SEEKING BETTER EDUCATION IN CIVICS MAY BE LOST CAUSE

Date: Saturday, February 25, 2006

At a dinner I attended Thursday, someone had posted a quotation from Margaret Mead, who once said, "A small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."

The second claim is simply silly; the Black Death changed the world quite remarkably, to mention only one example that owes nothing at all to people, whether thoughtful or not. But faith in the first possibility is widespread, which perhaps explains why there are so many small groups earnestly trying to do just that.

And some of them have pretty good ideas, like the people from the Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools who visited the News earlier this week. They were former Colorado congressman David Skaggs, the national director of the campaign, who was in Denver to speak at an event sponsored by the Colorado chapter, and Jill Conrad, director of the Colorado group (online at www.co-civicmissionofschools.org).

Their thesis, to summarize it briefly, is that a primary mission of the public schools is to educate young people to be responsible citizens of a democracy, that the schools are failing at that mission and that the situation is worse than it ever was.

I can't exactly argue with that, although schools are failing at a lot of missions and I'm not sure this is the most critical of them. How much "educating for democracy" can you realistically do for kids who are going to drop out because they can't read or do simple arithmetic? And the idea that matters are going from bad to worse is as old as civilization.

The national campaign identifies six principles that taken together make up "civic learning." They are instruction in government, history, law or democracy; guided discussions of issues and current events; service learning and community service; extracurricular opportunities; student participation in governance; and simulations of democratic processes.

Doesn't exactly stir the blood, does it? And even if you could find ways to shoehorn all that stuff into the school day, or motivate students to take on the extracurricular activities, is the teaching staff in elementary or middle schools prepared to teach constitutional principles? Probably not, if they've barely studied these subjects themselves and what limited exposure they have had consists mostly of postmodernist theorizing taught with a highly political agenda.

That's hardly a theoretical worry, since the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education is pressuring schools of education to vet their students' political "dispositions" before allowing them to earn teacher certification.

In Colorado, and I assume elsewhere though I didn't specifically ask, the campaign has recruited a lot of prominent people for their steering committee. Conrad herself is also a member of the Denver school board, and though she's not acting in any official capacity in her work with the campaign, she obviously has some influence. Or, as the brochure for the Colorado campaign puts it, "within months of its founding, [it] had grown to include more than 150 individuals and organizations with the power to get things done."

Look, it's a worthwhile cause and if you are inspired to go join up, please do. And I don't want to be mean to people who were nice enough to come talk so enthusiastically about the important work they were doing.

I just don't know that there's enough power available to get much of anything done.

Skaggs said that one sign of progress is that the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which will test history and civics this year, will move to a four-year schedule; otherwise, the next assessment wouldn't have been done until 2014. So we're going to find out every four years instead of every eight years that American students know as little about history and civics as they do about reading, mathematics and science. What good is that if we have no idea how to change it?

Conrad said that many schools and districts concentrate their civics courses in high school, often in a single-semester course taught in the 11th or 12th grade. But with dropout rates as high as they are, some students never get any serious exposure to the principles of civic responsibility.

Actually, in a report she prepared on the "Civic Learning Opportunity Gap" in Colorado schools, Conrad writes that some districts responded to a 2003 state law requiring a one-semester civics course for high school graduation by moving instruction in Colorado history from elementary schools to high schools, "further concentrating civic learning in the high school grades."

Does that mean more students could miss out entirely? Why yes, but it wouldn't be the first time a well-intentioned law had unintended consequences.

Sorry for the gloom and doom today, but I don't expect a whole lot to come of this effort. Still, they are thoughtful people and, as Mead observed, they could change the world. I surely don't fault them for trying.