Schools Need an Infusion of Civic Education

In January 2012 the Obama administration released a document, a call to action, titled “Advancing Civic Learning and Engagement in Democracy.” Has anything changed?

Sadly, the answer is no.

Since the 1980s American democracy—and with it public education—has been hijacked by corporate oligarchs whose bought-and-paid-for “conservative” lawmakers have overrun Congress and many state legislatures. The result has been a deluge of anti-democratic laws and utter stagnation on key concerns upon which the future of the United States turns, such as education and infrastructure, which are suffering at every level.

While gerrymandering and roadblocks to voting have been fostered by rightwing forces, the real stumbling block to progress has been voter apathy. Congress consistently acts contrary to the will of the people because, although many people are willing to answer opinion polls, far fewer are motivated to exercise their right to vote. Voter apathy is an international embarrassment. Some 60% of eligible U.S. voters don’t regularly vote, and among low-income voters the non-voting numbers rise to around 80%. The International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance ranks the United States 120th in the world for average national turnout.

Voting is fundamental to the maintenance of a democracy. It’s no wonder that American democracy is giving way—some would argue, has already given way—to corporate oligarchy, in which wealth governs regardless of the will of the people. Lincoln’s “government of the people, by the people, for the people” has become “government of the poor, by the corrupted, for the rich.” The demise of American democracy cannot be slowed or reversed until the right to vote is seen as an obligation to vote.

Education for democracy at all levels, from kindergarten to the public forum, must be given a central place in our national conversation. And the conversation must lead to action. In the schools, it must become every educator’s role to foster awareness of democratic values, to infuse civic education throughout the curriculum, and to give young people opportunities to exercise democratic values.

Among the steps identified in the “Advancing Civic Learning” report are a couple that merit highlighting:

·      Convene and catalyze schools and postsecondary institutions to increase and enhance high-quality civic learning and engagement.

·      Support civic learning for a well-rounded K-12 curriculum.

We need to ask, not only of our federal government but also our state and local governments, what has been done to accomplish the first of these? And we need to ask our public schools, despite the perversity of the present test mania, where is civic learning for a “well-rounded K-12 curriculum”?

The full “Advancing Civic Learning” report and more can be found at https://www.ed.gov/civic-learning. It is a call to action that must be taken seriously.

Opt-Out Movement Growing

The opt-out movement is gaining strength as more and more parents recognize that over-use of standardized testing is damaging their children’s education and psychologically harming their children in the process. In New York State, for example, more than 183,000 of some 1.1 million students refused to take a recent English exam, more than triple the number last year.

Opting out is going to continue to gain momentum. It’s not, as some have asserted, about labor unions disputing with legislators because over-testing looks a lot like union-busting, though that would certainly be another reason to opt out. Boycotting tests is a grassroots action by increasingly better informed parents and students to stop a harmful, time-wasting, money-wasting, and educationally useless practice, namely, testing for the sake of testing—and for the sake of enriching testing corporations with public tax dollars. That’s the bottom line.

Of course, there is push-back from those in power whose corporate overlords don’t take kindly to even a modest damming of the money flowing into testing corporations—or their long-term objective to bust unions, lower wages, and control education workers, those folks we used to call teachers who now mainly function as test preppers and proctors. U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan says the federal government will be “obligated to intervene” if too many students opt out and states don’t reach their testing quotas.

By “intervene” Duncan means cut federal funding, which as most people know, flows mainly to programs that assist low-income students. In the way of the world—or at least the way of the United States in recent years—punishment will be meted out to those who are most vulnerable. Underfunding education, a consistent pattern of abuse of education that increasingly happens at all levels of government, is a way to destroy public education and thus complete the transformation of the United States into a third world oligarchy.

Some states are already ahead of others in the race to the bottom. In Kansas, Governor Sam Brownback’s failed financial policies and radical tax cuts are causing school districts to shut down early this year because the state’s education coffers have been depleted. This and similar problems are not the result of grassroots movements by parents and students to push for better education. They are the consequence of bad government, of government that has ceased to be by the people or for the people but is, instead, by the few for the few—those few being the corporate elites for whom destruction of public education is a fundamental objective in their war for wealth and power.

