I’m back from a very inspiring meeting of civic activists, civic educators, and students in the White House. It was convened by the Domestic Policy Council along with Civic Nation and the Beeck Center, with support from Tisch College and others. Committed and skillful teachers and students attended from selected schools across the country. These students are not just learning about civic engagement, practicing to be citizens, or developing civic skills. They are at the forefront, right now, of addressing the most serious issues in their communities. We need them, and many more like them, to govern the republic better than it has been governed and to achieve justice that has eluded us so far.

We learned that US Secretary of Education John King is sending a “letter of guidance” to all state education agencies about new federal support for the humanities as part of the “well-rounded” education mandate of the Every Student Succeeds Act. As a humanities person, I am glad about that direction, and as a civics advocate, I’m pleased that civics is included among the humanities. 

The US Department of Education has also made civics a core component of the Department’s “Blue Ribbon Schools” program, which recognizes excellence. 

Meanwhile, the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor/HHS and Education recently passed the 2017 appropriations bill, which includes the first funding for civics and American History in years. The appropriation includes $6.5 million for competitive grants to improve instruction in American history, civics, and geography, particularly for schools in under-served rural and urban communities. It also includes nearly $2 million for American History and Civics Academies: professional development opportunities for teachers of these disciplines. For now, it’s just a House appropriations bill, but it’s an important step toward actual dollars for civics.

Washington (DC): I am on a civics road trip: the First Annual Civics Literacy Conference in Massachusetts, an advisory board meeting for iCivics inside the Supreme Court building, and then a meeting with executive branch people.

The public discourse about civic education often takes the form: “Why don’t people (meaning adults) know basic facts about politics? Why do 10% of college graduates think Judge Judy is on the Supreme Court? We should teach schoolkids these facts!”

But almost all students study and face some kind of tests on facts like the number of US Senators. The problem is, adults don’t remember what they learned as kids.

That is because adults are not obligated to retain or update their civic knowledge. You spend 13 years of school learning to read and write. Then, if you have a job that involves written words, you must constantly update your literacy skills. You spend a few dozen hours in school learning about politics, and then you’re a citizen—but that role comes with no rewards or penalties. Nothing bad happens to you if you forget what you learned. Yes, politics affects us all. It is interested in you even if you aren’t interested in it. But just because it affects us all, each of us can let others take care of it.

Some of us do update and even dramatically expand what we learned as kids about civics. The reason is: we’re interested. Something made us feel that politics was intriguing, important, dramatic, and rewarding for us as individuals. I conclude that the main purpose of civic education in k-12 schools is to increase the proportion of young people who reach that conclusion.

One of the most exciting current efforts in civic education–which also has applications far beyond civics–is a project on reinventing the high school civics course led by Walter Parker with Jane Lo and others.

Typically, a civics course involves presenting and explaining a whole lot of material to students, who then face a test to see what they have understood and remembered. Walter has noted that, all around the world, the final-year of high school tends to be dominated by courses that are fast-paced surveys of information, known for being difficult mainly because they cover so much ground. It doesn’t seem likely that students obtain advanced skills or remember much of the content from these classes.

Walter and his colleagues worked with teachers of the American Government AP course to redesign it so that projects become fundamental. The redesign process was a collaboration with the teachers and involved iteration: trying projects, evaluating, and changing the design. In the fully redesigned courses, activities–such as a mock trial, or a model Congress–come first, and students learn the content that is tested on the AP because they need to know it in order to succeed in the projects. As Parker and Lo write in a very valuable new overview article, “Projects carry the full subject matter load of the course. They are not culminating activities that come at the end of an instructional sequence nor lively interludes inserted periodically into traditional recitation.”

As reported in earlier articles, students in the redesigned AP course “did as well or better on the AP test than students in comparison groups, and … found the course and projects personally meaningful.” That means that there is no tradeoff between learning to be an active citizen by participating in simulations and mastering the content tested by the AP. If teachers use this redesigned curriculum, they can achieve both outcomes together.

Over at The Conversation, I have a new article that’s meant to be a short overview of civic education today. It begins:

Any election demands knowledge, attention and wisdom from the whole electorate. When a campaign season does not seem to be going well, there’s often angst about whether the public has been sufficiently educated.

Anxious eyes turn to our public schools.

For instance, writing in The Atlantic recently, Jonathan Zimmerman, professor of education and history at New York University, decried the incivility of the 2016 campaign and named “a flaw with civic education.” He wrote: “Put simply, schools in the United States don’t teach the country’s future citizens how to engage respectfully across their political differences.”

I have studied and advocated civic education for almost two decades. I believe civic education must be improved in the United States. First, though, it’s important to understand the condition of America’s civic education.

This new article explores reasons that k-12 athletics may boost civic engagement, as well as some important differences between sports and civic life. Student associations in general teach civic skills, and sports are best understood as examples of associations. Indeed, high school teams should be more like standard school clubs, in which participation is voluntary and the students are primarily responsible for managing the group.

