As I’ve noted before,<\/p>\n
people in the civic education world are now seriously discussing a national<\/p>\n
campaign to revive "civic ed" in schools<\/b>. But there are interesting<\/p>\n
debates about strategy. It seems to me that people variously believe:<\/p>\n
1)<\/p>\n
All the action is at the state level, where standards, assessment methods, and<\/p>\n
textbooks are chosen. So we have to intervene there, and right away. Any federal<\/p>\n
legislation that actually passes will be small potatoes.
2) A new campaign<\/p>\n
should focus at the federal level, since others are advocating in the states.<\/p>\n
Federal legislation is significant because it can generate national interest and<\/p>\n
leverage resources, and it needs to be good.
3) We need a public relations<\/p>\n
campaign to get people concerned about civic education and to raise the public<\/p>\n
salience of the issue.
4) Public relations is irrelevant, because policymakers<\/p>\n
are going to make decisions about standards and assessment too soon to be influenced<\/p>\n
by popular opinion. Besides, it would be far too expensive to raise public concern<\/p>\n
sufficiently.
5) We need to develop grassroots-level campaigns in favor of<\/p>\n
civic education, involving various local stakeholders and young people themselves.<\/p>\n
6) We should tailor messages for select decision-makers, especially officials<\/p>\n
in state departments of education, stressing ways that they can improve civics<\/p>\n
without huge financial costs and without risking lower test scores in reading,<\/p>\n
writing, and math.<\/p>\n
I have views on these matters (leaning toward 1 and 4,<\/p>\n
and 5 and\/or 6), but I’m by no means sure that I’m right.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As I’ve noted before, people in the civic education world are now seriously discussing a national campaign to revive "civic ed" in schools. But there are interesting debates about strategy. It seems to me that people variously believe: 1) All the action is at the state level, where standards, assessment methods, and textbooks are chosen. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4234","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-advocating-civic-education"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4234","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4234"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4234\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4234"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4234"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4234"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}