The Erosion of Common Ground

A hive of intellectual curiosity and pursuit. That was my impression as I looked up from the new Alexander McCall Smith novel I was sampling in the New Books section of our public library. Before me, spread throughout the spacious, well-appointed library, were patrons of all ages, even college students in spite of the fact that the university nearby has several extensive libraries as well. The public library is a citizens’ space: common ground for the common good. Ours is heavily patronized by readers young and old across the economic strata. Yes, a number of homeless individuals take shelter there, reading the day away or using the pubic computers, avoiding the bitter chill of the Indiana winter. Why should they not? They are as entitled to the pursuit of knowledge or the pleasure of a good read as anyone.

Although the Digital Revolution has brought about changes in how we can engage in literate pursuits, those changes—the Internet, ebooks—have provided new options, rather than substitutes for volumes on shelves. I will gladly confess that in the course of writing five or six books since 2000, I have not darkened the door of traditional library to do the research necessary for them. The Internet has provided me with access to libraries, collections, and various media worldwide. But that does not mean that I consider traditional libraries obsolete. Far from it. Public libraries offer both traditional resources and access to digital resources, especially for those who don’t have computer media ready to hand. The emerging Digital Age is enlarging the role of public libraries, not reducing it.

That is not what those heavily invested in the Industrial/Corporate Age would have us believe. Corporate oligarchs are grasping at every possible means to extend the Corporate Age past its sell-by date, which was about the turn of the century. Much of this grasping is taking the form of attacking common ground: public places, spaces, and endeavors whose democratic mission is to foster and support the common good. The graspers are largely conservative, though not exclusively, and focused on elitist privilege, often corporate. The Digital Age is increasingly about individuation and diverse community, not about corporate personhood.

Public libraries, public schools, public—read “democratic”—anything is suspect in the eyes of corporate oligarchy, in which monied elites are focused on controlled parochialism. Gerrymandering electoral districts to ensure that candidates backed by corporate money win offices and become puppet legislators; undermining public confidence in public schools by unfounded criticism, underfunding, and the shunting of public money into corporate pockets through contracts for ever more testing, vouchers, and charter schools; widening the wealth gap between rich and poor through regressive taxes and tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy—all of these are the self-serving actions of those heavily invested in a dying age, the Industrial/Corporate Age.

The Digital Age, sparked by two key Digital Revolution developments, the computer and the Internet, is not an extension of the Industrial/Corporate Age. It is a revolution-worthy new era. Too many people already understand this. Maybe they read newspapers or see the information on Facebook. Maybe they come to the public library. However, they gain their understanding of the radical changes that are marking out a new cultural era, it’s scaring the bejezus out of conservatives hoping to preserve the dying Industrial/Corporate age. But beware. Those who are afraid are always dangerous. Those of us ready to embrace the Digital Age would do well to remember Gandhi’s words: “The enemy is fear. We think it is hate; but, it is fear.”

*This essay is cross-posted on two blogs: Advancing Learning and Democracy (http://advancinglearning.blogspot.com) and Arts in View (http://artsinview.blogspot.com).

Back When...

“Back when the United States was a democracy” is not a phrase that most Americans have ever hoped to use, but unfortunately the past thirty years has seen the United States slide down a slippery slope from democratic governance to corporate oligarchy. The oligarchs, both named (such as billionaires David and Charles Koch) and unnamed, have managed to create an America in which, like the old saw, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. The wealth gap between rich and poor is now worse in the United States than in most of the developed world. A university study* this year concluded that government policies reflect the desires of the wealthy. The authors believe “that if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened.”

Who knew during the Red Scare of the 1950s McCarthy era that the Republican Party would become a far greater danger to American democracy than communism? But now that Republican politicians are openly bought and paid for by corporate oligarchs, the United States is well on its way to being merely a democracy by tradition but not in fact. “Conservative” is a meaningless term in that so-called conservatives actually conserve nothing but are bent on the destruction of democracy by every means, from blatant propaganda paraded as news to a mix of legislative action and strategic inaction (witness the current do-nothing 113th Congress on track to pass the fewest substantive pieces of legislation of any congressional session in the past half-century).

