Monthly Archives: February 2014

the Common Core and civic education

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The Common Core is a powerful reform movement in education. State standards are regulatory documents that prescribe the expected outcomes, the content, and (to some extent) the pedagogy used in our public schools. The forty-five states that have adopted the Common Core are revising their standards for mathematics and English/language arts with the goal of making them more coherent, more demanding, and more similar across the states.

Since the Common Core is about math and English, not other subjects, I and many colleagues have written a voluntary framework for states to revise their social studies standards, the College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework. But some thoughtful and well-informed people believe that the Common Core itself provides sufficient impetus for strengthening the social studies. I have heard that argument made by the social studies coordinator of a very large urban school system, the lobbyist for the main teacher’s union in a major state, and others. They point to valuable provisions in the Common Core’s English/language arts standards. For example:

  • The Common Core includes standards for speaking and listening that encourage deliberation, which is a fundamental democratic skill. “CCSS.ELA-Literacy.SL.11-12.1b Work with peers to promote civil, democratic discussions and decision-making, set clear goals and deadlines, and establish individual roles as needed.”
  • The Common Core is not a curriculum, and it does not prescribe content, but it frequently uses classic civics texts as illustrative examples. “CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RH.11-12.4 Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, including analyzing how an author uses and refines the meaning of a key term over the course of a text (e.g., how Madison defines faction in Federalist No. 10).”
  • Again, although the Common Core generally avoids mentioning specific texts and assignments, it gives explicit attention to “seminal U.S. texts, including the application of constitutional principles and use of legal reasoning (e.g., in U.S. Supreme Court majority opinions and dissents) and the premises, purposes, and arguments in works of public advocacy (e.g., The Federalist, presidential addresses)” and to “seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century foundational U.S. documents of historical and literary significance (including The Declaration of Independence, the Preamble to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address) for their themes, purposes, and rhetorical features.”
  • It has been typical to teach reading through fiction alone at the primary grades, but the Common Core requires experience with nonfiction texts all the way from k-12. By high school, it explicitly requires reading civics texts. “CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.9-10.9 Analyze seminal U.S. documents of historical and literary significance (e.g., Washington’s Farewell Address, the Gettysburg Address, Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms speech, King’s ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’), including how they address related themes and concepts.”

I believe that these provisions and others in the Common Core are valuable, and I appreciate what groups like Street Law Inc., have done to demonstrate how good civics teaching aligns with the Common Core standards. But I do not agree that adopting the Common Core will suffice to strengthen civics. It may even cause unintended harm if social studies teachers are enlisted to teach the Common Core’s vision of literacy while the separate goals of the social studies are forgotten.

These are my main concerns:

1. The Common Core reflects a remarkable focus on the formal analysis and “close reading” of excellent texts. In literary theory, this approach would be classified as “New Criticism.” I don’t particularly object to it for high school-level English. I actually prefer close reading to the book-club style, in which one mainly reacts to situations and characters in books as analogs to one’s own life. However, close reading will not achieve the purposes of history and civics.

For example, the Common Core standard quoted above that mentions the Federalist Papers comes under the heading of “Craft and Structure.” The main goal is to understand how Madison constructs an argument and uses phrases like “faction” in Federalist 10, treated as an example of excellent prose. Indeed, Federalist 10 would be a good text to assign in an English class to teach argumentative writing. But it was written for a purpose (to convince readers to support the Constitution), by a person who held specific roles (an author of the Constitution, a future president), to a particular audience (prospective voters in New York State), at a particular time (after the Revolution and the degeneration of the Articles of Confederation), in a broader intellectual and political context (the Enlightenment, the age of European empire). These are not matters that one can explain with a footnote to help the reader with formal analysis. Each of these topics requires days or weeks of study. We do not study them in order to analyze Federalist 10 as text. We study them for their own sake and because they help us to understand our current political institutions.

An American student might learn about Queen Elizabeth I to explicate a Shakespeare play. But she should study the American Revolution because of its intrinsic importance and its current implications. The textual analysis of documents from the founding period is of secondary importance in a history, civics, or government course. The text helps us to understand politics and history, not the other way around.

