The headline in The New York Times says: Failing Grades on Civics Exam Called a ‘Crisis’. Whether that’s how you read the data is a matter of opinion, but I can shed a little light on the source.

The National Assessment in Educational Progress in Civics is our best measure of what students know about civic, legal, and political concepts and facts. It is a no-stakes test of a representative sample of almost 20,000 American students. It assesses knowledge and skills that are relevant to civic participation, but they are fairly academic skills of individuals, not skills that people commonly use in groups. For instance, students may be asked to interpret the text of a speech, but not run a meeting.

The NAEP Civics assessment has been given only sporadically but is now on a regular three-year cycle. I was on the committee responsible for the 2010 assessment and will help again with the 2013 version. I would describe it as a rather hard test which most adults would badly flunk. It is closely tied to academic content in American history and government, so you have to recall quite a few Supreme Court decisions and constitutional principles to do well.

Today, the results were released for 2010. In brief, 4th graders improved their mean scores, whereas scores for 8th and 12th graders did not change. This is interesting because our research has found that time devoted to civics shrank recently in the early grades but not in the later grades, where the number of credits earned in social studies actually rose.

To be specific, time spent on civics or social studies shrank in the first through fifth grades from 1999-2004. (We don’t know what happened after that.) Yet fourth-grade NAEP civics scores rose from 1998 to 2006 and again from 2006 to 2010.

According to the NAEP, 97 percent of twelfth-graders report that they have studied civics or government in high school. That is consistent with other research that finds most kids study the topic. It means that the solution to our concerns about civic knowledge should not be to require civics. It is already being studied. On the other hand, the high dropout rate means that a 12th grade assessment misses almost one third of our young people, and many of the dropouts received little civics education.

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 Fourteenth Amendment. But very few can summarize the views of Reagan and Roosevelt on economics or compare the citizenship requirements of the US to other countries. They seem to score better on questions concerning constitutional and legal issues than on political matters.

From what I am hearing, the budget deal negotiated by Congress and the President had the following effects on civic education:

Learn & Serve America, the program within the Corporation for National and Community Service that funds “service-learning” in k-12 schools, colleges and universities, nonprofits, and Native American communities, was eliminated completely–after 21 years of work.

The Center for Civic Education, a national nonprofit whose primary source of funds for decades has been the United States Department of Education, was allocated no money. I think the entire civic education portfolio in the Department was zeroed out.

The Teaching American History grant program (which mainly supports educational opportunities for teachers of k-12 history) was cut by about 36 percent.

I have been critical of the way some of these funds were used in the past; improvements are possible. But for the national government to invest nothing in the civic education of young people is unacceptable.

For other cuts that affect democratic processes in the United States, see the Campaign for Stronger Democracy.

Three lively discussions about civic education within two weeks: one at the CUNY Graduate Center in Manhattan, the next at James Madison’s Montpelier, the third in DC. A similar topic, but the participants came from very different places on our wide political spectrum.

At CUNY, at least one participant believed that No Child Left Behind was a right-wing strategy to privatize all public schools. (The theory goes: once schools fail to meet the Adequate Yearly Progress benchmarks, students will be given vouchers.) Another speaker simply called charter schools “private” and saw them as a manifestation of creeping market fundamentalism. I don’t know whether these views represented consensus in the room, but no one challenged them. There was some talk about trying to revive the “open classroom” movement of the 1970s. A distinguished and experienced scholar said that he had expected Barack Obama’s election to change everything, but when that failed, he was now ready to give up on politics.

At Montpelier, at least one participant felt that any federal intervention in education is unconstitutional (because education is not listed among the enumerated powers). Thus to try to influence the federal government to support civic education would be to mis-educate our students, who should be learning that the government has wantonly exceeded its constitutional limits. No Child Left Behind is a liberal plot to get the federal government deeply implicated in our schools. There was much talk about teaching the founding documents of the Republic. Some people felt that we should stay out of politics and policy completely and instead create small, alternative spaces where teachers and students could explore first principles.

These contrasting thoughts clear one’s head, challenge one’s clichés, and take one back to first principles. What is the proper role of a national government in civic education? What should students learn, and how? And how can we even consider national standards, if our adults disagree so profoundly about the core purposes of education?

(The participants in DC seemed less explicitly ideological to me, perhaps because they were much more numerous, predominantly centrist, and focused on pending policy changes.)

(Washington, DC) At a conference here on Educating for Democracy in a Digital Age, the Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, said, “A foundation in civics education is not a luxury but a necessity. … Civics cannot be pushed to the sidelines in schools. …. At the same time, civics instruction needs to be more engaging and exciting, both inside and outside the classroom. … It’s time for us to dust off and revitalize civics education for the 21st century.”

Duncan said that many students receive an implicit message that they don’t have to pay attention to civics. To succeed, they must focus on reading, math, and science. But “the skills acquired through civic education are critical to succeeding in the knowledge economy.” Duncan gave equal emphasis to the political importance of civics for a democracy. “Civics education is the first bullwark against tyranny.”

