do we teach civics anymore?

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In the New York Times online (Sept. 23), Thomas B. Edsall quotes a Romney supporter who explains why Obama may win that state: “People are stupid. … [Governments] eliminated civics from our curriculum. The students don’t know about civics, they don’t know about our history, our government, our constitution.” The mega-blogger Atrios asks whether it’s true that civics has been eliminated, and Kevin Drum thinks not, heading his blog post, “Civics is Alive and Well in American High Schools.”

This is an empirical question (a matter of fact), and a relatively full analysis is coming very soon from CIRCLE. We are at the proofreading and layout stage of a study that investigates all the standards, course requirements, and tests for civics and government in the 5o states plus DC. I do not want to scoop our findings, but my previous writing on this topic has already disclosed a major theme: We do still teach–and require–civics, but how we define and assess the subject is not satisfactory if we are trying to produce active and responsible participants in civil society.

game theory and the super PACs

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Imagine that you lead a conservative super-PAC like American Crossroads, Restore Our Future, the Koch network, or the US Chamber of Commerce, which collectively planned to spend a $1 billion on this fall’s election. Of course, you must accommodate a bunch of separate and strong-willed donors, but I think these are the goals you will balance:

  1. Support the person you most want to see win, which is probably Mitt Romney, because you most want to see Barack Obama lose.
  2. Make the greatest marginal difference in the election by supporting candidates who are in a position to benefit from your dollars.
  3. Support candidates who will maximize your members’ after-tax profits. Whom to choose is debatable–it could even be the Democrats, if you believe they have a better macroeconomic policy–but leaders of conservative super-PACs presumably believe the answer is fiscally conservative Republicans.
  4. Support candidates who are likely to win, because if they win without your money, you have no pull with them. There’s a debate about how much access and influence money buys, but you have something else to worry about besides influence. If Democrats win despite your spending $1 billion for Republicans, you will send a clear message that you are weak and the Democrats can build a coalition without you.

Now, consider that the odds of Barack Obama’s winning in November are 90% according to Sam Wang, 77.6% according to Nate Silver, and 71.7% according to Intrade. Consider also that both the House and Senate are in play, with numerous unpredictable races.

No wonder Karl Rove is spending his money on behalf of Senate Republicans. The Center for Responsive Politics reports that conservative super-PACS were spending $10 million/week on behalf of Mitt Romney until a few weeks ago, but they are down to just $2.07 million in the last week.  CRP also calculates that Restore Our Future has spent $84 million on congressional races, American crossroads has spent $34 million, and Americans for prosperity has spent $31 million.  Meanwhile, an industry like financial services (including real estate and insurance) demonstrates how to distribute your cash if you are mainly concerned about your own after-tax profits plus mollifying the winner. They’ve given $221 million to Republicans, of which only $29 million had gone to Romney. They have also given $116 million to Democrats, including an ingratiating $12 million to Obama.

Conversely, if you are a liberal Democrat, I think your favorite outcomes, in descending order of priority, are: 1) win Congress, 2) win the presidency with no help from corporate donors, and 3) win the presidency with some corporate support.

ideology in the Chicago teachers’ strike

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I understand–from personal contacts and from articles like this one by The Nation‘s Matthew Cunningham-Cook–that teachers who share a pretty strong ideological orientation took over the Chicago teachers’ union by democratic means. Offering a systematic critique of current trends in education, they wanted to confront a prominent representative of those trends, such as their own combative mayor, Rahm Emanuel. In other words, they were looking for a fight. They wanted (writes Cunningham-Cook) “a union founded on the principles of member-directed communal action, mutual solidarity and systemic analysis.” Their analysis yielded this nicely written, 55-page manifesto. Their “communal action” took the form of a strike.

I am for systematic analysis and a revived left, at least as a counterweight to other forces. Sometimes a public struggle over core principles is worth the costs. So the fact that the union is ideological does not bother me.

But we’re entitled to ask whether their systematic analysis is right. I would say: only in part. I am moved and persuaded by the teachers’ attack on the criminalization of youth and the whole punitive disciplinary system. I share their endorsement of a broader curriculum, although I wish they had mentioned civics and democratic education as well as arts and physical education. Most of their recommendations would cost money, and that is a reasonable thing for a union to demand. Chicago Public Schools say that they spent $13,078 per student in FY2010–not a small amount, but Rondout Elementary School, near Lake Forest IL, spends $24,244 per child for a much more privileged student body. Middle-class families who move out to Lake Forest think it’s worth spending $11,000 more per kid than Chicago spends, and the union ought to challenge that.

But what bothers me is the very broad and simplistic ideological framework. A whole range of reforms uncomfortable to teachers are lumped together as “neoliberalism,” and the union’s goal is to resist them all. The result is a basically conservative vision, predicated on protecting schools against rapid change, even though the authors are angry at those same schools for being segregated and oppressive. Not only is the analysis defensive, but it is unclear because it names too many disparate ideas with one label.

