Category Archives: advocating civic education

the Common Core and civic education

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The Common Core is a powerful reform movement in education. State standards are regulatory documents that prescribe the expected outcomes, the content, and (to some extent) the pedagogy used in our public schools. The forty-five states that have adopted the Common Core are revising their standards for mathematics and English/language arts with the goal of making them more coherent, more demanding, and more similar across the states.

Since the Common Core is about math and English, not other subjects, I and many colleagues have written a voluntary framework for states to revise their social studies standards, the College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework. But some thoughtful and well-informed people believe that the Common Core itself provides sufficient impetus for strengthening the social studies. I have heard that argument made by the social studies coordinator of a very large urban school system, the lobbyist for the main teacher’s union in a major state, and others. They point to valuable provisions in the Common Core’s English/language arts standards. For example:

  • The Common Core includes standards for speaking and listening that encourage deliberation, which is a fundamental democratic skill. “CCSS.ELA-Literacy.SL.11-12.1b Work with peers to promote civil, democratic discussions and decision-making, set clear goals and deadlines, and establish individual roles as needed.”
  • The Common Core is not a curriculum, and it does not prescribe content, but it frequently uses classic civics texts as illustrative examples. “CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RH.11-12.4 Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, including analyzing how an author uses and refines the meaning of a key term over the course of a text (e.g., how Madison defines faction in Federalist No. 10).”
  • Again, although the Common Core generally avoids mentioning specific texts and assignments, it gives explicit attention to “seminal U.S. texts, including the application of constitutional principles and use of legal reasoning (e.g., in U.S. Supreme Court majority opinions and dissents) and the premises, purposes, and arguments in works of public advocacy (e.g., The Federalist, presidential addresses)” and to “seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century foundational U.S. documents of historical and literary significance (including The Declaration of Independence, the Preamble to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address) for their themes, purposes, and rhetorical features.”
  • It has been typical to teach reading through fiction alone at the primary grades, but the Common Core requires experience with nonfiction texts all the way from k-12. By high school, it explicitly requires reading civics texts. “CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.9-10.9 Analyze seminal U.S. documents of historical and literary significance (e.g., Washington’s Farewell Address, the Gettysburg Address, Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms speech, King’s ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’), including how they address related themes and concepts.”

I believe that these provisions and others in the Common Core are valuable, and I appreciate what groups like Street Law Inc., have done to demonstrate how good civics teaching aligns with the Common Core standards. But I do not agree that adopting the Common Core will suffice to strengthen civics. It may even cause unintended harm if social studies teachers are enlisted to teach the Common Core’s vision of literacy while the separate goals of the social studies are forgotten.

These are my main concerns:

1. The Common Core reflects a remarkable focus on the formal analysis and “close reading” of excellent texts. In literary theory, this approach would be classified as “New Criticism.” I don’t particularly object to it for high school-level English. I actually prefer close reading to the book-club style, in which one mainly reacts to situations and characters in books as analogs to one’s own life. However, close reading will not achieve the purposes of history and civics.

For example, the Common Core standard quoted above that mentions the Federalist Papers comes under the heading of “Craft and Structure.” The main goal is to understand how Madison constructs an argument and uses phrases like “faction” in Federalist 10, treated as an example of excellent prose. Indeed, Federalist 10 would be a good text to assign in an English class to teach argumentative writing. But it was written for a purpose (to convince readers to support the Constitution), by a person who held specific roles (an author of the Constitution, a future president), to a particular audience (prospective voters in New York State), at a particular time (after the Revolution and the degeneration of the Articles of Confederation), in a broader intellectual and political context (the Enlightenment, the age of European empire). These are not matters that one can explain with a footnote to help the reader with formal analysis. Each of these topics requires days or weeks of study. We do not study them in order to analyze Federalist 10 as text. We study them for their own sake and because they help us to understand our current political institutions.

An American student might learn about Queen Elizabeth I to explicate a Shakespeare play. But she should study the American Revolution because of its intrinsic importance and its current implications. The textual analysis of documents from the founding period is of secondary importance in a history, civics, or government course. The text helps us to understand politics and history, not the other way around.

