Cincinnati

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I am stuck after nearly a week’s travel because the hurricane has canceled my flights homeward. But Cincinnati is a handsome and impressive place in which to be stranded. I am staying in the Netherland Plaza, an Art Deco extravaganza. It was built immediately after the stock market crash of ’29 with money that had been withdrawn from the market in the nick of time and could purchase vast quantities of cheap, skilled labor and exotic materials. The building was meant to be futuristic, with a garage that automatically parked your car and strange light fixtures that  glowed with decorative, transparent slides. (“Approach, earthlings. I am the one-eyed king of our planet.”)

picture by Virginia Berkel

Near the hotel is the mighty Ohio River, which made Cincinnati into America’s first important inland city in the 1800s, before railroads competed with rivers and westward expansion gave rise to new population centers well beyond the Ohio Valley. Cincinnati’s early development gave it an unusual base of important old buildings and institutions. For example, I enjoyed exploring the Mount Auburn neighborhood, a yuppie district perched castle-like on a high hill and almost surrounded by moat-like interstate highways. Quiet on a Sunday afternoon, Mount Auburn reminded me of side-streets in San Francisco.

deep in the thickets of test design

(Cincinnati, OH) I have arrived here for meetings about standards in social studies. We have been sitting around a hollow-square table; a separate round stand holds the projector. There are damp steel water pitchers on the tables, which are covered with white linen skirts almost down to the heavily patterned carpet. In all these respects, the meeting precisely replicates the one that I left several hours ago in DC.

I was in Washington to help design the NAEP Assessment in Civics. I had also served on the design committee for the last NAEP Assessment, which was administered in 2010. Once again I am struck by the immense complexity of this effort, by the high degree of care, sophistication, and dedication of the scores of people involved–and by our tendency, in modern America, to dodge profound political or philosophical questions by trying to make our decisions look statistical or procedural rather than substantive. An elaborate system of review enlists experts, stakeholders, political appointees, civil servants, students who take pilot, and federal contractors. Most of this review is technical. But the great issues are: What should good citizens think and know? and (beneath that first one) What is true and important about our world?

I can’t really improve on my description of the NAEP process from March 2010, except to say that then, the windowless room with the hollow-square table was in Phoenix.

if we are going to put millions in prison, WE should make millions of decisions

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(Washington, DC) Our jails and prisons hold 1.6 million people: the highest incarceration rate in the world. One percent of us are incarcerated at any given time, not counting almost 14 million ex-fellons. These rates are much higher for young adults and especially for young men of color. There are 1.5 million children with at least one parent in prison. When you consider that prison rape and the use of solitary confinement (which causes severe mental illness) are common, it is clear that we are sentencing many of our fellow citizens to conditions similar to torture. Not to mention that it costs us about $23,000/year to incarcerate a person in the United States.

We are doing this–choosing to do it by passing referenda and by preferring politicians who support minimum sentencing laws. According to brilliant forthcoming work by Albert Dzur, we are motivated in part by distrust for lawyers and judges, whom we see as elite and effete. Certainly, hatred for whole classes of people whom we call criminals plays a role–an emotion that is at least tinged with racism and class prejudice.

We make these decisions abstractly about nameless people and generic laws. Although 1.6 million people are incarcerated, the American people people have made many fewer than 1.6 million decisions, because most prison terms result from plea-bargaining. Distrusting lenient professionals, we impose punitive laws on top of a system that continues to function by negotiation among professionals. In turn, the lawyers and judges who negotiate plea bargains become inured to individual circumstances as they deal with one case after another.

If we are going to put our fellow citizens in prison, we should do it. They should be tried by juries of their peers who are required to listen to their stories. New to the courtroom, but guided by experienced professionals, the juror is an ideal listener.

I would endorse this proposal even if it didn’t change the incarceration rate. We simply have the responsibility to make decisions of such importance. But Dzur and others suggest that when we act as jurors, our beliefs and attitudes change. We trust the system more and make more nuanced (and often more merciful) decisions about particular cases. Thus I would expect rates of incarceration to fall if we had to put our fellow citizens in prison one at a time instead of en masse by the million.

religious service attendance

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I am in DC for NAEP meetings. My post of the day is over at the CIRCLE site, where I track the rates of religious attendance for young adults and older adults. Regular attendance has declined, especially for youth, but remains fairly common. The proportion who believe in God has also declined, yet just 4.1% of young adults are what I would call atheists. More information is on the CIRCLE site, and the key graph is below.

American students know quite a bit of civics, but do they know the right stuff?

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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.