If you heard about the following case studies, when would you guess that they happened?

• An East Harlem principal decides that he can’t educate his extraordinarily diverse students effectively unless someone addresses out-of-school issues, including drugs, ethnic conflict, and gangs. To address these issues, he needs data and analysis. He enlists teachers, local adults, and students as community researchers; they also undertake service projects to work on the problems they uncover. He focuses the whole curriculum on community problems. He also establishes store-front extensions for adults to drop in.
• A state decides that reversing serious social problems, such as its poor and shrinking rural communities, will require “social capital” (using that phrase). Recognizing that people are not meeting and talking socially, the state turns its schools into “social centers” and funds evening programs that will bring in adults. At the same time, it creates the first statewide standardized tests and begins disclosing school data to the parents.
• A superintendent of a mid-sized industrial city worries that education will fail if the city cannot address municipal problems, from corruption to poverty and pollution. To address these problems requires public deliberation. So he turns all the schools into “social centers,” which emphasize public discussions of public issues.

These examples are vividly described by Michael C. Johanek in his paper “Preparing Pluribus for Unum: Historical Perspectives on Civic Education” (PDF). As you might have guessed, they took place between 1890 and 1925. Ideas that we imagine are cutting-edge today–participatory action research, service-learning, deliberation, “themed” high schools, high schools with civic “charters”–were much more common a century ago than they are today.

I learned an enormous amount from Johanek’s paper, but I had previously explored civic reforms ca. 1900 for my book The New Progressive Era. The stereotype that Progressive Era reformers were technocrats and centralizers is one-sided: that was one strand of reform, but it was countered by serious efforts to decentralize power to deliberating laypeople. Thus I was not surprised to read that public deliberation and engagement, social capital, and civic education were influential themes in that era. They were often combined and understood as part of larger movements for social reform. It’s disturbing how much less influential these themes are today.

(Washington, DC) Since President Bush signed “No Child Left Behind” (NCLB) in 2002, that has been the name of the comprehensive federal education statute. The name will be dropped, but the law will sooner or later be amended and reauthorized under its original title: the “Elementary and Secondary Education Act” (ESEA).

NCLB had basically nothing to say about civic education, except that some vestigial provisions were left over from earlier legislation. The law’s neglect was not benign: 2002-2011 has been a bad decade for civics, culminating with the termination of all federal funding last spring.

An important ingredient of the actual ESEA reauthorization law will be the bill offered by Senator Harkin, because he chairs the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee. This week, Sen. Harkin is releasing his bill. According to the Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools, under “Programs of National Significance” Harkin would authorize:

Developing, implementing, evaluating and disseminating innovative, research-based approaches to civic learning, which may include hands-on civic engagement activities for low-income elementary school and secondary school students that demonstrate innovation, scalability, accountability and a focus on under-served populations.

For what it’s worth, this is exactly what I would write if someone asked me to draft a law. We should thank Senator Harkin and work to make sure his proposed provision survives on the long road to ESEA re-authorization.

• According to a report by the Southern Poverty Law Center, “Across the country, state educational standards virtually ignore our civil rights history. … Thirty-five states [get] an F because their standards require little or no mention of the movement, [the report] says.” (New York Times, 9/28)
• “Most states do not include in their social studies/history standards a direct mention of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, according to a new study [released by CIRCLE], and only four states actually name Osama bin Laden or al-Qaeda.” (Washington Post, 9/9)
• “California will become the first state to require public schools to teach gay and lesbian history. As expected, Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill on Thursday that mandates that the contributions of gays and lesbians in the state and the country be included in social science instruction and in textbooks ” (New York Times, 7/14)

Like everyone else, I have opinions about what Americans should know. I think, for example, that the Civil Rights Movement should be understood by everyone. It is not only a story of race in America (which is an essential topic), but also an example of democratic participation.

Yet it seems crucial to distinguish among several issues:

1. Which bodies of knowledge we wish everyone would know.
2. Whether lasting knowledge will result if we teach any given topic for a limited amount of time in school.
3. What kinds of educational experiences we want students to have, e.g., in-depth research projects on a few topics, or a lecture on a different topic every day.
4. What are the effects of any given state law or mandate, considering not only its content (e.g., “Teach gay history!”), but also the carrots and sticks that the law imposes.
5. Whether it is wise to standardize the curriculum across a whole state.
6. Whether states, districts, schools, communities, teachers, or teachers-plus-students should make curricular decisions.
7. Which signals we wish to send as a society about the topics we consider important.

I think almost all the discussion is about #7. If we don’t require the teaching of 9/11, civil rights history, or gay history, the lack of a mandate is interpreted as a sign of unconcern–hence disrespect. The result is a default presumption that everything important should be included in state standards. And the standards become voluminous lists.

But the other questions listed above also deserve consideration. We found, for example, that whether the First Amendment was included in state standards had no effect on whether students could answer survey questions about the First Amendment. It did matter whether they had studied the topic, but not what their state law or policies said. Presumably, statewide content mandates do not encourage teaching that leads to lasting knowledge.

All in all, I would prefer that some of our students do in-depth research projects on the Civil Rights Movement and really learn it, rather than require all our students to memorize a few key facts about the Movement that may show up on a standardized test. I make that choice with some reluctance, because I really do think the Movement has transcendent importance. But I would bet that kids will forget almost everything they cram for a test, especially if it covers a long list of topics, whereas they will benefit permanently from a deep experience wrestling with a complex topic that they and their teacher find interesting. I am not in favor of unilateral disarmament–dropping the Civil Rights Movement but leaving 9/11 and the Mayflower Compact in the standards. Instead, I’d like to see a radical shift from lists of topics to core skills and concepts.

(Philadelphia) I am at the National Constitution Center to help release Guardian of Democracy, a successor report to The Civic Mission of Schools, which CIRCLE and Carnegie Corporation of New York released in 2003. The original report became the charter document of the Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools, the nation’s leading advocacy campaign in civics. Guardian of Democracy reflects another eight years of research, experience, and organizing. Many people were involved in producing the new report, which I consider the guide to policy for civic education.