History Education Reform and the National History Education Network

Louis R. Harlan

NHEN differs somewhat from the other organizations because of its focus on networking and on advocacy, what we might just as well call lobbying.  At the federal, the state, and eventually at the school board level, NHEN lobbies in behalf of what history teachers want and need.  It complements rather than duplicates the efforts of the other collaborations among history teachers such as National History Day, the History Teaching Alliance, the National Council for History Education, and the Magazine of History.

The key word in NHEN’s title is “network.”  NHEN is a network of organizations of history teachers joined with the leading historical associations, history advocacy groups such as the National Council for History Education and the National Council for the Social Studies, and, we hope, in the future the college departments of history and schools of education.  Its goal is to promote, protect, and, yes, sometimes improve the teaching of history in the schools.  But it is definitely not a missionary organization.  Professors and public historians active in NHEN are not missionaries bringing the gospel from on high to the natives (high school history teachers).  We are all equal partners with a common aim of teaching history.  As Jim Gardner, the Deputy Executive Director of the AHA, stated several years ago: “History education reform has long suffered from too much talk and too little action, but the establishment of NHEN promises to change all that.  The network is a new alliance of organizations and projects committed to action.”

I can take only a modest share of the credit for founding NHEN.  It was actually Jim Gardner of the AHA and Arnita Jones of the OAH who did the hard administrative work to cobble NHEN into being.  Jim probably ought to be the one up here making this speech.  But I will take some credit for the idea.  Back in 1989, when I was president of both the AHA and the OAH, I was searching for something I could do for history that would make my one-year presidencies more than an empty honor.  I devoted part of my AHA presidential address and all of my OAH address to proposals for history education reform.  I also took advantage of my dual presidency to convene a “summit conference” on history education reform, with representatives of the OAH and the AHA sitting down with history teachers and other interested parties to work on our common problems.

There was nothing original about the idea.  There have been several earlier, transitory reform movements.  Back in the 1930s Merle Curti and Howard K. Beale had led a movement to establish a vital link between history in the schools and history in the universities.  That initiative became a casualty of World War II.  In the 1970s, H. G. Jones and others formed the North Carolina Committee on the Status of History in the Public Schools, but it soon died on the vine for lack of sustained public interest.  There were probably other such local efforts that I don’t even know about.  Then, in the late 1980s began a new national cycle of interest in history education reform.  The Bradley Commission on History in the Schools published its recommendations for more history and better history in the schools, and the National Commission on the Social Studies issued a model curriculum.  Both commissions took a hard look at history programs and came up with excellent recommendations.  But commissions always have a built-in sunset clause.  What was still unclear was how to make these reform proposals a reality.  I made that question the whole agenda of my summit conference.  Representatives of eight organizations met with AHA and OAH officers and staff in Washington in March 1989.  But it was just a beginning.

Out of many proposals for action, the main one seemed to be the development of a state and district level network, collaborating with history classroom teachers to influence policy-making related to history education.  We decided to meet every six months until we had formed such a networking organization.  By our third meeting in April 1990 the number of participating organizations had doubled to sixteen.  Strong opinions clashed, and there were major turf battles—between advocates of the social studies approach and of history pure and simple—that came close to splitting us apart.  But I am happy to say that today the spokespersons of both sides are still participants, and the membership has more than doubled again, to thirty-five organizations.  At the fourth meeting, in September 1990, we agreed on a statement of mission and goals and an organizational structure modified from that of the National Coordinating Committee for the Promotion of History.  We agreed on the name National History Education Network, with its imperfect but serviceable acronym NHEN.  Director Sam Gammon offered $10,000 a year from the AHA, Executive Secretary Arnita Jones arranged to match that from the OAH, and smaller organizations pledged lesser amounts.  We hoped for help from NEH and other funding agencies, but that was the heyday of Lynne Cheney.  We had to settle for bootstraps of our own making and a shoestring budget.

The next tasks were to find an institution that would provide a home and to hire a director.  These tasks took more than a year.  Several institutions explored the possibility of housing NHEN, but the most promising was the University of Florida, where the enterprising Kermit Hall was chair of the history department and where the History Teaching Alliance was already established under Hall’s aegis.  At a crucial point in the negotiations, Hall moved to the University of Tulsa as a dean and offered to take both the HTA and NHEN there under his broad wing.  Hall stayed at Tulsa just long enough to move both HTA and NHEN there under a single director before himself taking flight to a deanship at Ohio State University.  He arranged to provide office space, a half-time assistant, and substantial financial support for up to four years.

Christine Compston came aboard as director of NHEN and HTA in June 1993.  She had had five years’ experience teaching in secondary schools, a Ph.D. in history, and about ten years of widely ranging experience combining university teaching and directing humanities projects in Maine and New Hampshire.  In her two years at NHEN she has a remarkable record of achievement.  She has disseminated a quarterly newsletter since October 1993, and in January 1995 supplemented it with an electronic network to share information regarding history education, policies, and legislative action.  In 1994-1995 she published a directory and resource guide to the educational activities of member organizations.  Beginning last fall, she began a series of mailings informing member organizations about the debate over the National History Standards and about legislative action threatening NEH and the Department of Education.

Under Compston’s direction, NHEN conducted a survey of the state social studies specialists to gather information on teacher certification, graduation requirements, and history content requirements, with results so far from 36 states.  She has participated in numerous panels on history education at national conferences of member organizations, including OAH and AHA.  At the state level, she is currently working on amending an Oklahoma bill that would otherwise exclude all of the social studies from an examination required for high school graduation.

As you can tell from these particulars, NHEN is proving daily its usefulness and indeed the necessity for its work of advancing the cause of history education in these parlous times.  Modern Know Nothings are now trying to politicize history, counting up the non-mentions of George Washington’s name to attack the National History Standards.  Veterans’ organizations now seek to dictate the history of our patriotic gore in the case of the Enola Gay exhibit.  In addition to  promoting history at the federal level, we now need more than ever to work at the state level and the secondary-school level, exerting a hands-on influence on educational policy-making.