2. All Most of the texts mentioned as examples in the Common Core are “seminal” or foundational, and the list in CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.11-12.9 explicitly ends with the nineteenth-century. I yield to no one in my respect for history, but students must also understand that history continues; they play a role in it. The curriculum should not stop at 1900 or even at 2010. Students must learn to read, analyze, evaluate, and criticize speeches by Obama and Romney (and Putin and Snowden) as well as Washington and Lincoln.

3. I am enthusiastic about the deliberative standards in the Common Core’s “Speaking and Listening” sections. In fact, if those standards really influence instruction, I might accept the Common Core as a net benefit for civics. But much will depend on assessment. Right now, private firms are developing tests aligned with the Common Core for consortia of states. I am completely outside that process, but rumors hold that the tests will use conventional formats, except that they will be taken on computers instead of on paper. Choosing multiple-choice responses–or writing short or even long essays completely on one’s own–is no way to demonstrate this kind of skill from the Common Core: “Work with peers to promote civil, democratic discussions and decision-making, set clear goals and deadlines, and establish individual roles as needed.” That requires interaction with actual other people.

I fear that even though the standards evoke the idea of civil and constructive interaction, the tests that really count will not measure it. That would be acceptable if social studies teachers could still assign deliberations, service projects, mock trials, and other interactive experiences in their own classrooms while English teachers taught the Common Core. But resources are flowing to math and English, and social studies teachers are already saying that they must follow the Common Core in their courses. Once the tests are ready, they will have to prepare students to pass Common Core assessments. The net result could easily be harmful for civics.

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Democracy in schools: Albert Dzur talks with principal Donnan Stoicovy

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Albert Dzur is breaking ground in political theory by revealing how professionals who interact with laypeople can create valuable democratic practices. Democratic theory has generally been blind to the positive potential of work sites, and especially public sector sites such as schools, hospitals, and courtrooms. It has also generally overlooked the democratic contributions of professionals who choose to engage citizens. Often, populist democrats want to trim the wings of professionals, seeing them as arrogant. But engaging citizens in complex institutions requires skill, dedication, and a kind of expertise–all marks of professionalism. Democratic professionalism is thus an important aspect of civic renewal. (See also “Albert Dzur and democracy inside institutions” and “Public Work and Democratic Professionalism.“)

In the The Good Society (which is now the journal of civic studies), Albert has posted an interview with one such democratic professional, Donnan Stoicovy, who is the principal of Park Forest Elementary School in Pennsylvania. For my friends who are interested in civic education and school reform more than political theory, this interview offers a nice overview of a school-wide intervention. It is not unique or unprecedented, but it is thoughtful and impressive. In essence, the principal asked her whole student body to participate in the writing of a school constitution as a way of meeting the state’s mandate to produce a “school-wide positive behavior plan.”

In other schools, administrators hold assemblies and hand out rewards to well-behaved individuals. At Park Forest, the assemblies were deliberative events aimed at setting rules and norms. As I have observed in other cases as well, the kids came up with more demanding rules than their teachers would have proposed.

This case exemplifies professionalism in several respects. One that I would highlight is the need to navigate tricky tradeoffs. The kids’ rules included “No Put Downs” but also “Speak what we believe and not be judged for it.” Sometimes what we believe comes across as a put down of someone else, especially when the individuals in question are ten years old. Skillfully navigating those tensions is complex work.

The interview ends with some discussion of expanding the scale of such examples. Stoicovy cites limited time as one obstacle; “and I think the other [need] is opportunity to collaborate with other people across the country—similar people who are thinking about this.”

Dzur asks whether universities could help. Stoicovy replies:

I would want everybody to know about democratic schools. I would want universities to be teaching more about democratic schools, in general. I would like more of the work at universities to be helping open students’ minds to thinking about having a responsive classroom, eliciting student voice and engaging students in their school. Not just “here’s what discipline is.” And oftentimes they don’t even teach that until they end up in school and it is modeled for them by whoever their mentor is. Universities need to go back to essential questions like “What is the purpose of public education?”

