Building a Consensus for the Development of National Standards in History
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Old Dominion University ODU Digital Commons Theses and Dissertations in Urban Services - College of Education & Professional Studies Urban Education (Darden) Spring 1994 Building a Consensus for the Development of National Standards in History Mary Vassilikou Bicouvaris Old Dominion University Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/urbanservices_education_etds Part of the Curriculum and Instruction Commons, Educational Assessment, Evaluation, and Research Commons, and the History Commons Recommended Citation Bicouvaris, Mary V.. "Building a Consensus for the Development of National Standards in History" (1994). Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), dissertation, , Old Dominion University, DOI: 10.25777/xj3t-7g28 https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/urbanservices_education_etds/85 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the College of Education & Professional Studies (Darden) at ODU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses and Dissertations in Urban Services - Urban Education by an authorized administrator of ODU Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. BUILDING A CONSENSUS FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF NATIONAL STANDARDS IN HISTORY by Mary Vassilikou Bicouvaris B.S. June, 1963, Ohio State University M.A. May, 1970, The College of William and Mary A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of Old Dominion University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY URBAN SERVICES OLD DOMINION UNIVERSITY May, 1994 Maurice R. Berube, Member Ms. Francie Alexander, Member Area Graduate Program Director Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Copyright by Mary Vassilikou Bicouvaris 1994 All Rights Reserved Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. DEDICATION To my husband James G. Bicouvaris, for his steadfast support encouragement and sacrifice and to my mother, the late Georgia N. Vassilikou who believed in Education. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Writing this dissertation I became indebted to many. With a deep sense of gratitude, I thank my dissertation committee: Dr. Dwight W. Allen, dissertation chair and mentor, who in addition to providing expert advice, never failed to trust me; and Dr. Maurice Berube and Ms. Francie Alexander, whose pointed advice and interest in my work were an inspiration to me. For their help in the production of the dissertation, I thank: Nancy Paige Hill for her competent work as my assistant; Dana Margulies for her technical assistance at a critical point in the production process; Patricia M. Kearns, Technical Services Librarian at Christopher Newport University; for her professional assistance; Susan Drewery, my friend and colleague who edited the work; and the secretaries and support personnel at Hampton Roads Academy where I teach for keeping up with the trail of paper and messages that were so important to the project. Special thanks are due my husband Jim and our children Greg and Valerie for their gift of understanding. My friends and colleagues Nancy Ambersley and Dr. Stavroula Gailey lifted my spirits with their many expressions of friendship, and I thank them. I am also indebted to Linda Symcox for her expert advice and help in gathering materials, to the many people I interviewed who were willing to take the time to share their views with me, and to Delta Kappa Gamma Society International for granting to me one of the international scholarships which helped fund this research. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Finally, I want to thank the Council of Chief State School Officers and Encyclopaedia Britannica, sponsors of the National Teacher of the Year Program, for recognizing me as the 1989 National Teacher of the Year, a small step that led to a thousand miles. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT I. INTRODUCTION............................... 1 Statement of the Problem .................. 1 Significance of the Study ................. 1 Background of the Problem ................. 3 Rationale ................................. 13 Propositions .............................. 16 Research Questions ........................ 17 Definition of Terms ....................... 18 Limitations of the Study .................. 19 II. REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE ............. 22 Educational Reform ........................ 22 National Standards ........................ 26 National History Standards ................ 33 Controversial Issues in History ......... 40 Building Consensus ........................ 58 Management of Conflict for Consensus Building.......................... 63 III. METHODOLOGY ............................... 69 Principles of Data Collection ............ 70 Type of Data .............................. 71 Data Collection Process ................... 72 Method of Data Analysis ................... 76 IV. BUILDING CONSENSUS ........................ 78 Organizational Structure .................. 78 vi Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Membership of the National History Standards Project ................................... 83 Timetable of the National History Standards Project .................................. 86 Controversial Issues ...................... 89 Building Consensus ........................ 109 Unresolved Issues ......................... 125 The National History Standards Project: A Model for Standards-Setting Organizations ............................. 129 V. CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS .......... 135 Conclusions ............................... 140 Contributions to Research............. ... 146 Recommendations for Future Research....... 149 EPILOGUE ...................................... 152 NOTES .......................................... 154 BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................... 175 APPENDIXES ..................................... 187 APPENDIX A Membership List of the National Council for Education Standards & Testing (NCEST) ................................ 187 APPENDIX B Pre-Interview Letter ........................... 190 APPENDIX C Interview Questions ............................ 192 APPENDIX D Interview Questionnaire ........................ 194 (codification) vii Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. APPENDIX E Purposeful Group Interview Participants........... 196 APPENDIX F Organizational Structure (proposed) ........... 201 APPENDIX G Organizational Structure (revised) ............. 203 APPENDIX H Rosters of Participants ........................ 205 APPENDIX I Renditions of standards ........................ 223 APPENDIX J Analysis of data based on C.W. Moore's Theoretical Model .............................. 232 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ABSTRACT BUILDING A CONSENSUS FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF NATIONAL STANDARDS IN HISTORY Mary V. Bicouvaris Old Dominion University, 1994 Dissertation Chair: Dr. Dwight W. Allen This research project examines the process used by the National History Standards Project to build consensus for the development of national standards for teaching history in America's schools. Since the publication of A Nation At Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform by the National Commission of Excellence in Education in 1983, the American educational community has been in the grips of a reform movement. The aim of this movement is to examine where we have been and where we are going as a nation and to redefine what we believe in and what we believe is important to teach our children if they are to be successful participants in the twenty-first century. In 1989, former President George Bush and the governors of all 50 states gathered in Charlottesville, Virginia, to set national education goals. In 1990, six goals were established for American education. Of these six goals, the third addressed the need to develop national standards of learning in the core subjects. This national standards movement which began during the Bush administration has continued in the administration of President Bill Clinton. Designed by Charlotte Crabtree and directed by Crabtree and Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Gary Nash, the National History Standards Project included representatives of every affiliated professional organization and involved a wide array of people representing America's cultural, racial, and ethnic diversity. Among the contentious issues on which the National History Standards Project had to reach consensus if it was to fulfill its mission of writing national standards for the teaching of history in America's schools were content versus process, the place of western civilization in the teaching of world history, and the inclusion of minority contributions in the teaching of United States history. A case study, developed according to the established protocol of propositions to be examined and questions to be asked, this dissertation creates a chain of evidence with explicit links between the questions asked, the data collected, and the conclusions drawn. Multiple sources of evidence