Citation: Peter Levine, “Join a club! Or a team – both can make good citizens,” Phi Delta Kappan, vol. 97, no. 8 (May 2016), pp 24-27

(New York City) “The Question Each Citizen Must Ask” is my new piece in Educational Leadership, the magazine for k-12 school administrators (vol. 73, no. 6, March 2016, pp. 30-34. It begins:

Anyone who works on civic education or grassroots civic engagement will sooner or later encounter critics who say, “The US is not a democracy–it is a republic” as if that were a profound objection to teaching or practicing democratic values. In a longer post, I analyzed the terms “democracy” and “republic” in the language of the Framers and subsequent authors. I argued that: (1) populist Framers like Jefferson used the word “republic” to mean what can also accurately be called a democracy, and (2) the original Constitution did include undemocratic elements, but they have been deliberately removed by the 15th, 17th, 19th, and 24th amendments to the Constitution. That means that although the Framers would call the United States a republic, it is now a democracy, at least in aspiration.

Here I would like to emphasize a related point. During the 20th century, almost all American political leaders asserted that the US was a democracy. Conservatives tended to be more sanguine about how much of a democracy we actually had. Left-liberals were the ones who argued that America was not authentically democratic because of persistent injustices. It is only in the last decade that it has become a talking-point for some conservatives that the US is (and ought to be) a republic and not a democracy.

I have quickly found one quotation from each GOP president since McKinley in which the president called the US a democracy. This was the result of 30 minutes of web searching; many more examples could be found:

[*It’s been noted that I accidentally omitted William Howard Taft, and it’s not easy to find a positive statement by him about democracy. He was, indeed, an opponent of the direct-democracy reforms of his era. So Taft may be an exception.]

• Teddy Roosevelt, “A Charter of Democracy” (1912): “I believe in pure democracy. With Lincoln, I hold that ‘this country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it.'”
• Warren Harding, Inauguration Address (1921): “Because we cherish ideals of justice and peace, because we appraise international comity and helpful relationship no less highly than any people of the world, we aspire to a high place in the moral leadership of civilization, and we hold a maintained America, the proven Republic, the unshaken temple of representative democracy, to be not only an inspiration and example, but the highest agency of strengthening good will and promoting accord on both continents.”
• Calvin Coolidge’s Address at the Celebration of the 150th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence (1926) is probably the most interesting, because it is an explicit and rather scholarly argument that the Framers had created a democracy. “Placing every man on a plane where he acknowledged no superiors, where no one possessed any right to rule over him, he must inevitably choose his own rulers through a system of self-government. This was their theory of democracy. In those days such doctrines would scarcely have been permitted to flourish and spread in any other country. This was the purpose which the fathers cherished.” Coolidge quotes Thomas Jefferson saying that his “‘best ideas of democracy’ had been secured at church meetings.” Coolidge says that Jefferson was influenced by John Wise, who had written, “Democracy is Christ’s government in church and state.”
• Herbert Hoover, in a Challenge to Liberty (193o) argued that the New Deal had repudiated democracy, leaving “the Republican Party alone the guardian of the Ark of the Covenant with its charter of freedom.” He added, “You might think that reform and change to meet new conditions of life are discoveries of the New Deal. Free men have always applied reform. We have been reforming and changing ever since George Washington. Democracy is not static. It is a living force. Every new idea, every new invention offers opportunity for both good and evil.”
• President Eisenhower’s Farewell Address as president (1961): “We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. … We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.”
• Richard Nixon, State of the Union Address (1970): “In the majesty of this great Chamber we hear the echoes of America’s history, of debates that rocked the Union and those that repaired it, of the summons to war and the search for peace, of the uniting of the people, the building of a nation. Those echoes of history remind us of our roots and our strengths. They remind us also of that special genius of American democracy, which at one critical turning point after another has led us to spot the new road to the future and given us the wisdom and the courage to take it.”
• Ronald Reagan, Normandy, June 6, 1984: “You all knew that some things are worth dying for. One’s country is worth dying for, and democracy is worth dying for, because it’s the most deeply honorable form of government ever devised by man.”
• George H.W. Bush, Inaugural Address (1989): “We meet on democracy’s front porch. … Our children are watching in schools throughout our great land. And to them I say, Thank you for watching democracy’s big day. For democracy belongs to us all, and freedom is like a beautiful kite that can go higher and higher with the breeze. And to all I say, No matter what your circumstances or where you are, you are part of this day, you are part of the life of our great nation.”
• George W. Bush at the National Endowment for Democracy (2005) “The roots of our democracy can be traced to England, and to its Parliament — and so can the roots of this organization. … Working democracies always need time to develop — as did our own. We’ve taken a 200-year journey toward inclusion and justice — and this makes us patient and understanding as other nations are at different stages of this journey.”

For more than a century, both Democrats and Republicans vigorously claimed that the US was a democracy as well as a republic. It’s possible that the names of the two major parties have recently encouraged some people to view the words “republic” and “democracy” as partisan labels. That is both an etymological error and an unfortunate barrier to what used to be shared aspirations. I happen to be confident that the language of democracy will regain its consensus appeal for Americans, thus inspiring us to honor our democratic ideals. But we are sailing through a rough patch right now, and virtually no political word seems able to unite rather than divide.