Monthly Archives: August 2011

religious service attendance

I am in DC for NAEP meetings. My post of the day is over at the CIRCLE site, where I track the rates of religious attendance for young adults and older adults. Regular attendance has declined, especially for youth, but remains fairly common. The proportion who believe in God has also declined, yet just 4.1% of young adults are what I would call atheists. More information is on the CIRCLE site, and the key graph is below.

American students know quite a bit of civics, but do they know the right stuff?

I am en route to DC to help with planning the next National Assessment in Education Progress (NAEP) for Civics. I was also on the design team for the 2011 test, which yielded newspaper articles like “Failing Grades on Civics Exam Called a ‘Crisis’” (The New York Times) and a Washington Post editorial on “civic illiteracy.”

I have a somewhat different view of the data. I think the NAEP shows that students know quite a bit about civics, although less about some topics than others. For example, 61 percent of American twelfth graders can interpret a passage from the majority opinion in Schenck v. The United States (1919), although only those at the NAEP’s “advanced” level could compare the citizenship requirements of the United States to those in other countries. (Other research has found that American students compare well to international peers when it comes to understanding their own political system, but are very naïve about foreign governments.)

There is no evidence of decline. The mean scores at eighth and twelfth grade are flat, and the fourth grade scores have risen. But surely there is a “crisis” when only 24 percent of twelfth graders score at “Proficient” on the NAEP Civics Assessment? Not necessarily: the cutoffs for “basic,” “proficient,” and “advanced” are essentially arbitrary, set originally by a small committee of teachers and subject-matter experts. A different committee could easily have set the standards differently and concluded that most American students are proficient. Compared to 14-year-olds in a sample of 28 other countries, American students perform substantially above average. The value of the proficiency levels is not for deciding how much our students know but for comparing scores from year to year or one group of students to another. The most recent NAEP shows improvements, but only at the fourth grade level, and troubling gaps in proficiency by race, ethnicity, and parents’ education.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan has deplored the fact that “a staggering number of Americans do not know much of the basic history and traditions of our nation.” He cited information that many adults fail to know, ranging from the three branches of government to the names of today’s Supreme Court justices. But the structure of the federal government is included in state standards, taught in mandatory courses, and included on standardized tests. Every state except Iowa (with its strong tradition of local control) has civics standards. Ninety-seven percent of high school seniors reported in 2011 that they have taken classes in civics or American government

In other words, education policy is already designed to ensure that young people know the three branches of government, and 69 percent of high school seniors can correctly answer a question about Marbury v. Madison (relevant to relations between two of the branches), even though the NAEP has no stakes and no one studies for it.The main problem is probably that adults tend not to remember such concepts even though they knew them when they were teenagers.

On the other hand, the names of individuals who serve today on the Supreme Court and hold other public offices are virtually never included on standardized tests. News and current events are not common areas of emphasis in social studies classes.

How we assess policies for civic education depends essentially on what we think is most important for young people to learn. In my view, the constitutional structure of the United States government, its origins, underlying premises, and most debated aspects, are worthy topics of study. I teach them myself, even at the graduate level. I wish that everyone understood them. I also think that Kantian, utilitarian, and Aristotelian ethics, doctrinal differences among world religions, and the nature of modernism and postmodernism are worthy topics that people should study. We teach the US constitutional structure but we don’t teach, for example, Kant (who is a major topic in other countries and of much greater global significance than any American founder). Our choices are defensible but not necessary. The Republic would survive if fewer people understood Marbury v. Madison. What really worries me is not measured on the NAEP, and that is the proportion of people who have the skills and values they need to participate effectively in our civil society.

Underlying my position here are some doubts about “American exceptionalism” and “Constitutional piety” combined with severe concerns about the state of our civil society.

where do you turn if you mistrust the government and the people?

If you mistrust the government but trust your fellow citizens, you may be drawn to political changes (such as referenda, campaign finance reform, or electoral reform) to increase the power of “the people,” collectively. That was the main trend of reform between 1890 and 1914. If you mistrust many of your fellow citizens but trust some version of the government, you may be convinced to expand the power of technocrats or charismatic politicians, as has happened in many countries, especially the most divided ones. But the clear trend in America for the last several decades has been growing distrust for both.

If one distrusts both the public and the government, a consistent response would be individualistic libertarianism: asking to be left alone to the greatest possible extent. (I distinguish this philosophy from communitarian libertariansm, which means devolving power to localities.)