Universities could also model a more democratic approach. Some of them are getting better at having more engagement work, but without modeling it is hard to open peoples’ minds.

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racial pluralism in schools reduces discussion of politics, and what to do about that

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Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg and I have published a new article in Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy entitled “Diversity in Classrooms: The Relationship between Deliberative and Associative Opportunities in School and Later Electoral Engagement.”  Using a new survey conducted in 2012, we confirm previous findings that attending racially pluralistic high schools–i.e., schools that enroll substantial numbers of students from several different racial groups–seems to reduce the students’ electoral and civic engagement after they graduate. One explanation appears to be that discussion of current controversial issues boosts students’ interest in politics, but such discussion is less common in pluralistic high schools.  We find that classroom discussion is especially important for students who do not participate in political conversations at home. We also find that joining issue-oriented groups encourages voting.

We say:

Considering that strong arguments can be made in favor of racial diversity in schools, it is important to compensate for the lessened electoral engagement in diverse schools by creating policies and teacher preparation resources that promote high-quality discussion of controversial issues in classrooms, and by encouraging students to participate in extracurricular groups that address political issues.

In my opinion, it’s understandable that teachers and students sometimes shy away from controversial topics when the student body is diverse. For example, they may not want to talk about the Middle East if some of the students are Arab-Americans, some are Jewish-Americans, and some are Christians of other backgrounds. Teachers may simply feel unprepared to deal with an issue that students know from personal experience–whether it is the Israeli occupation or racial profiling by police here in the United States. They may also worry about “micro-aggressions” in the form of comments that fundamentally challenge other students’ worldviews and identities. These concerns can arise with respect to most topics (both domestic and foreign), because racial and ethnic differences and conflicts are ubiquitous.

But it is a highly unfortunate result if we see less political discussion in classrooms that are more diverse. That is a waste of the asset of diversity, and it suppresses the political and civic engagement of students who attend integrated schools.

In the article, we call for “policies and teacher preparation resources” that support the discussion of controversial issues in pluralistic classrooms. I think an important policy is simply to affirm that freedom of speech is a positive good in schools. To be sure, a free discussion of a hot topic can lead to truly offensive remarks that cause psychic harm to participants, and that is something to pay attention to. But not talking about difficult issues is worse. It suppresses political engagement. It sends the message that a public space (of which the school is an example) should be a discussion-free zone. And it leaves any offensive private views unchallenged by other students. Better that a student should say something offensive and get a reply than not be allowed to say it at all.

See also “on religion in public debates and specifically in middle school classrooms,“  “defending free speech in public schools,” and “who is segregated?”

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50 Core American Documents

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I was a little amused to receive a letter that began, “As a leader in the Conservative Movement, you know that ideas matter.” The letter continued, “At Ashbrook we teach young Americans about the big ideas that define America by using original historical documents–avoiding the distortions that textbooks introduce to the story of American history.”

Although I am less worried than Ashbrook is about distortion in classrooms and textbooks, I am grateful for the volume that came with the letter: 50 Core American Documents: Required Reading for Students, Teachers, and Citizens, edited by Christopher Burkett.

It collects quite diverse perspectives. For example, John C. Calhoun’s “Speech on the Oregon Bill” denounces (as a “dangerous error” and an unnecessary insertion into the Declaration of Independence) the clause that “all men are created equal.” But the very next document is Frederick Douglass’ great speech for equality, “What to a Slave is the Fourth of July?”

Calhoun should be read; he reminds us that secession was driven by hostility to human rights. But I might have chosen his Senate speech arguing that slavery was a “positive good” as a more illustrative historical example. And if I had chosen Calhoun’s “Speech on the Oregon Bill,” I would not have deleted the beginning. The excerpt in the 5o Core Documents begins:

The first question which offers itself for consideration is — Have the Northern States the power which they claim, to prevent the Southern people from emigrating freely, with their property, into territories belonging to the United States, and to monopolize them for their exclusive benefit? …

In the quoted excerpt, the nature of the “property” under discussion is not clarified; the question is presented as one of interstate migration and commerce. But Calhoun actually began his speech with slavery. This is his first sentence:

There is a very striking difference between the position on which the slaveholding and non-slaveholding States stand, in reference to the subject under consideration.

