the shrinking field of vocational education

Before you look at the graph …

What subjects do you think have become more or less prevalent in US high schools since the late 1980s?

If we measure the percentage of all high school teachers who are assigned to each major subject, this is the pattern:

Almost all the subjects were similar in 1988 and 2012, except that vocational education dropped a lot and health/physical education shrank by a bit. The other subjects all gained about the same amounts at the expense of those two.

It isn’t worth showing the trends for most of those subjects by year, because the lines would be pretty flat. But here is the proportion of vo-tech teachers for all the years in the survey.

Posted without a comment, except to say that this may surprise people who think that some of the arts and sciences have expanded at the expense of others.

My analysis of U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS), “Public School Teacher Data File,” 1987-88 through 2011-12; “Private School Teacher Data File,” 1987-88 through 2011-12; and “Charter School Teacher Data File,” 1999-2000.

The Civics Classroom: A Free Online Course Series for Civics Teachers, Newly Revised and Completely Self-Paced

CivicsClassroomLogo

Good afternoon, friends in Civics. You may recall that we had previously offered a free online course series for civics teachers. While we remain proud of that initial iteration and are pleased with the outcomes, our most important goal is to always respond to the needs and desires of our stakeholders. As such, we are excited to announce that we are now enrolling folks into the newly revised and completely self paced The Civics Classroom Course Series! The course has been redesigned based on feedback from participants, and we believe it meets the needs of teachers much better.

Courses begin June 15, 2020.  A certificate of completion, for 5 hours of professional development, will be issued for each course successfully completed. While the first course, The Prepared Classroom, is especially designed for Florida civics teachers, the courses are free and open to all civics and government educators throughout the country.

TCC EMBED

You can download the above flier here: Civics_Classroom.

Courses open on June 15th, and you can enroll in any of the courses at any time! To learn more about each course (including access to the syllabi), or to enroll, head over to Florida Citizen. Questions? Shoot us an email! 

TWO New Civics in Real Life: The National Institutes of Health and Government Task Forces

We have posted two more Civics in Real Life readings this week! The first looks at the National Institutes of Health. How is support for the general welfare reflected in the work of the National Institutes of Health?
NIH

The second reading explores Government Task Forces. How do these reflect Article II of the US Constitution?
task forces

We hope that you find this, and others in the series, useful!

Check out the new series here. 

As a reminder, our topics so far have addressed
The 2020 Censuscensuscrl
Unemployment InsuranceUI

The Defense Production Act
DPA

Essential Workers

CRLEW

The First Amendment1st amndcrl

Government Power

GP

Nongovernmental OrganizationsNGO

Propaganda and Symbolism

prop

The National Guard

NG

The CARES Act

CARES

Primary Sources

primary sources

Federalism in Action

federalism

The Preamble in Action

Preamble
Executive Orders
CRL EO

the Common Good,
CG1

and Public Health and the Social Contract.
PH1

We hope that you will find these useful. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to contact us at anytime! And don’t forget, you can find the ‘Civics in Real Life’ resource on the Florida Joint Center for Citizenship website here. Be sure also to check out Civics360 for videos and readings that explore additional civics concepts and ideas within a more traditional framework!

a civic silver lining?

Thanks to the Former Members of Congress Association, I joined Former Member Dennis Ross (R-FL) and mayors Nan Whaley (D-Dayton), Francis Suarez (R-Miami) and Marty Walsh (D-Boston), for a discussion of civic engagement during the pandemic.

I particularly appreciated Mayor Walsh’s eloquence about respecting poorly-paid work. His point expanded into a broader discussion of how to get everyone involved in the “public work” of rebuilding our community and country. On that topic, see “War Is a Poor Metaphor for This Pandemic” by Harry Boyte and Trygve Throntveit in Yes!.

I learned a lot from the mayors. I ended up thinking that the attitudinal effects of the pandemic may well be positive. We may care more about each other and feel more motivated to work together on public goals. The fact that the crisis is widely (although inequitably) shared will provide an opportunity to bring Americans together. However, the economic impact on civic life is very worrying.

