As Florida educators may be aware, the state is now requiring high school students to take a civic literacy assessment prior to graduation. This will be piloted this semester and implemented in full for the 2020-2021 school year (and is not specifically tied to any one course).

The Florida Department of Education has now released a new webpage that lists a variety of resources that can be used to help prepare students for the assessment, available here. 

Many of these resources are ones civics educators are likely familiar with, such as:

• The American Presidency Project
• Avalon Project: The Federalist Papers
• Bill of Rights Institute: Founding Documents and Resources
• Civics Flash Cards for the Naturalization Test
• Citizenship Resource Center: Study for the Test
• Constitutional Sources Project
• The Florida Constitution
• The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History
• Government Publishing Office: Ben’s Guide to the U.S. Government
• iCivics
• Khan Academy: U.S. Government and Civics
• Library of Congress: Primary Documents in American History
• Lou Frey Institute: Civics360
• National Archives: America’s Founding Documents
• National Archives: Founders Online
• The Living Room Candidate
• United States Courts

You might notice that Civics360 is on the list! We are working on creating a standalone module that will help prepare students to succeed on the Civics Literacy Assessment and will have that up and available for the 2020-2021 school year. Sadly, we will be unable to have it ready for the pilot later this semester. However, questions about how you might prepare your kids for the Civics Literacy Assessment can be directed here! 

Questions about Civic Literacy Assessment itself should be directed to Mike DiPierro and the Florida Department of Education. 

This is an unofficial list of the courses that will count for Civic Studies at Tufts next fall. It is likely to change a bit at the margins but gives an insight into our curriculum.

This new center is consistent with a recommendation in our report entitled MassForward: Advancing Democratic Innovation and Electoral Reform in Massachusetts.

From the official announcement:

MEDFORD/SOMERVILLE, Mass. (Feb. 13, 2020)–Tufts University’s Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life today announced the creation of a new, non-partisan Center for State Policy Analysis (cSPA) to ensure that lawmakers and residents in Massachusetts have access to the best information on effective public policy.

cSPA will conduct detailed, independent analyses of current legislative issues and ballot questions in Massachusetts and will widely share this research with the public. The Center aims to partner with experts at Tufts University and beyond to provide real-time analysis that informs legislative debates and helps voters better understand the stakes of ballot initiatives.

Former Boston Globe data-journalist Evan Horowitz will serve as cSPA’s executive director, supported by an advisory council that includes:

• Governor Jane Swift, president and executive director of LearnLaunch;
• Governor Michael Dukakis, Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Northeastern University
• Alan Solomont, dean of Tisch College;
• Michael Widmer, former president of the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation;
• Michael Curry, deputy CEO & general counsel at the Massachusetts League of Community Health Centers;
• Katharine Craven, chief administrative officer at Babcock;
• Ted Landsmark, director of the Dukakis Center at Northeastern;
• David Cash, dean of the McCormack Graduate School at UMass Boston;
• Carolyn Ryan, senior vice president for Policy and Research, Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce; and
• Kate Dineen, executive vice president, A Better City.

“With a history of policy leadership, and facing gridlock in Washington, Massachusetts has the opportunity to take the lead on issues like climate justice, transportation investment and healthcare,” said Alan Solomont, ambassador (ret.) and dean of the Tisch College of Civic Life. “Given our mission to study and strengthen civic life, and to promote the power of people and communities to bring about change, Tisch College is proud to host and support this nonpartisan center that can help lawmakers and citizens better understand policy issues and identify solutions.”

Working with academics and policy experts at Tufts and beyond, cSPA will produce leading research on key issues in Massachusetts political and civic life, including assessments of the economic, environmental, geographic, budgetary and equity implications of pending legislation and ballot initiatives.

“Having spent time in academia, at think tanks, and in journalism, I think there’s a real opportunity to start bridging these worlds—producing relevant, rigorous, readable research on a timeframe that works for policymakers,” said Horowitz. “Massachusetts is the perfect place to begin. The commonwealth has the richest collection of academic expertise in the world and a long history of pushing the bounds on policy innovation, from 17th-century public schools to 21st-century healthcare reform.”

In the coming months, cSPA plans to release:

• An analysis of the Transportation Climate Initiative, which would establish a regional cap-and-trade system for gasoline;
• A review of the options—and trade-offs—for addressing rising prescription drug costs; and
• Research on the projected impact of the fall 2020 ballot questions, potentially including right to repair, expanded sales of beer and wine in food stores, and ranked-choice voting.

Here are six answers to the question in my heading. Arguments can be made in favor of each.

1. The founding took place from 1776-1789, from the Declaration to the Constitution. Although the architects of the new republic sought to recycle some existing materials, they drew a new blueprint for the base on which our system stands. It was designed to be alterable–and it has been altered–but the foundation is still recognizable.
2. The foundation was poured in 1492 and 1619. Once Europeans began seizing land from indigenous people and importing enslaved Africans to work that land for them, the basic arrangement was set. The 1788 Constitution essentially preserved that structure. Some better things have been built on top of it, but the original floor is still down there, not far below the surface and determining what can be constructed above.
3. The social contract has been renegotiated at several key points: 1776 (Declaration), 1781 (Articles of Confederation), 1788-9 (Constitution), 1864-5 (post-Civil War amendments), 1938-45 (the Supreme Court reverses itself and allows the welfare state), 1954 (Brown v Board), and arguably again since the 1980s. These shifts are fairly fundamental and not well described by treating the 1788-9 contract as still foundational. The 21st-century political system is incompatible with the Framers’ plan, but that is because we have chosen to lay new foundations.
4. The United States was founded in 1788-9. In the 1900s, we ignored some of its basic principles, such as the list of enumerated powers, without explicitly and legitimately renegotiating them. The foundation is still in place, but we have built unsound structures on top of or beyond it. The Constitution is “in exile” (a phrase apparently more used by critics of this view than proponents of it).
5. The actual political-economic system in which we live is fundamentally based on publicly traded corporations, industrial production, organized labor, regulatory agencies, credentialed professions, public and private bureaucracies, mass media, mass schooling, securities markets, electronic networks, science (as a set of powerful institutions), databases of people and objects, and a permanent war machine. These elements are not envisioned in the US Constitution, which influences them somewhat but hardly determines them. The same basic structure is evident, for example, in Canada. The modern foundation has been poured one layer at a time, but if you had to pick a symbolic date for this option, it might be 1908, when the first Model T rolled off the assembly line.
6. There is no foundation. A society is not well understood as a base and superstructure or as a single game with basic rules. It’s a complex, emergent system best understood as whole series of overlapping and interacting institutions, each with rules of its own that affect the other institutions’ rules. All is flux.

I realize that most people don’t explicitly discuss this question, yet I think that today’s opposing ideological camps would each answer it differently. It could even serve as an ideological Rorschach Test.

See also: constitutional piety; the Citizens United decision and the inadequate sociology of the US Constitution; the role of political science in civic education; polycentricity: the case for a (very) mixed economy.