Texts won’t teach or explain themselves. They must be presented in some way. Political texts make complete sense only in institutional and historical contexts. For instance, a reader must understand that John C. Calhoun was a Senator, that the Senate has specific powers, and that Calhoun represented South Carolina as a slaveholder and apologist for slavery when the Senate was deciding whether to admit new states (such as Oregon) as slave or free soil. Students cannot avoid an interpretive framework that has some kind of ideological valence. Thus I don’t fully endorse the premise that an anthology of original texts suffices.

I am also not so keen on presenting history as a series of statements by national leaders (even if some of them are insurgents and critics). Ordinary people have roles as well, and they can be given voice. But certainly this volume presents a welcome diversity of views, including, for example, presidential defenses of the New Deal and Great Society. The idea of choosing fifty documents is worthy, and I would recommend the book as well as the website on which all the contents are available free. Although it makes some debatable choices about which texts to include and how to excerpt them, the debate is valuable.

Meanwhile, the Pioneer Institute, which is generally considered conservative, held a terrific session on the Civil Rights Movement with the goal of deepening how it is taught in k-12 schools. They invited my colleague Peniel Joseph, who said, “we live in the belly of the beast… we live in the American Gulag”; and Robert P. Moses, “who blasted a recent ruling by the Supreme Court that he said invalidated part of the Voting Rights Act.” Jamie Gass, director of Pioneer’s Center for School Reform, writes:

Where one comes down on any one aspect of history matters very little. People will always disagree — otherwise, historians would have little to do. But learning about the depth and richness of our nation’s civil rights movement, the injustices that existed and still persist, the blood that was shed, lives lost and destroyed, and the real progress that has emerged, ought not to be an adjunct or afterthought in our schools. It should, rather, be front and center in every curriculum.

Our civic responsibility as Americans demands nothing less.

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new CIRCLE report on teaching news

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From the CIRCLE website:

With news sources changing rapidly and fragmenting along ideological lines, understanding how to use news and information media (“information literacy”) is an important civic skill. A new fact sheet by CIRCLE deputy director Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg explores the extent to which information literacy is taught in high school civics classes and how its teaching varies.

Using the data from CIRCLE’s National Civics Teacher Survey, which asked teachers about the courses they taught in Fall 2012, this analysis found that overall:

  • Civics teachers believe that information literacy is critical and that students must be able to identify and gather credible information
  • Less than half of teachers are very confident about teaching information literacy. A majority are interested in receiving more training and resources.
  • Teachers commonly use news articles as sources, and 80% discuss election-related issues at least weekly
  • AP and honors courses are more likely to incorporate information literacy than courses that are required for graduation.
  • Teachers who perceive more support are more likely to teach information literacy.

Read the fact sheet National Civics Teacher Survey: Information Literacy in High School Civics. The National Civics Teacher Survey was conducted as part of CIRCLE’s Commission on Youth Voting and Civic Knowledge.

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two op-eds on civic engagement

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I am on a winter vacation and not blogging, but two op-eds of mine have been published this week:

High school students still read in textbooks about how the legislature is designed to work, and how government depends on the consent of the governed. But Congress passes virtually no bills, and almost all adults seem to despise the government.  …

This is compounded by another problem. At times in our history, we have seen people distrust the national government but trust one another. That combination encourages populist reform proposals like term limits, referenda, and campaign finance reform that increase the people’s control over the government. However, today we are living in a time when Americans trust “the people” almost as little as they trust the government in Washington….

If you grow up not trusting the government and not trusting your fellow Americans, you will not admire the political system, but you will also be unmoved by proposals to reform it by empowering the people. That combination is a recipe for cynicism and withdrawal. Unless we want to live in that environment of distrust and suffer its consequences for many decades to come, we must change the situation quickly. …

In schools that serve low-income and minority students, kids are less likely to experience interactive civic education, meaning discussion of current events, participation in school governance and school media, field trips and simulations, such as mock trials. In schools that serve economically diverse students, those who are headed to college tend to get most of these interactive experiences. And in schools that serve several different racial groups in significant proportions, discussions of current events are particularly rare.