To that last point, the Federal Reserve system recently surveyed a mix of local organizational leaders (two thirds of them from nonprofits) about the impact of the pandemic. “Nearly 2 out of 3 respondents (66%) indicated demand for their services has increased or is anticipated to increase, and more than half of the respondents (55%) noted a corresponding decrease or anticipated decrease in their ability to provide services.”

This chart from the Fed. paper is particularly significant:

See also: the Coronavirus information commons; a Green recovery;Educational Equity During a Pandemic“; trends to watch in civil society; why the relatively good US numbers for COVID-19 mortality?; effects on civil society will be mediated by the economy; and COVID-19 is not a metaphor.

the Coronavirus information commons

In Wired, Natalie Chyi offers an excellent list of ways that people are fighting misinformation–and promoting reliable and useful information–during the pandemic:

Neighborhoods are creating Slack groups and communities are coming up with mutual aid spreadsheets to coordinate aid and support each other. … Local geographies have been reconstructed in online spaces, most notably as students are rebuilding their universities within Minecraft. … . Volunteers on Wikipedia have been working tirelessly to ensure that the site serves reliable and up-to-date information, especially surrounding the virus. Students are compiling master lists of summer internship updates, cancellations, and opportunities across various industries. Groups are creating crowdsourced libraries of resources tailored to the unique needs of everyone from mourners to remote workers to policymakers. New online platforms have been created for specialists like doctors, engineers, and scientists to find and contribute their expertise to ongoing relief projects. Thousands of Covid-19 related open-source projects are popping up, with the source code and documentation freely available to enable their use. Some focus on software, like code for a hospital impact model developed by the University of Pennsylvania; others on hardware, like instructions for 3D printing medically-approved masks and other critical supplies.

Finally, knowledge previously locked behind paywalls or intellectual property protections has been made available to the public for the purposes of fighting the pandemic.

Chyi credits Elinor Ostrom and Charlotte Hess for the idea of an information commons (itself an application of Lin Ostrom’s ideas to the special case of information), and she cites me to the effect that “this form of collective action and participation of place-based knowledge strengthens communities by giving them a shared sense of identity, understanding, and trust.” Incidentally, the whole book by Ostrom and Hess, Understanding Knowledge as a Commons (2007) in which my chapter appears is–fittingly–online and free.

See also my new chapter on Elinor Ostrom and Civic Studies; the legacy of Elinor Ostrom and the Bloomington School; Elinor Ostrom, 1933-2012; understanding knowledge as a commons.

Register ASAP for Today’s Confab Call on Envisioning an Intentional Future

NCDD’s May Confab call is happening TODAY and we are looking forward to digging in with participants on envisioning an intentional future! Register now to join us for this call at 1:00 PM Eastern/10:00 AM Pacific. Courtney will present this session with NCDD Board Member Lori Britt. 

Earlier in the pandemic, NCDD hosted conversations to help the dialogue, deliberation, and public engagement community explore how to respond to the needs arising immediately in our own communities. These conversations primarily focused on how to continue our work in a virtual format and how to help our communities stay connected while physically distanced. Now, two months into this experience, we would like to launch a conversation on what we are learning about our communities, and how we might help community members recognize what they see as important to sustain or nurture going forward.

In this interactive session, which is free and open to all, participants will share what they are noticing about their communities during the pandemic and what topics they want to engage around further. More specifically, we’ll discuss: What are you noticing about your community that you want to make more space for as you go forward? What are you noticing that is essential and needs support going forward? We’ll share some of our reflections as a group, and then break into smaller groups to discuss different topics of importance to our communities.

We hope that this session will be a jumping-off point for many of us to engage our own communities around the issues that matter most to them. We’ll keep in touch to see how things go, and how we might learn from each other!

Join us to share what you’re observing and what you’re hoping for in your own community! Let’s plan for what comes next. Don’t miss this opportunity – register today to secure your spot!

