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Cultural History in AP U.S. History Classes: Evidence from 25 Years at the AP Exam Reading
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by Ronald E. Butchart
University of Georgia
Athens, Georgia
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| | What Do Students Learn?
I have long been curious about what high school students are learning in their history classes. Does their curriculum reflect more current historical work, or are they largely trapped in historiographic fashions that were abandoned 40 years ago? To what degree are the questions that engage my university students finding their way into high school classes? Are those classes still mired in the "wars and rumors of wars" approach to history that dominated the history curriculum when I was in high school?
I get some answers to those questions from the students with whom I work, of course, but to extend my sense of what was going on in high schools, I began volunteering to be a Reader for the written portion of the AP U.S. History Examination. If memory serves, I began in 1980, a full quarter of a century ago. I should hasten to add, however, that I have not attended the Reading every single year since 1980, though I know colleagues who have. Various things have conspired to keep me away from time to time, including a few consecutive years in the 1990s when a tour of duty in administration made it impossible to attend. Still, over that quarter of a century, I have attended at least 18 Reading sessions, perhaps more, and thus have probably read upward of 20,000 efforts by high school juniors to make sense of their history, for better or worse. I have seen the program grow from about 75 Readers in 1980 to well over 900 last year.
It intrigued me, then, when Marc Singer, an AP U.S. History consultant at ETS, asked me about cultural history and whether I thought we were seeing any impact of cultural history on what high school students know about history. After a good deal of thought about the many essays I have read addressing a multitude of questions, it is my sense that, in the last decade, roughly, I have noticed increasing evidence of cultural history in the essays and an increasing sophistication in students' use of cultural history.
Patterns of Student Performance
Before offering some illustrations of the changes I have observed, let me put my claim of increased cultural history in the AP Examination in a larger context. We are emphatically not seeing evidence of cultural history in the majority of the essays. Quite the contrary. An increasing number of the essays are, unfortunately, unmitigated disasters. Not only do many of the students taking the examination not know cultural history, they do not know political history, diplomatic history, or much of any other species of history. That is not the result of growing stupefaction among America's youth, as much as some people want to believe that. Rather, a portion of the growth in the Advanced Placement Program in the last couple decades has been artificial, a result of a few states paying the cost of the examination, even for students who have no prayer of passing, and at least one state essentially decreeing that every history class is, ipso facto, an AP class, though without spending a cent on training the thousands of teachers who were suddenly herded under the AP tent.
The result, not surprisingly, has been an enormous growth in the number of students taking the exam who have not had a history class that was authentically the equivalent of a college-level course. From what I can learn from students attending public schools near me, and from student teachers working in high school history classes from my university, many students taking AP courses are never required, or even given the opportunity, to write essay examinations similar to those they will take when they sit for the AP Examination. There is nothing wrong with today's students, in other words, but much wrong with the ways politicians are attempting to "fix" the students.
Thus when I speak of increasing evidence of cultural history, I need to be heard very precisely: among the minority of papers that receive a score of 6 or above (on a 9-point scale), cultural history makes a showing. My general sense is that while the average score on the free-response questions has dropped in recent years as a larger proportion of the high school population takes the examination, the quality of the top students has not declined. I suspect, too, though I cannot demonstrate it, that the proportion of students who make up that top group, as a proportion of the entire high school population, has also not declined, though they have declined as a proportion of the expanding population of those who take the examination.
Cultural History Defined and Utilized
Let me add here, too, what I mean by cultural history: I am referring to evidence of historical study that draws from social and cultural history, historical insight informed by anthropological notions of culture, and historical evidence that includes literature, music, and folkways, along with historical studies that explain various expressions of values and ideological commitments.
It is my sense, then, that among the best students, probably defined most accurately as those studying with committed, enthusiastic teachers trained well in the expectations of the Advanced Placement Program, I have observed a heartening increase in students' familiarity with social and cultural history and an ability to mobilize their learning effectively. Even among students who do not write particularly effective essays, or who betray learning that should not merit college credit, but appear to have studied with a strong teacher, one can detect glimpses of cultural history.
How has this increase in cultural history manifested itself? Let me answer that by offering a number of illustrations from the last quarter-century of exams. In 1993, for example, students faced a Document-Based Question that noted that while New England and the Chesapeake region were both settled by people of English origin, "by 1700 the regions had evolved into two distinct societies." They were asked to explain why this difference in development occurred.
Just last year, a different form of the same question was posed, though without documents to prompt the students. It asked students: "Compare and contrast the ways in which economic development affected politics in Massachusetts and Virginia in the period from 1607 to 1750." The 2005 question had the potential of pushing students to answer more narrowly because of its specific language about economics affecting politics. Despite that potential prompt, the stronger responses to the 2005 question frequently drew as much on cultural and social history as on economic and political history, and they described the interaction between culture, politics, and economics. The students spoke intelligently of the differences in community structures between the regions and the impacts of different community and land-use practices on such things as social class formation and the differential development of education in the two regions. They demonstrated sophisticated understandings of the different family structures that resulted from different cultural milieu and the changing place of children and women in each area. Some were even aware of the new environmental history, along with historical work on colonial women and religion in the two areas.