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wrapping up the year

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(en route to Georgia for the holidays) As it says on the CIRCLE website:

It has been a busy, productive, and satisfying year. In the past 12 months, we have released a groundbreaking major report, taken a leadership role in several initiatives to improve civic education, advised and evaluated youth development programs, and even helped design and evaluate an innovative multiplayer game.

Last month, we released the CIRCLE Annual Report, which offers an overview of all our work from August 2012 to September 2013. Some highlights:

The Annual Report also looks ahead to the work we will embark on in the near future. For example, we are excited about opportunities to play a role in evaluating and refining emerging tools for civic education like multiplayer games, massive open online courses (MOOCs), and e-portfolios of students’ civic work.

We are extremely grateful to our many friends, funders, colleagues, and collaborators from the past year. See you in 2014!

Read the full 2012-2013 Annual Report.

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our study of state policies for civic engagement

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Just published: “Policy Effects on Informed Political Engagement” by Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg and me. It is in American Behavioral Scientist and available online. (A print copy is coming soon.)

Abstract:

For this article, we tested whether and to what extent young people’s rates of informed voting are influenced by laws and policies that regulate the electoral system and by civic education policies. Education policies and state voting laws vary widely and are in rapid flux; their impact is important to understand. Immediately after the 2012 election, a sample of 4,483 youth was surveyed that included at least 75 respondents in each of the 50 states and national oversamples of African Americans and Latinos. Their experiences with civic education and support from their families predicted their informed political participation as young adults, but variations in the existing state policies did not matter. This may suggest that the kinds of policies that states have enacted—such as allowing early voting or requiring one course on government in high school—are not helpful but policies that promote extracurricular participation and discussion of current issues in schools could be much more effective.

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assessment and accountabillity for civics

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These are some notes for a presentation I will make later today at the New England Association of Schools & Colleges conference. NEASC is one of the six regional accrediting associations in the US. It works by “developing and applying standards, assessing the educational effectiveness of pre-school, elementary, middle, secondary, and postsecondary educational institutions.”

As measurement and accountability have become more important at all levels of education (from pre-K to graduate school), the measurement of civic outcomes has generally been forgotten. It is not clear that civic education has been dropped as a result. All states still have some kind of civic education requirement at the k-12 level. Most colleges still have programs that emphasize service or activism. However, levels of attention, innovation, and investment have clearly suffered because we do not measure civics very seriously.

Measuring anything valuable and complicated is a challenge, and trying to improve any form of education by imposing measures from the outside is always somewhat problematic. But measuring civic education raises special challenges:

  1. Civic engagement is intrinsically interpersonal. Being a citizen means relating to other citizens and to institutions. Measures of individual civic performance (such as multiple-choice tests, essays, or surveys of individual behavior) may miss the point altogether.
  2. Citizens engage on current issues that are often local. That means that the topics of their engagement vary and change rapidly. Standardized tests of civics–simply because they are standardized–must emphasize abstract and perennial questions (such as the US Constitution) and omit equally important current and local matters.
  3. Civic engagement can be either good or very bad, depending on the means, methods and objectives of the participants. Margaret Mead said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” But Mussolini and his fellow fascists started as a small group of thoughtful and committed citizens. They changed the world for the worse. Measures of activity or impact that are value-free fail to distinguish between fascists and Freedom Riders.
  4. In many fields, we can decide what students should learn by assessing whether they are prepared to succeed in their chosen profession or in the labor market more generally. For instance, good engineering education makes good engineers, and good engineers are those who succeed in engineering jobs. Likewise, good citizens succeed in democracy and civil society. But what “success” as a citizen means is controversial. That is what radicals, liberals, conservatives, libertarians, patriots, cosmopolitans, Greens, and others argue about: what we owe to each other (and to nature and future generations) and how we should relate to the community and the state.
  5. When assessing education overall, it makes sense to ask whether it enhances the long-term well-being of the students, which can be measured in terms of earnings, health, or psychological flourishing. Some evidence suggests that being an engaged citizen boosts such outcomes. For instance, being able to define and address problems with peers is a civic skill that can also pay off in the labor market. Contributing to your community can make you happier. But the relationship between being an excellent citizen and flourishing as an individual is complex. In his great book Freedom Summer, Doug McAdam shows that the volunteers paid a severe personal price for their efforts to register Black voters in Mississippi in 1963. They were worse off than a comparison group in terms of happiness, career success, and health ten years later. That is no argument against the Freedom Summer program, which wasn’t meant for their benefit. It was one part of a glorious struggle against Jim Crow. To measure it in terms of the developmental benefits for the participants would have been a travesty.

