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.