2. All Most of the texts mentioned as examples in the Common Core are “seminal” or foundational, and the list in CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.11-12.9 explicitly ends with the nineteenth-century. I yield to no one in my respect for history, but students must also understand that history continues; they play a role in it. The curriculum should not stop at 1900 or even at 2010. Students must learn to read, analyze, evaluate, and criticize speeches by Obama and Romney (and Putin and Snowden) as well as Washington and Lincoln.

3. I am enthusiastic about the deliberative standards in the Common Core’s “Speaking and Listening” sections. In fact, if those standards really influence instruction, I might accept the Common Core as a net benefit for civics. But much will depend on assessment. Right now, private firms are developing tests aligned with the Common Core for consortia of states. I am completely outside that process, but rumors hold that the tests will use conventional formats, except that they will be taken on computers instead of on paper. Choosing multiple-choice responses–or writing short or even long essays completely on one’s own–is no way to demonstrate this kind of skill from the Common Core: “Work with peers to promote civil, democratic discussions and decision-making, set clear goals and deadlines, and establish individual roles as needed.” That requires interaction with actual other people.

I fear that even though the standards evoke the idea of civil and constructive interaction, the tests that really count will not measure it. That would be acceptable if social studies teachers could still assign deliberations, service projects, mock trials, and other interactive experiences in their own classrooms while English teachers taught the Common Core. But resources are flowing to math and English, and social studies teachers are already saying that they must follow the Common Core in their courses. Once the tests are ready, they will have to prepare students to pass Common Core assessments. The net result could easily be harmful for civics.

We are the Ones on WPFW

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WPFW 89.3 FM (Pacifica Radio in Washington, DC and environs) has chosen “We are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For” as the theme of their pledge drive this year. People who pledge $50 to the station this morning get a free copy of my book by the same name (and the station keeps the whole $50). Here is the audio of me on WPFW’s “Community Watch & Comment,” discussing the book. My segment starts halfway through, at about the 33:34 minute mark.

The special offer from WPFW will not last long, but I encourage DC-area folks to support the station.

syllabus of an undergraduate course on civic studies

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An Introduction to Civic Studies: Theories for a Better World

Overview: “Civic studies” is a nascent discipline that looks at social problems from the perspective of a citizen and asks tough questions about what we should do, taking into account values (ethics), facts (empirical evidence), and strategies. It originated with a joint statement written by a distinguished group of scholars in 2008. Since then, it has produced a special issue of a journal, an annual conference, a book, and–most importantly–the annual Summer Institute of Civic Studies at Tufts. The Summer Institute has drawn about 100 graduate students, leaders, and professors from Bhutan, Singapore, China, Mexico, South Africa, and numerous other countries and backgrounds. This course will be the first-ever undergraduate version of the Summer Institute. We will contribute to building “civic studies.”

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my father’s books are going to James Madison’s desk at Montpelier

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(Syracuse, NY) My father, Joseph M. Levine, collected more than 20,000 books as a working library of a professional historian. Many were published before 1800. I am a sort of trustee for this collection, happily responsible for its long-term future.

James Madison, the fourth president of the United States, collected a library of books that informed his thoughts about the Constitution. In his case, the next generation meant his ne’er-do-well son-in-law, John Payne Todd, whose gambling debts cost the family all their property, including the books.

Now the Madison home at Montpelier has been restored to look as it did in James Madison’s day. But Montpelier needs appropriate books to display beside the president’s desk. By mutual arrangement, ten feet of my father’s collection are going there on permanent loan. I am in Syracuse to pick out books that might have belonged in Madison’s personal collection ca. 1820.

This, for example, is the same edition of Montaigne on which James Madison took notes when he was a student. Those notes were the very first substantive writings Madison produced in his life.

CAM00067My father was a Jewish boy from Brooklyn, New York; a Dodgers fan; an FDR liberal. James Madison was a slave-holding Tidewater planter. My Dad studied English intellectual history and was something of an Anglophile. James Madison led the US in a war against Great Britain, yet he was very far from an immigrant New Yorker. How do all these pieces fit together?

The answer is a certain version of liberalism. Dad grew up in a liberal family and neighborhood, but an additional formative experience was studying at Cornell during the McCarthy period. Cornell was stocked with great thinkers, including refugees from totalitarianism and veterans of struggles at home. During Dad’s undergraduate years, Vladimir Nabokov, Frances Perkins, Edwin Arthur Burtt, Buckminster Fuller, Clinton Rossiter, and Richard Neustadt all served on the faculty. They pursued rich cultural ideas, developed the inner life, and fought for social reform. Cornell broadened and liberated minds. The Constitution and the fundamental principles of the American Republic stood with the university and against its enemies.