About NCDD’s Confab Calls

Confab bubble imageNCDD’s Confab Calls are opportunities for members (and potential members) of NCDD to talk with and hear from innovators in our field about the work they’re doing and to connect with fellow members around shared interests. Membership in NCDD is encouraged but not required for participation. Confabs are free and open to all. Register today if you’d like to join us!

Navigating the Pandemic webinar series

Tisch College of Civic Life is launching an eight-part weekly webinar series this summer aimed at supporting students, including the Class of 2020—and the Tufts community generally—during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Navigating the Pandemic: Knowledge, Resilience, Civic Purpose and Engagement will be offered on Wednesdays, 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. ET, starting June 10. It draws on the expertise of Tisch College faculty and staff, Tufts faculty in a variety of academic disciplines, and experts from Boston-area universities, hospitals, and community nonprofit organizations.

“We have developed this webinar series to help mitigate the sense of isolation and unsettledness many students are experiencing,” said Deborah Donahue-Keegan, Tisch College senior fellow and Department of Education faculty member. She is leading the effort with Tisch associate dean Peter Levine.

“We are offering a way for students to stay connected to the university community and to each other over the summer,” she said. “We also want to help students acquire more knowledge and skills in order to navigate conflicting information and misinformation regarding COVID-19.”

“The pandemic is confusing and unpredictable,” said Levine. “For some, it can be isolating, damaging, and even tragic. As a major research university, Tufts offers a wealth of resources to learn about the disease and its social impact and how to take care of ourselves, help others, and be civically engaged during the pandemic.”

Webinar topics will include:

  • emotional resilience in the face of trauma and uncertainty
  • civic engagement and voting
  • dispelling COVID-19 misinformation with science
  • the public policy and economic implications of the pandemic
  • physical health and nutrition
  • building and maintaining connections

The weekly seminars for undergraduate and graduate students are free. Those who attend at least six of the sessions and submit responses to questions at the end of each session attended will qualify for a certificate of completion. The panel discussions will be broadcast via Tisch College’s YouTube channel and will be recorded to ensure access for the entire Tufts community.

“This effort reflects Tufts’ commitment to promote social emotional resilience and well-being skills across the university,” said Donahue-Keegan. “This webinar series is one of many ways we strive to foster the development of such skills in service of fostering civic purpose, agency, and ethical civic engagement.”

For more information and to sign up, go to https://tischcollege.tufts.edu/navigating-pandemic-knowledge-resilience-civic-purpose-and-engagement.

Civics in Real Life: The 2020 Census

Well, it’s time for the Census! And today, we bring you a new Civics in Real Life reading on the 2020 Census and why it matters. How is it an obligation of government and a responsibility of citizens? Why should we complete it?

censuscrl

We hope that you find this, and others in the series, useful!

Check out the new series here. 

As a reminder, our topics so far have addressed
Unemployment InsuranceUI

The Defense Production Act
DPA

Essential Workers

CRLEW

The First Amendment1st amndcrl

Government Power

GP

Nongovernmental OrganizationsNGO

Propaganda and Symbolism

prop

The National Guard

NG

The CARES Act

CARES

Primary Sources

primary sources

Federalism in Action

federalism

The Preamble in Action

Preamble
Executive Orders
CRL EO

the Common Good,
CG1

and Public Health and the Social Contract.
PH1

We hope that you will find these useful. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to contact us at anytime! And don’t forget, you can find the ‘Civics in Real Life’ resource on the Florida Joint Center for Citizenship website here. Be sure also to check out Civics360 for videos and readings that explore additional civics concepts and ideas within a more traditional framework!

the pivotal significance of reparations for the American left

About one in four Americans supports reparations for slavery. There is a racial split on that question, with up to three in four African Americans–but only 15% of whites–in favor.

If you think that justice demands reparations, you should support them. You might not make reparations your main criterion for choosing candidates in a given political contest, because you might vote on other grounds, but you should endorse proposals that you believe are just.

