Teaching America is a new book organized and edited by David Feith with chapters by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, Senators Kyl and Graham, former Education Secretary Rod Paige, “Instapundit” Glenn Reynolds, and more than a dozen other authors. I contribute the last chapter, “Letter to Persident Obama: A Policy Approach for the Federal Government.”

As might be expected, the chapters are richly diverse. There are implicit debates about, for example, the centrality of factual knowledge versus democratic skills or values. (Which values are desirable is also a running question.) Some authors are upset that the government takes too little responsibility for civic education, while others are more concerned about the dangers of indoctrination.

I’m not sure how consistent my policy recommendations are with the preceding chapters of diagnosis and critique. I argue that we already require civic education–with a strong focus on concrete facts about the American political system. As a result, students don’t perform badly on tests of that material. But we tolerate vast gaps in civic knowledge and skills by socioeconomic status, and many of our courses and curricula are ineffective at boosting active, responsible, independent citizenship. Thus the important functions of government are to invest in innovation and evaluation and to develop new forms of assessment that encourage students to collaborate and deliberate–not just record their individual knowledge on a test. Two specific proposals for assessment are worth trying: (1) requiring students to show what they can do on a computerized, game-like simulation of a social problem, and (2) asking students to record the opportunities for civic learning that their schools make available to them.

Today, CIRCLE releases new research by Jeremy Stoddard and Diana Hess on how 9/11 is treated in state standards and textbooks. More than 20 states require the event to be discussed, but usually in superficial ways. My quote in the release: “9/11 was an event of enormous significance, but we must get away from putting everything important in state standards until they are unmanageably long lists … If we are going to list specific events that must be covered, the point should be to teach skills, concepts, or ideas rather than just requiring students to identify the event.”

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.

Dan Rothstein and Luz Santana from The Right Question Project have published Make Just One Change, a new book about using their approach in schools. It’s available from Harvard Education Press. Howard Gardner writes, “In reading this powerful work, I was reminded of what Albert Einstein said, when he learned of Jean Piaget’s pioneering questioning of young children: ‘so simple only a genius could have thought of it.”

The Right Question idea is indeed simple and powerful. When teachers, case workers, doctors, police officers, and many other officials make decisions that affect us, we need to ask what decisions are being made and why. If we don’t ask “the right questions,” we can be poorly served or mistreated, whether intentionally or accidentally. I say “we” because I am not always confident that I ask the right questions, and I have benefited personally from the simple training that Dan and Luz offer. But social class is important here. Middle class people learn early how to ask authority figures about their decisions and the reasons for them. Asking effective questions creates accountability and yields better results. Poor and working class people do not know whom or what to ask. (Annette Lareau’s book provides great evidence.) Yet the poorer you are, the more likely you are to interact with public sector employees who hold power over you. Thus asking the right question is a basic democratic act.

Although asking the right questions increases the power of clients (or students), it is not zero-sum: power at the expense of officials or teachers. On the contrary, institutions can work better and public employees’ lives can get easier when the people they serve ask the right questions. Make Just One Change is primarily aimed at teachers and argues that they will be more effective if they teach their students to ask to ask the right questions.

(Concord, NH) I have been meeting with the New Hampshire Task Force on Civic Education, which includes a very engaged and thoughtful Justice David Souter. The Task Force is seeking to define what “civic education” should achieve in the Granite State and has decided that providing voluntary educational opportunities for current teachers will be its best investment. I agree with that because there really isn’t any evidence that any set of state requirements, tests, or standards has changed students’ experiences or outcomes in civics. That means that the Task Force is unlikely to help kids by promoting any policy reform at the state level, unless there is a strong infrastructure for teachers to learn about both content and pedagogy.