Whose History Is It?

By Henry C. Zabierek

The battle over national standards for public schools appears to be over. Most Americans now believe that some sort of accountability in which communities can compare the academic performance of their students with their contemporaries' nationwide is essential. In addition, most Americans are exasperated at the seemingly endless reports of how our students' performance pales before that of their international peers.

While standards and tests may be a given, the nature of those standards are not. That is why, in this season of Thanksgiving, near the eve of the new millennium, we might find it instructive to consider the fate of the national history standards.

Lynn V. Cheney, then the chairwoman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, commissioned them and didn't like them. Rush Limbaugh detested them. The U.S. Senate condemned them. Scholars such as Diane Ravitch and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. cited flaws in them. "Them," the national history standards, were developed in 1994 by a committee headed by Gary Nash of the University of California, Los Angeles, the director of the National Center for...