As Mitch noted in an earlier post, Professor Holly Brewer’s visit yesterday to our Shaftesbury luncheon featured her remarks on the decision of the NC Department of Public Instruction regarding the history curriculum in the high schools. The decision, as Holly explained, was to minimize or remove discussion of founding principles and documents from North Carolina’s high school American history curriculum–basically lopping off all pre-George Washington material.

Social studies teachers in NC schools, including those who understand the enormous importance of this missing history, have no choice under the NC Standard Curriculum of Study but to omit or cover the material prescribed?the end of grade tests are geared toward it, with all of the NC teacher bonus baggage and No Child Left Behind consequences that that entails.

Today, the Teacher’s College Record of Columbia University is featuring a new article–available without subscription for the week–called “Unfulfilled Expectations: Faculty Participation and Voice in a University Program Evaluation.” The article’s lessons apply more broadly than the University alone.

From the Introduction and Conclusion sections of the TCR report :
Increasingly, instructional programs in publicly funded educational institutions, such as reading programs in elementary schools, are expected to have undergone rigorous evaluation as part of accountability systems. Nationwide, schools, colleges, and universities are being required to demonstrate their efficacy on the basis of standardized student test scores and through more traditional measures of program evaluation.

…the results of this study suggest that active involvement in program evaluation and a sense of ownership in the process have the possibility of fostering ongoing formative evaluation within the academic unit. However, if participants come to believe that their participation does not have an impact on outcomes and that they have not been heard, or if they have been excluded from the evaluation process when they had expectations that they would be included, there is potential for disillusionment and disenchantment with the program evaluation process and possibly even the institution as a whole.

Yup.

Update on Social Studies in particular, for those who may want to subscribe (5:39pm).