I think it’s essential to measure civic education in an era of assessment and accountability–if only so that educators and students can track their own progress. Assessments must be interactive, not private and individual. Evaluation must consider ethics and values; it is not enough to act or to affect the world–you have to make it better. The question of what to measure is somewhat controversial because it relates to questions about what kind of society we should have. But there is a lot of common ground and room for compromise. In any event, we should decide what makes a good citizen not by asking what skills pay off in the marketplace or what civic activities boost students’ welfare. We must start with a theory of the good democratic society and then ask what skills, values, knowledge, and commitments we need from the next generation of citizens.

In my recent book, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For, I argue that citizenship  fundamentally means: (1) deliberating with other citizens about what should be done, (2) actually working with other people to address problems and reflecting on the results, and (3) forming relationships of loyalty and trust. That theory derives from my study of politics, not primarily from a theory of education or youth development. I argue that the US political system depends on these three aspects of citizenship, all of which are in decline for deep, structural reasons. If I am right, these are the attainments that we should try to teach, and our measures should capture whether people can (1) deliberate, (2) collaborate, and (3) form civic relationships. If I am wrong, the counterargument should be a different theory of what our society needs from its people.

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putting action in the state standards

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I am in St. Louis for the big annual gathering of social studies teachers, the National Council for the Social Studies conference. Last fall, the NCSS released a new voluntary framework for state standards entitled College, Career, and Civic Life (C3). For full disclosure, I helped write it. One part that seems especially important to me is the section near the end about “taking informed action” (shown below). I will be discussing why this is important and what it means in classrooms.

Screen Shot 2013-11-21 at 4.19.50 PM

At each level, we ask students to analyze a problem, then consider options for addressing the problem, and then make deliberative decisions about what they will do. The scope of action expands from the classroom in grades k-2 to beyond the school by 12th grade.

These standards were written by a large group, but they are consistent with my personal view that good citizens deliberate. By talking and listening to people who are different from ourselves, we learn and enlarge our understanding. We check our values, strategies, and facts with other people. We form ideas about topics that we didn’t even consider before we talked and listened. We also make ourselves accountable to our fellow citizens.

But (I argue) deliberation is not enough. Talking without ever acting is pretty empty. You can say most anything without learning from the results or affecting the world. Deliberation is most valuable when it is connected to work or action. At least sometimes, we should be part of groups that talk about what we should do, then actually do what we have talked about doing, and then reflect on the experience, holding themselves ourselves for the results. This is both the best way to improve the world and the best way to learn to be a good citizen.

Concretely, “taking action” can mean many things: not just community service, and definitely not just political activism (which is hard for a public school to recognize), but also managing and leading student groups, organizing public events, and creating and sharing knowledge.

As Meira Levinson and I argue in the new issue of the NCSS journal, taking action is nothing new.* There is a great old tradition of American students being asked to deliberate and then act as part of their social studies classes. If anything, I suspect the prevalence of action has declined because high schools now mimic colleges (which makes social studies into History or Poli Sci 101 for teenagers) and because conventional standardized tests cannot measure students’ facility at deliberation and action. The new framework, if taken seriously, would require a whole new approach to assessing students’ work.

*Meira Levinson and Peter Levine, “Taking Informed Action to Engage Students in Civic Life,” Social Education, vol. 77, no. 6 (Nov/Dec, 2013) pp. 337-9

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