Restoring the Civic Mission of Public Schools

WASHINGTON—The 2012 elections are underway, and soon all Americans will be making decisions on the candidates for public office, and state and local ballot measures. But how qualified are people today to make the kinds of assessments needed as citizens of a democracy? To what extent do they know and understand U.S. history, the Constitution, and national issues that provide the foundation for the country’s laws and our common civic culture?

On Jan. 9, Brookings Institution hosted a discussion of a new book, “Teaching America: The Case for Civic Education,” edited by David Feith, who enlisted more than 20 leading thinkers—public officials, scholars, educators and policy experts—to talk about civic identity, and the state our schools have dropped to in teaching self-governance and citizenship.

Feith and several contributors to this book participated in a discussion on strengthening civic education. He concluded that public schools are failing to prepare young Americans for “informed citizenship.”

The “civic literacy deficit” may be a “slow threat to our democracy, Feith added. “Far more teenagers today know The Three Stooges than the three branches of government.”

Three-fourths of high school seniors are not proficient in civics; 90 percent are not proficient in U.S. history; 6 out of 10 cannot place the Civil War (1861–1865) in the correct half century, said Feith, whose source is the Department of Education. Generally, youth know little about the democratic process or the civil rights movement, he said.

“The achievement gap separating the poor students from the rest is larger in civic education than any other area,” including math and English, said Feith.

Feith graduated Columbia University in 2009, and while attending became concerned over a lack of civic education in the public school system. He set about to restore civic education and bring it to life, to be desired by a new generation.

Far more teenagers today know The Three Stooges than the three branches of government.
—David Feith, Wall Street Journal.

While at Columbia, he founded the Civic Education Initiative, which he chairs. Housed in the Democracy Prep Public Schools, it set up a program “to improve civic education in schools and to build a national network of school leaders focused on cultivating informed citizenship.”

Currently, Feith writes editorials about education and foreign policy at the Wall Street Journal.

Dr. Peter Levine disputed with Feith on the poor civics proficiency that Feith cited. In 2011, 97 percent of high school seniors report that they have taken classes in civics or American government, he said, and so requiring civics classes is not the problem.

Levine is director of the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE), located at Tufts University.

Levine explains on his blog that the cutoff for proficiency in the National Assessment in Education Progress (NAEP) for Civics is “arbitrary” and that the statistic is interpreted too negatively. He says that actually students know quite a bit of civics.

Levine acknowledges there is an acute problem, however. Important knowledge is not being taught, such as German philosopher Immanuel Kant.

”A closer look at the 12th-grade results shows that most of our graduating seniors can identify an argument made in Marbury v. Madison or explain part of the 14th Amendment. But very few can summarize the views of Reagan and Roosevelt on economics,” he says on his blog.

New Ideas in Civic Education

While the statistics on civic education look bleak, the situation is not hopeless. John Bridgeland, CEO of Civic Enterprises, provided some hope for renewing the public service and civic mission of schools by giving the keynote address, where he described in personal terms what civic education meant to him.

Bridgeland said his history high-school teacher assigned him to be the lawyer for Dred Scott in the Supreme Court decision of 1857. He said he won the re-enactment, freeing Dred Scott who in history lost his bid for freedom. From this exercise, Bridgeland learned about the U.S. Constitution, the relationship between the legislative and judicial branches of government, the Missouri Compromise and the injustices of slavery.

Bridgeland spoke of one initiative to take the first 10 Amendments to the Constitution—the Bill of Rights—and document its applications in magazine articles and newspapers, thereby “breathing new life into them.”

Bridgeland said the idea is to “create experiences that awaken and inspire our authentic interests and core values.” He thinks it’s important to make civics education more personal, and offered the above examples.

As a nation, we are not united like other nations by the motherland, race, or religion, Bridgeland said.

What unites us are these ideals and ideas in the founding documents, said Bruce Cole, who was a contributor to the volume, and in the audience. “This country of immigrants has succeeded because there has been an understanding of, and allegiance to, these great principles,” Cole said in an interview for Humanity Magazine. Cole was the chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), from 2001e2009.

“You can’t know where you’re going unless you understand where you’ve come from, and so this very much coincides with the mission of the Endowment, which says in our founding legislation that democracy demands wisdom and vision.”

NEH oversees We the People, which provided money to help teachers improve their subject matter knowledge. It funds films about American history and culture, preserves archives, and supports scholarships on American history and culture.

In the interview, Cole especially noted Picturing America, a program that sends to schools, libraries, and embassies 40 high-quality reproductions of American art “to tell the story of American history and culture.”

Bridgeland was President Bush’s director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, and later the first director of the USA Freedom Corps. More recently, he was appointed by President Obama to the White House Council for Community Solutions. He has been author of a dozen reports related to the school dropout epidemic, and helped bring national attention to the issue.

High school dropouts lose out in civic education, which is another reason why it is a tragedy to the nation, according to Bridgeland.

His book, “Heart of the Nation: 9/11 and America’s Civic Spirit,” was recently released, and points to a brief period immediately after 9/11 when the nation’s civic spirit and bipartisanship was at a high point, before it descended again by 2005.

By his own example and stories he told, Bridgeland believes that the current severe partisanship and lack of civility proves the need for a revitalized civic education.

Civic Education in Harlem

The civil rights issue in the 1960s was registering African-Americans to vote, but today it is fixing our public schools, said Feith.

Superintendent of Democracy Prep Public Schools Seth Andrew agrees with Feith that it is the civil rights issue of our generation. He said the public schools are “fundamentally, profoundly, disturbingly, and dangerously broken.”

“It is a crisis of proportions that you cannot even think about until you walk into a classroom,” Andrew said.

The talk of civic education and being engaged in civic life doesn’t mean anything until “a teacher takes it up and inspires students to a life of active citizenship,” Andrew said. “We are just starting to figure out this problem with real students and real teachers.”

The Democracy Prep Public Schools, founded by Andrew in 2005, is a network of public charter schools currently operating in Harlem. The prep schools are the only schools dedicated to closing the “massive civic education gap,” according to their literature. Students participate in community service, speech and debate, and the political process to develop the knowledge, attitudes, and skills “needed to change the world.”

Andrew said that Democracy Prep Charter School was ranked No.1 middle school and No.1 charter school in New York City in 2010.

The real challenge is to teach civics when new students coming in cannot read, he said.