He cited statistics about low knowledge of civics. He assigned some responsibility to schools. “Too often, our schools are doing a poor job of transmitting civic knowledge.” The most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress showed “distressing disparities–what we call ‘the civics achievement gap.'” (I am glad he uses that phrase, which you could read first on our website.)

Duncan cited iCivics, Rock the Vote, the American Bar Association, and Mikva Challenge as examples of cutting-edge civic education (giving Mikva an extended and well-deserved endorsement).

Duncan said that wherever he goes, people complain about the narrowing of the curriculum. History and civics are also important. It’s “simply unacceptable” for schools to have to choose between reading and math and civics.

He summarized the administration’s excellent proposal to replace small, earmarked civics programs with a much larger competitive pool of funding. His proposal, however, lumps civics together with all the disciplines currently subject to being crowded out of our schools. We would prefer a separate pool for civics so that it doesn’t get lost.

Civics is about giving students the skills for effective participation. The “need to improve civic education is urgent, but with great need comes great opportunity.” He called the Internet more than a source of information; it is also a platform for students to create and organize.

In response to a question about bullying, he said he was especially excited about opportunities for the students themselves to build zero-tolerance against bullying.

Duncan was one of the keynoters at the conference. Others included Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and former Rep. Lee Hamilton (the co-chairs of the Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools); the presidents of the MacArthur and McCormick Tribune foundations, and all-star academics like Joe Kahne and Diana Hess.

Recently I presented some thoughts about why and how we might use assessment in civic education. Most of my points apply to education in general. People seemed to find these ideas useful, so I offer my notes here.

Assessment for what?

• “Formative”: to find out what students or other people know or can do before an educational experience begins, so that we can tailor the education to their needs.
• As an incentive for performance. For instance, if students must pass a civics test to complete ninth grade (the theory goes), they will work hard at civics.
• As a gatekeeper: perhaps no one should hold a high school diploma unless he or she can demonstrate particular knowledge.
• To guide institutions or public policies. For example, we assess programs to decide whether to fund or require them; we evaluate teachers to determine their employment status.
• For the improvement of programs or institutions: in other words, as helpful feedback to educators and administrators.
• To impress outsiders, such as potential funders, with the merits of programs.

Assessment of whom?

• Students–but we might choose to focus on average students, highly at-risk students, talented and motivated students who are potential leaders, or groups of students to see how they perform as teams.
• Educators
• Programs
• Schools
• States and other governmental entities

Assessment of what?

• Students’ knowledge, skills, dispositions, values, or habits and behaviors. Note that the kinds of knowledge we want children to possess are enormously various and extensive. In the civic domain, skills encompass fairly typical academic skills (such as interpreting a written political speech) and distinctively civic skills (such as moderating a meeting or dealing with a free-rider in a group). Dispositions and habits can be assessed, but not when the stakes are high. Asking students to report on their own values and behaviors and then holding them accountable for their answers seems an invitation to lie.
• Schools’ offerings–for example, what courses they provide; whether a student newspaper exists.
• Teachers’ performance.
• Programs’ effects: ideally, the changes in students that are causally attributable to their experience in a given program.
• Pedagogical techniques or strategies, or elements of programs abstracted from specific programs. For instance, several evaluations of programs that include seminars for teachers have shown good effects on students. (Facing History and Ourselves is an example). But we do not know whether seminars for teachers, per se, are helpful.

Assessment by whom?

• Program staff or teachers, who can assess students or programs
• Supervisors, who can assess teachers or students
• Expert evaluators or test-designers
• Voters, citizens, or parents, whose role can either be informal (putting pressure on schools to remedy perceived failures) or formal (serving on evaluation committees, reviewing data)
• Students, who can be asked for their opinions about teachers or programs. More interestingly, they can be asked to supply relatively objective data about educational experiences.

Assessment how?

• Tests or test-like written instruments. These are relatively inexpensive, standardizable, and subject to public review; but limited to factual knowledge and fairly simple academic skills. They are limited, also, to the assessment of individuals’ work, not group work.
• Performances or portfolios that are graded by teachers or juries.
• Simulations or games–winning or scoring well on the game would lead to a positive assessment.
• Evaluations based on people’s opinions of the program, e.g., college students’ course evaluations.
• Longitudinal studies, which repeat some of the same survey items at different times. Repeating a survey very soon tells us nothing about retention. Repeating it after a long while precludes attributing any changes to a particular intervention. Repeating it many times is helpful but is generally expensive because of the costs of retaining individuals in a study.
• Randomized experiments, about which I have written before. My favorite design, by the way, is a wait-list control, in which volunteer participants are assigned to receive the experience either immediately or after a delay, and the two groups are assessed simultaneously. Facing History and Ourselves, the Bill of Rights Institute, and the Center on Politics at the University of Virginia have shown that randomized field experiments of civic education are possible.

What we lack

In the civics field, we are most seriously in need of:

• Tools for reliably assessing advanced skills, especially distinctively civic or leadership skills that are not also academic skills.
• Tools for assessing participation in group projects and discussions.
• Assessments of the quality of “inputs” (not what students know but what schools teach)
• Well-designed assessments of the impact of professional development for teachers on their students.