Individualistic libertarianism has been a growth stock during the period depicted above, when–not coincidentally–people have also become less likely to work together with their neighbors. But without arguing its merits, I would note that most Americans don’t buy all the tenets of individualistic libertarianism. In particular, they are concerned about negative externalities (whether from smokestacks or from drug sales) and want to regulate other people’s behavior to prevent them. They are also at least somewhat concerned about economic equality.

So where will Americans turn if they want to regulate society but distrust both the government and their fellow citizens and are not working with their neighbors? That seems to me a great underlying issue of our time.

assessing the president

Right now, everyone on the left seems to want to criticize President Obama’s leadership or else rise to his defense–yielding a vast flow of commentary. (See, for example, Drew Westen, Matt Miller, or Tom Philips for the prosecution; Kevin Drum or Jonathan Chait for the defense.) We know things are going badly: the economy barely sputtering along, the 2012 election in doubt, the political system reaching depths beneath satire’s reach, and public opinion pretty strongly against any federal activism that might help. I think the interesting questions are:

  1. Could pursuing different policies in 2009-10 have substantially changed the situation today?
  2. Could the administration alter the situation now with substantially different policy proposals or legislative strategies?
  3. Could the president change public opinion by talking differently?

There are two reasonable sides to each of these questions, but for what it’s worth, my answers would be: no, no, and no. We now know that the US economy shrank by 5.1 percent from 2007-9 and unemployment doubled. The recovery was going to be hard and slow, and Obama took office well before a cyclical rebound was possible. (In contrast, FDR won the presidency after three years of depression, once the economy had already begun to turn the corner.) I am enough of a Keynesian to think that a gigantic stimulus might have helped, but that was not in the cards. Also, the money would have to be well spent or the political backlash would have been tremendous. A modestly larger stimulus could have mitigated suffering, but we would be in the same “macro” situation as we are now.

In 2011, even a relatively modest stimulus might prevent a double dip. So we should do that! But proposing or requesting a stimulus does not cause one to pass Congress. Indeed, the chances of its passing are near zero. So if there is an underlying strategy behind the many calls for tougher or better rhetoric, it must be the hope of changing public opinion in time for the 2012 elections.

That strategy raises the much-debated question of whether presidential rhetoric can change public opinion on matters as deeply rooted as basic trust in government. I see no examples of success. As has been widely noted, the public throughout FDRs administration favored spending cuts to balance the federal budget, and he even opted for that policy in 1937. Substantial economic growth from 1932-6 made him a popular president, and his social innovations were good–as is Obama’s health care reform. But FDR did not persuade Americans to be Keynesians. Since then, trust in government has eroded slowly but profoundly, making Keynes’ case even harder.

Two additional challenges stood in Obama’s way: substantial public money had to be spent on bailouts (very bad for public trust), and the 2010 electorate was bound to be smaller and more Republican than the 2008 electorate, because it was an off-year election. Given this combination of factors, I think no other rhetoric, narrative, strategy, or bargaining posture would have made a whole lot of difference. One of the most remarkable facts about today’s political situation is the president’s relatively high approval rating, a surprising asset for an incumbent in such terrible times.

I could certainly endorse criticisms of particular bargaining decisions and particular rhetorical choices. On the other hand, if “everyone’s basically had it with the president,” then let me say that my anger is directed elsewhere. The list includes corrupt kleptocrats, Congressional partisans who don’t care about collateral damage, and liberal pundits and opinion-leaders who reacted so tepidly to the legislative achievements of 2009-10 that they probably reduced Democratic turnout that November. I can’t prove that booing the health care plan caused the 2010 electoral shellacking, any more than I can prove that the president’s sometimes centrist rhetoric has hurt the progressive cause. But my instinct tells me the biggest fault was not his.

The main line of criticism seems to be: the administration’s legislative agenda should have been, and should remain, much more ambitious, and bolder rhetoric would persuade the public to support it. My view was and remains: the political system is broken, little can be expected from it, and the public doesn’t help because they–understandably–have no faith in better policy. As I wrote in a Democratic Strategist article:

Americans’ distrust of government is deep and poses a fundamental obstacle to progressive reform. …. When only six percent of Americans trust the government to have created any jobs by spending almost one trillion of their dollars, the problem is much deeper than Fox News or the communications strategy of the White House. The underlying relationship between people and their government is fundamentally broken.

Candidate Barack Obama seemed to understand that rhetoric could not change this situation, but engaging the public in the substance of governance would begin to restore the relationship. His administration’s failure to do that has been a deep disappointment to me, but that is an entirely different critique from the one being discussed today.