Here I want to address a different issue. I’ll offer an explanation (not a justification or a critique) of the importance of reparations in the mentality of left-leaning Americans.

I think that many Americans on the left are torn between two political positions, each coherent on its own but in tension with the other:

1. A strong version of New Deal/Great Society liberalism and/or social democracy, in which the nation-state intervenes assertively in the economy to promote equity and environmental sustainability. This stance is compatible with enthusiastic support for voting and democratic processes. It requires a lot of trust in the state and a willingness to entrust state actors with the ability to, for example, investigate how much wealth (not just annual income) you have, which schools your kids will attend, and which health treatments will be paid for, given data about your body.

Martin Luther King, Jr., provides a classic statement of this view when he recalls the launch of the Great Society: “A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor — both black and white — through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings.”

2. A deep suspicion of the United States government as white-supremacist, patriarchal, and colonialist: as a continuous entity that has played a leading role in genocide, enslavement, and apartheid, in part because those policies have sometimes been popular among the white majority of the country.

It’s debatable what positive program follows from the second position, but in practice, it can mean support for local initiatives, nonprofits, women- and minority-owned businesses, and autonomy at the neighborhood level. Malcolm X provides a classic text for this view:

The white man, the white man is too intelligent to let someone else come and gain control of the economy of his community. But you will let anybody come in and control the economy of your community, control the housing, control the education, control the jobs, control the businesses, under the pretext that you want to integrate. 

… we haven’t had sense enough to set up stores and control the businesses of our community. … But the political and economic philosophy of black nationalism…the economic philosophy of black nationalism shows our people the importance of setting up these little stores, and developing them and expanding them into larger operations. Woolworth didn’t start out big like they are today; they started out with a dime store, and expanded, and expanded, and expanded until today they are all over the country and all over the world and they getting some of everybody’s money. …

So our people not only have to be reeducated to the importance of supporting black business, but the black man himself has to be made aware of the importance of going into business. And once you and I go into business, we own and operate at least the businesses in our community. 

Note that this position is compatible with certain forms of libertarian thought but not with social democracy.

It is not embarrassing to be drawn to two incompatible views. The social world is complicated, and there are good reasons in favor of many positions. However, when you feel the pull of two incompatible ideas, a deciding factor becomes very important.

Reparations play that role for the American left. If the United States government were to pay reparations, that would tilt many left-leaning people from the second position to the first: from Malcolm to Martin, if those labels are helpful. The impact would be especially strong if Congress and the president decided to pay reparations of their own volition–not by grudgingly negotiating with a social movement–and if the payment were substantial.

The underlying theory here is similar to Homer-Dixon et al (2020). An ideology is a complex system that consists of numerous ideas with logical links among them. It cannot be described adequately by placing it on one left/right spectrum, nor even several such continua at once. It is not a point in logical space but a structure of ideas.

In complex systems, we frequently see multiple equilibria, and specific nodes have surprisingly large impact because of their location. A single node can tilt the system from one equilibrium to another.

My conjecture is that reparations plays such a role in the system of the ideology of the American left. Left-leaning people may not rate it as the most important issue. They may not even endorse it whole-heartedly. But it (perhaps uniquely) can tilt them from a libertarian equilibrium to a social-democratic equilibrium.

This is an empirical conjecture for which I do not have data. To test it, we would have to explore the epistemic network of left-leaning Americans, either by analyzing large bodies of text or by surveying individuals about their ideas and perceived connections among their ideas.

See also: on Hillary Clinton and Julius Jones of #blacklivesmatter; ideologies and complex systems; and unveiling a systems map for k-12 civic education (for a methodological analog).

Do Shipwrecked Boys Choose Cooperation or Barbarism?

In the course of researching his forthcoming book on human cooperation, Humankind: A Hopeful History, Dutch historian Rutger Bregman had to deal with the inevitable atrocities and behaviors that suggest that humanity is barbaric at its core. There is no question that humanity has shown such tendencies through history. But is savage cruelty the default setting for “human nature”? 