Education is a key tool by which radical rightwing, anti-democratic policies are promoted and set in place. The first major effort in this regard was to undermine public education. That effort can be pinpointed to 1983 and the Reagan era “big lie”: A Nation at Risk. In spite of decades-long debunking of this commissioned government report, the message that America’s public schools are failing has persisted, giving rise to successive, largely ill-conceived waves of school “reform.” The report was the opening salvo of what has become endless war, largely promulgated by radically “conservative” Republicans on public schools. Short of an absolute takeover, it has been sufficient merely to sow chaos, to keep schools, teachers, parents, and students off balance and having to respond to rolling assaults, such as every-changing standards and a seemingly endless barrage of mandated tests. All the while, public money for schools is being siphoned off to line corporate pockets, whether in the testing industry or the charter school industry.

Average citizens have been hoodwinked—intentionally set upon by unscrupulous pundits, politicians, and policy makers, all of whom are robbing them blind, literally, as well as robbing average Americans of a prosperous, forward-looking future in a truly democratic nation. While there is still time, though full recovery will take generations, it is essential for parents and educators to reclaim their schools and for American voters to reclaim their democracy—by whatever means necessary. Currently there is a groundswell of opposition to the vast testing movement that has undermined teaching, damaged students and teachers, and stolen public school funds for private gain. This resistance movement needs to be nurtured and to spread. It is a wakeup call that everyone who cherishes this country must hear.

*Gilens, M., and B.I. Page. (2014, April 9). Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens. Pre-publication. Subsequently published in Perspectives on Politics 12(3): 564-581.

Trust Teachers

In the 1940s when my mother was a teenager, my grandfather, a respected businessman in their small Kansas community, taught her to drive. When he then took her to get her license, the license clerk asked him, “Can she drive?” My grandfather affirmed that my mother could indeed drive, and so the clerk issued the license. No written test, no road test. To my knowledge, Mom never had an accident over a lifetime of driving in several U.S. states and Europe. Probably she was lucky, but she also had a good teacher who knew his student’s abilities.

For decades now, critics have been hammering at public school teachers. Current movements are gaining momentum in several states to strip away collective bargaining rights and even do away with colleges of education in our universities. Much of this undermining of the public’s confidence in teachers is part of a broader assault on public education, as the Right pursues its anti-democratic agenda to transform the United States into a corporate oligarchy.

But here are some facts to ponder. In the forty-year period between 1970 and 2010, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP—also called “The Nation’s Report Card”—has documented consistently rising achievement in fourth- and eighth-grade math and reading scores. During the same period the U.S. dropout rate fell from 15 percent to 7.4 percent. And yet, over those same forty years the public’s confidence in the public schools dropped from 58 percent to around 30 percent.* Exactly how were higher student achievement and lower dropout rates attained except by the effective work of good teachers in good public schools? I would argue that lack of confidence in teachers is wholly unfounded.

State-mandated mass standardized testing continues to grow, wasting valuable teaching time and vast sums of taxpayer money—more than $46 million in Indiana alone—to provide limited and misleading information about student learning. The heart of the problem is that the further assessment gets from the classroom, the less informative it becomes. It also gets more expensive.

At root, standardized achievement tests don’t tell us where a student started or how far he or she progressed in learning over a given period of time. Standardized test results, at best, tell us what a student knows within a narrow band of knowledge on a given day. Not only are such results misleading, in the sweep of a student’s education they are meaningless. Indiana State Superintendent Tony Bennett would have us believe that these test results help shape instruction. They do so only in the sense of narrowing the curriculum, rather than enriching it; focusing on failure that may, in fact, be the fault of factors beyond students’ and teachers’ control, instead of celebrating success and getting help to challenged students.

Competent, attentive teachers can use intense observation, portfolios of student work, and classroom-based assessment to ascertain more accurately what and how students are learning far better than any standardized test. Bear in mind that we make a big deal of rising SAT and ACT scores. Both the SAT and the ACT are designed to help predict whether a student will be successful in higher education—nothing more than that. But what has the research shown to be a better predictor? High school grades. The reason is simple: A course grade represents a composite evaluation of a student’s achievement based on multifaceted assessment by the student’s teacher.

The same principle applies at all levels of schooling. Teachers interact with their students every day and are far more accurate in assessing student achievement than standardized tests. The fiscal bonus is that we already pay teachers to do this work. So why send millions of taxpayer dollars to testing corporations to give us flawed information when we already get good information from the professionals we already employ? We need to trust our teachers.

* See “Restoring Faith in Public Education”