The project will address the need for teachers trained in American history, a lack of access to historians for content enrichment and a lack of ongoing collaboration among teachers of American history. Its ultimate goal is to improve student academic achievement through improvements in teacher content knowledge of traditional American history. Building on the concluding Teaching American History project that examined 18th and 19th century American history, this project will assist the Consortium's 123 secondary history instructors in becoming scholar-teachers with a three-year, in-depth examination of how American ideology and other key elements of American life from the 18th and 19th centuries were carried into the 20th century world. Through this content-rich professional development project, teachers will gain the historical knowledge and resources necessary to reinvigorate their classroom instruction and subsequently impact students' understanding of important questions, themes and narratives of traditional American history.

In the participating school districts, 79% of 4th grade and 74% of 8th grade students scored below proficiency on the state American history test. Only 2% of both groups reached advanced proficiency on the test. Participants—a portion of whom will be pre-service teachers—will become familiar with historical methodology (including analyzing primary and secondary source data) and examining key events in state history. The ultimate goal is to increase student achievement through reading and analysis of historical documents, and to demonstrate mastery through writing and debate.

With high levels of student poverty and a 15% rate of limited English proficient students, the state has assigned the Reading School District a "district improvement" status. Students district-wide have not made AYP in reading and mathematics. The William Penn Liberty Fellowship will deepen the Fellows' comprehension of traditional American history, through the use of primary sources, the study of historical events, issues, personalities, turning points, and interpretations of events by coeval contemporaries, along with the study of modern historiographies. The Fellowship will investigate traditional American history in a systematic, chronological, and thematic fashion, as part of the Binary Paideia approach to teaching history.