As anyone who has gone through high school remembers, that is the one lesson we were all taught when assigned to read Lord of the Flies, by William Golding. That classic book, you may recall, is about a band of British schoolboys who are shipwrecked on a desert island. Forced to create their own society, they end up shedding the veneer of (British) civilization and reveal themselves to be utterly nasty and depraved. When the constraints of civilization and state power disappear, the story tells us, we all revert to savagery. We choose barbarism.

Poster for the 1990 film 'Lord of the Flies'

Since its publication in 1951, Lord of the Flies has been translated into more than 30 languages and sold tens of millions of copies. The idea that humanity is disturbingly sinister at heart would seem to be widely believed. Or at least readers may find such stories darkly thrilling, for which there is certainly something to be said.

But Bregman discovered that Lord of the Flies was more a flight of William Golding’s perfervid imagination than an empirical description of humanity. In researching his book, Bregman tripped across a blog post that referred to an actual incident of shipwrecked boys in the South Pacific in 1965. According to the blog, “six boys set out from Tonga on a fishing trip….Caught in a huge storm, the boys were shipwrecked on a deserted island. What do they do, this little tribe? They made a pact never to quarrel.”

Whaaaaaat? You mean, boys stranded in the wilderness don’t descend into barbarism? 

In a recent piece in The Guardian, Bregman recounts his research odyssey to confirm the incident and learn more details. (See, also, a profile of Bregman here.)

It turns out that the Australian boys had been stranded alone on the island of Ata for fifteen months before being rescued on September 11, 1966. Fifty years later, Bregman flew to Australia to try to track down any survivors of the incident. He located sea captain Peter Warner, then 90 years old, who told Bregman how he came to rescue the lost boys given up for dead.

The island on which the boys were marooned had been inhabited until 1863, when a slave ship captured all the natives and sailed away. While steering his ship past Ata, Captain Warner noticed a fire. Looking through his binoculars, he saw naked boys screaming for help. The six boys were all Catholic schoolboys, ranging in age from 13 to 16, who had drifted for six days without food or water following a big storm. Eventually they washed up on the shores of Ata.

The fifteen months stranded on the island did not resemble the story of Lord of the Flies, however. As Captain Warner recalled in his memoirs, “the boys had set up a small commune with food garden, hollowed-out tree trunks to store rainwater, a gymnasium with curious weights, a badminton court, chicken pens and a permanent fire, all from handiwork, an old knife blade and much determination.” The boys survived on fish, coconuts and tame birds, and seabird eggs, wild taro, bananas and wild chickens.

In Lord of the Flies, the boys got into fights about who would maintain a fire to alert would-be rescuers. But the boys on Ata assiduously kept their fire going for more than a year. The boys had a roster for tasks, which they did in pairs. If arguments erupted, they agreed to a time-out. Bregman writes that “their days began and ended with song and prayer.”

The real-life drama of the stranded boys of Ata helps us to see that we invent the stories we want to believe. Who knows what motivated William Golding to tell this story, but Bregman notes that Golding as a person was apparently unhappy, alcoholic, and prone to depression. Golding himself even acknowledged Nazi-like tendencies in himself.

It may have been that Golding wanted to channel the spirit of Thomas Hobbes, the political philosopher whose fable about social contracts has long been used to justify state power. A Hobbsean story like Lord of the Flies helps justify our supposed need for the modern, coercive state. Who else, after all, is going to keep order when we individually can’t constrain our own savagery? Lord of the Flies in effect dismisses the idea that we might self-organize a stable, humane order that can satisfy our needs. 

Bregman’s discovery of the stranded boys of Ata is therefore a revelation. It helps debunk the fictionalized projections about humanity that often pass for political wisdom.

I’d argue that the story of the shipwrecked boys validates a different story about humanity.  It affirms the reality and potential of commoning. As Bregman puts it, “It’s time we told a different kind of story. The real Lord of the Flies is a tale of friendship and loyalty; one that illustrates how much stronger we are if we can lean on each other.”