need to stress the reasons why we learn about the past. More than anything else, young people are embalmed rather than engaged by the past because of the wax-minted condition in which the past is presented to them. History is not a done deal by any stretch of the imagination, one whose legacy and implications are still harassing or engaging us, from the leaders we elect in local and national governments, to the values we adopt and teach the next generation. Students deserve to be involved in the surging wealth and controversy that history accords and affords to those knowledgeable enough to appreciate and appropriate it. Let us not deny these opportunities to our young because of the vicarious pressure of standardized testing.