By contrast, the responses to the 1993 Document-Based Question often expressed much about the House of Burgesses (and a good deal less about the Massachusetts General Court), waxed eloquent about the growth of slavery in Chesapeake (but too often asserted that there was no slavery in Massachusetts), and showed full knowledge about shipbuilding and trade in the northern colonies. The best of them did well in explaining, from what they knew, why the two regions developed differently. But what they knew seldom betrayed the sorts of understanding of the interpenetration of culture and politics, culture and economics, that the 2005 essays did. While black slaves certainly made their appearance in the earlier essays, women and religion almost never did. Families, community structures, and land use were absent. About the only exception was written by what appeared to have been a young woman who was certain that neither place would have been a good one to grow up in, but that Massachusetts was clearly worse, what with all of those "thin-lipped women dressed all in black with their grim minister husbands." That, and a few other choice judgments on her Puritan forebears suggested that her exposure to cultural history was limited to her own private meditations on the illustrations in her textbook.
The Culture of American Reform Movements
Similarly, in 1988, students were asked to assess the validity of the claim that "American reform movements between 1820 and 1860 reflected both optimistic and pessimistic views of human nature and society." Students were given five movements and were to use three in responding to the claim: education, temperance, women's rights, utopian experiments, and penal institutions. Nearly 15 years later, in 2002, students were asked to respond to a similar claim: "Reform movements in the United States sought to expand democratic ideals" in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Students struggled with the 1988 question; few knew anything about the history of education or the history of asylums; they confused temperance with prohibition and knew little about its social or cultural dimensions; and, though they could name a few utopian experiments, they had difficulty separating them from media versions of hippie communes. Even the stronger essays tended to do well on only two of the three reform domains.
In contrast, the better essays responding to the same sort of question in 2002 drew from a much richer sense of cultural history. As a historian of education myself, I was pleased to see an expanded understanding of the growth of the nineteenth-century common school, and, among the best, a good understanding of the ambiguity of the common school regarding its role in expanding democratic ideals. Without a prompt regarding the "discovery of the asylum" in the 2002 responses, better papers referred to expanding reliance on the institutionalization of criminals and the mentally ill. Oddly enough, religion seldom appeared in the 1993 essays, discussions of temperance excepted. Yet in 2002, the cultural history of religion appeared often in essays that chose to argue that many antebellum reforms were antidemocratic in impulse, particularly blue laws, efforts to abolish the delivery of mail on Sundays, and common school reforms.
Women's History and Cultural Change
A number of questions over the years have been drawn from women's history. Given the emphasis on integrating women's history into the curriculum, it is not surprising that students exhibit a strong grasp of the field, and knowledge of women's history does not, in and of itself, indicate anything about the more general infusion of cultural history into high school history classes. Yet in recent questions on women's history, the stronger students have been more apt to be able to write about changes in family structure or the role of the cult of domesticity in prompting changes in women's public and private lives. The 1981 question asking students "How and why did the lives and status of northern middle-class women change between 1776 and 1876?" elicited stock responses about the increased availability of manufactured goods and relief from farm labor. More recent questions, including some that did not specifically call out women's history, but for which the inclusion of women's cultural history made good sense, have inspired excellent responses talking about declining birth rates, increased educational opportunities, the movement of women into the Protestant foreign mission field, the feminization of school teaching, and other aspects of women's social and cultural life.
Conclusions
As a final example, the AP Exam has frequently included questions on the origins of the Civil War. Responses from the 1980s were uniformly focused on political and economic issues, particularly nullification, slavery and its expansion, and abolitionism. Rather remarkably, I think, while more recent essay do not abandon political and economic sources of the war, they occasionally contrast Northern and Southern cultural allegiances, betraying at least a vestigial understanding of notions of Southern honor in conflict with Northern rationalism and restraint, or speaking in the language of a modernizing culture colliding with an antimodernist culture.
My effort to capture the penetration of high school history classes by cultural history is not, of course, even remotely scientific. Still, it seems clear to me that we are finding some high school students who have more than a nodding familiarity with cultural history, and often the most recent cultural history. It is not widespread. The essays that exhibit that familiarity are a small portion of the top essays. But what they do suggest is that cultural history can be successfully integrated into high school history classes without diminishing "traditional" approaches, and that high-quality teaching continues to be found in high school history classes.
Ronald E. Butchart is a professor in the Department of Elementary and Social Studies Edu-cation at the University of Georgia and the author of Northern Schools, Southern Blacks, and Reconstruction: Freedmen's Education, 1862-1875 (1980). A former high school teacher, he has also written extensively on education, the history of education, and African American his-tory. This paper was first delivered as part of a panel on cultural history and the AP United States History course at the 2005 National Council for the Social Studies Annual Conference in Kansas City, Missouri.
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