For instance, is Rahm Emanuel neoliberal because he wants a longer school day? Neoliberals wants less government; longer school days mean more government. Is he a neoliberal because he wants to use standardized tests for teacher assessment? Neoliberals want to take decisions away from centralized government bureaucracies. Classically, social democrats and left-liberals are the ones who want to measure and assess government performance in the name of equity. The Chicago teachers write, “Standardized testing as a tool to segregate educational opportunities is not new. Standardized testing grew
out of the American tradition of using ‘intelligence quotient’ (IQ) as a pretext for racist and exclusionary policies.” I do not disagree with the literal content of those sentences, but they don’t tell the whole story. Standardized testing is also a means to make sure that poor and minority kids are getting the education they need. Although the national civil rights groups now take complex positions regarding the federal testing requirements of NCLB, they were originally among the strongest proponents of those requirements. As recently as 2007, people like Wade Henderson, president and CEO of the Leadership Council on Civil Rights, and Peter Zamora, a regional counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, were involved in efforts like this:

As the Senate stalls debate on the future of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), the Campaign for High School Equity, a coalition of high-profile civil rights organizations, will present a case for protecting and strengthening the accountability contained in NCLB through a series of briefings and roundtables titled, “A Stronger NCLB in 2008: Critical for High Schools and Students of Color.” The first briefing in this series, “High School Accountability and Equity in NCLB,” will propose strategies for ensuring that high schools are held accountable for preparing students of color for success in college and work.

Finally, is Rahm Emanuel a man of the right because he is pushing a union to give up some benefits and protections? Or is he a man of the left because he is pushing a group of middle-class professionals to provide more services to low-income, minority youth?

I am basically on the teachers’ side, but that is because I share many of their substantive views of testing, funding, and the curriculum. I do not find it helpful to describe them as progressive and the mayor as neoliberal and to read the strike as a showdown between those two movements. The questions should be taken one at a time: How should we assess teachers? How long should the school day be? How much do we need to spend per student? And how is the available money being allocated?

Ideology has a place; it’s about big ideas and core principles. But ideological analysis must be valid and insightful. Better than a sloppy ideology is a pragmatic investigation of what works, for whom, at what cost.

the Times gives attention to non-student youth

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About 40% of young people don’t attend college at all. In a classic example of a vicious cycle, these young adults are largely ignored by campaigns, reporters, policymakers, and even academics. As a result, the non-college 40% tend not to vote–their turnout, even in the relatively good year of 2008, was only 36%–and that makes them even less influential. They are, for instance, unlikely to show up as “likely voters” in election-season polls, so no one cares about their preferences for candidates and issues.

Since CIRCLE was founded in 2001, we have focused consistently on non-college-attending young adults. We’ve been trying to break the vicious cycle. After all, there’s no law that says that because people are politically marginalized, you have to marginalize them further with your reporting and analysis.

Our latest ambitious report is entitled That’s NOT Democracy: How Out-of-School Youth Engage in Civic Life and What Stands in their Way. It was four years in the making, and we released it on August 23. Before that, we had shared an embargoed version with the New York Times‘ Susan Saulny. She was persuaded to conduct her own reporting, with contributions from Times reporters Robbie Brown, Dan Frosch and Steven Yaccino and photographers Jeff Swensen, Brian Blanco, and Darren Hauck. The result is a story by Saulny headed “Struggling Young Adults Pose Challenge for Campaigns,” which is currently the lead on the Times online version. It includes the following paragraphs about our work, but the most important contribution is the Times’ own reporting, which may help to make working class young adults more visible:

Experts say that the segment of young working-class people who are struggling may appear disengaged, but that they are also highly persuadable. “Extensive research shows that if you ask young people to volunteer or vote, they respond at high rates,” said Peter Levine, director of the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University.

In a report released in August, researchers from the center found that the most important factor in explaining low levels of civic participation may not be apathy but merely “an absence of opportunity and recruitment.” The report suggested that being “personally and explicitly asked” is perhaps the most important catalyst that motivates young people without college degrees to take political action.

Coverage begets coverage: because of this story, I was on CBS drive-time radio this morning as well.

taking the president seriously about citizenship

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My new Huffington Post piece is entitled Taking the President Seriously About Citizenship. In it, I cite our recent work on the economic benefits of civic engagement and connect that to the President’s speech about citizenship in Charlotte. An excerpt:

Mr. Obama’s talk of citizenship usually draws applause and cheers, as it did when he accepted the Democratic nomination in Charlotte. But pundits and policymakers never pay attention to it. They regard talk of citizenship as a politician’s cliché — like saying you are delighted to be in New Hampshire in January. The only question reporters asked about the Charlotte speech was whether it had fallen flat or done the job. Nobody wrote about the substance of the citizenship idea.

I see two reasons for their lack of interest: pundits doubt that active citizenship has important consequences, and they don’t see its relevance to policy.

Scholars who empirically study the consequences of civic engagement can demonstrate that it has important consequence …

After summarizing some of those consequences, I argue that we need a concrete policy agenda for citizenship.

(I am obsessive about blogging here every day, and this was supposed to be yesterday’s post; but the Huffington Post can take more than 24 hours to approve submissions–hence the delay.