Dad became an historian to join this community of free inquiry, and also to understand the origins of the modern liberal world. He began his graduate studies interested in the founding period of the US Republic, but he soon moved backwards to explore its origins in Tudor and Stuart England. That period became his lifelong interest and caused him to spend many years in England and to ship literally tons of books and other artifacts back from there.

English history is morally complex, as is the legacy of James Madison. England was a monarchy and a colonial power. But England was also the birthplace of individual rights, representative government, and rule-of-law–at least as those institutions have come to the US. It not only gave us our liberal traditions but also our more radical currents. From the Agitators and Levellers of 1647 to the Commonwealthmen and Whigs of 1750 to the Chartists of 1838, English thinkers developed the idea that political liberty and equality should come first, with cultural equality and economic reform to follow. As the MP Thomas Rainsborough argued in the mid-1600s:

For really I think that the poorest hee that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest hee; and therefore truly, Sr, I think itt clear, that every Man that is to live under a Government ought first by his own Consent to put himself under that Government; and I do think that the poorest man in England is not at all bound in a strict sense to that Government that he hath not had a voice to put Himself under.

Madison would certainly have qualified that populism in many ways. The poorest in Virginia were slaves, and Madison wanted to send them back to Africa rather than admit them as equals to the commonwealth. Federalist 10 presents Madison’s objections to “a pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person.” He feared that “a common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole ….” But Madison constructed a political order that–when we honor its design–preserves individual liberties, defends minorities, promotes the “mild voice of reason,” and creates an important place for the “republican principle” of political equality.

It seems perfectly fitting that my father’s books should sit by the desk of the man who introduced the Bill of Rights and served as the second Rector of the University of Virginia.

[PS: I shouldn’t have written “desk,” as I believe the books are destined for a small room outside Madison’s study that he used as a library.]

do marijuana ballot initiatives raise youth turnout?

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We are cited in a couple of recent news articles about whether potential marijuana-legalization ballot measures in Arizona, California, Florida, Massachusetts, Maine, Montana and Nevada could encourage young people to vote in 2014 or 2016. (See Toluse Olorunnipa, “Florida Pot Vote Turnout Seen Helping Democrat Win Governor Race,” in Business Week; and Matt Sledge, “How Marijuana May Influence The 2016 Election,” in Huffington Post.)

It’s tempting to look at the data from previous marijuana initiatives in Washington State and Colorado, but the results are murky. First of all, whether youth turnout rose or fell in those states depends on whether you use the Exit Polls or the Census’ Current Population Survey to estimate it. The former method shows an increase in Colorado in 2012, but the Census doesn’t confirm that trend. In any case, many other factors were in play in those two states–other ballot initiatives and candidate races, demographic shifts, and so on. Even if the increase seen in Colorado was real, it is not clearly attributable to the pot initiative.

Leaving aside the technicalities, I think it’s important to say that marijuana legalization never polls as a high-priority issue for young voters. It’s always far down on their list, well below the economy, jobs, education, and health care. There may be some libertarian-leaning youth (and young people concerned about unfair incarceration*), for whom legalization is a core matter of principle. But they are few. There may also be some young people–as well as some older people–who would just like to be allowed to indulge. But voting is a demanding civic act that correlates with seriousness. If there is an actual stoner voting bloc, I would suspect they are low-propensity voters, quite hard to turn out on a November Tuesday. Other youth voting blocs, from environmentalists to pro-Lifers, will be easier to mobilize.

Again, I do not mean to dismiss the moral seriousness of legalization activists. Whether libertarians or critics of the carceral state (or both), they are raising a real issue, and they will vote if they have a chance. But they are not very numerous. I don’t think they are strongly concentrated among the young. And other issues will matter a lot more to the youth vote in 2014.

(*For full disclosure, I would personally vote to legalize pot and I am very concerned about over-incarceration. But less than 1 percent of state and federal inmates were incarcerated as a result of marijuana laws, so I wouldn’t put my own energy into marijuana legalization as a strategy for reducing incarceration.)