CIVICS EDUCATION & DEMOCRACY NEED A BOOSTER SHOT

from AC&E - March-April 2020

by American Consortium for Equity in Education

EQUITY IN CANADIAN EDUCATION

CIVICS EDUCATION, AND OUR AILING DEMOCRACY, NEED A BOOSTER SHOT

By Robert Kim

These days, a health crisis is at the forefront of many people’s minds. The coronavirus outbreak has made international news and generated widespread concern. Quarantines are up, and the quest for a vaccine is on.

Yet, scary as the COVID-19 virus is, I’m more preoccupied with a different kind of ailment: the health of our democracy.

CAN YOU SPOT THE SYMPTOMS?

It’s 2020. Our nation and its denizens face major problems at home and abroad. With impeachment in our rear-view mirror, we’re now barreling toward what promises to be yet another divisive presidential election. Our confidence in the ability of the federal government (to say nothing of our state and local leaders) to function properly is incredibly low. According to the Pew Research Center, only 17 percent of Americans today say they can trust the government in Washington to do what is right.

Moreover, our ability to hold government accountable appears to be crumbling. As citizens, we lack basic knowledge of our democratic institutions; a 2019 survey by the Annenberg Public Policy Center reveals that only two in five American adults can correctly name the three branches of government.

Equally troubling as our lack of basic civic knowledge is our lack of appetite for civic engagement. It’s true that some of us are active; on any given day, our town meetings, state capitols, and the halls of Congress teem with constituents. But, if you pan out, there’s increasingly a sense that nothing we do or say will spur our fellow citizens, much less our elected officials, to think or act differently.

I suspect that the problem is not apathy; that is, we aren’t somehow inherently less engaged than before. Rather, we live in an online era in which people can access information and engage with each other in a way that feels public, but is essentially still private, in nature. Activism today consists of millions of closed-loop conversations. We’re connected to some, yet disconnected from our larger society and systems of government. Paradoxically, the Internet’s democratizing of information may have damaged democracy itself (at least in the short term). We need to figure out—and fast—how to cultivate public civic engagement for the 21st century.

A renewed focus on civics education in K-12 schools would help. Just as with any subject in the curriculum, students need to learn how

to participate in their democracy in today’s times. In short, the teaching of civics — and our democracy — need a booster shot.

There’s hope that this may yet happen; according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, in the 2018 legislative session alone, at least 31 states proposed bills or resolutions related to civics education, and 22 states enacted them.

I’ve been asking myself: how can I contribute to civics education? Some personal history here. I’m a civil rights lawyer and policy wonk by training, not a K-12 teacher or curriculum specialist. I worked for the federal government, in the education department, until the end of 2016. (You can probably guess why I left.) In fact, I didn’t learn civics in grade school or college; it wasn’t until law school that I properly understood how government even works in the U.S. And so my approach to civics education is shaped by the surfeits and deficits of my own background.

That said, here are my personal operating instructions: first, show how legal education is fundamental to civics education, and second, help K-12 educators incorporate law into civics education.

Achieving step one above is easy for social studies or government teachers, who keenly understand how are society is built on laws. Zeroing in on public education alone, we can see how everything from school governance and funding to testing and accountability to equal opportunity and civil rights protections comes from a matrix of legal decisions — including statutes and regulations, executive orders, and court decisions.

Step two above is a bit trickier. After all, the law, with its jargon and traditions, isn’t the most accessible body of knowledge—even for law students or lawyers. Nor is legal education a staple of most teacher certification or masters programs.

For now, I’ve decided to focus on one aspect of law that lends itself well to K-12 education: court cases—specifically, opinions from the Supreme Court of the United States (or SCOTUS) that deal with civil rights and civil liberties issues impacting students in public schools. I’ve compiled an explanation of key cases in a compact book, Elevating Equity and Justice: 10 U.S. Supreme Court Cases Every Teacher Should Know (Heinemann 2020), and included tips on how to teach them to K-12 students. These cases address sexual harassment (Davis v. Monroe County), immigrant students (Plyler v. Doe), racial integration (Parents Involved v. Seattle), students with disabilities (Endrew F. v. Douglas County), school funding (San Antonio v. Rodriguez), English learners (Lau v. Nichols), free speech (Tinker v. Des Moines), separation of church and state (Lee v. Weisman), privacy (Safford v. Redding), and student discipline (Goss v. Lopez).

Why these cases in particular? For one thing, they are a terrific way to teach concepts of equity and social justice. These are among the cases have shaped virtually all of the rights and liberties conferred upon the American K-12 student. What better way for students—and teachers—to examine the principles of (for example) free speech, equal protection, or privacy than to explore the application of those principles to real-life disputes involving youth like themselves?

As pedagogical tools, SCOTUS cases have the benefit of being historical artifacts in their own right. Although we may vehemently disagree with the reasoning or outcome of some of them (I certainly do), they can be important guiding documents, arguably parallel to (if less vaunted than) other core government canons like the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights. And they often include

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discussion of constitutional principles, instantly lifting their words off a dusty page and into the real world.

Plus, history begets history: even relatively recent Supreme Court cases can be excellent springboards for discussion of important prior historical developments. One can hardly study the SCOTUS’ 2007 Parents Involved case, for example, without puzzling over its relationship to Brown v. Board of Education—and the long, tortured history of school racial desegregation between 1954 and 2007. Nor can one appreciate the SCOTUS’ blockbuster 1969 free speech ruling in the Tinker case without reflecting on a period of remarkable upheaval and civic engagement in the U.S. during the Civil Rights and Vietnam War eras.

What’s more, certain court cases tie in easily to present-day issues. Take Plyler v. Doe, the 1982 case in which the SCOTUS held that undocumented students have a right to attend public schools on an equal basis as children who are U.S. citizens. How does Plyler relate to the 2020 SCOTUS case involving undocumented students, Department of Homeland Security v. University of California? (That decision is expected in June.) And how does the SCOTUS’ 1999 decision in the Davis case provide a roadmap for how victims of sexual assault should be treated in today’s #MeToo era?

Importantly, teachers of every grade level can use court cases in the classroom. Recently, I watched Liz Kleinrock, an elementary teacher and instructional coach in Los Angeles, expertly introduce the story and concepts in the Tinker case to eight-year-olds. Even the youngest students can relate what happened to the child plaintiffs in school civil rights court cases, while older students can critically examine the legal standards and terminology used to decide the fate of students similar in age or background to themselves.

Certainly, bridging courts and the classroom is only a small piece of the puzzle. Civics education involves a much broader inquiry into how our society functions. And innovation in civics teaching is necessary in order to help students to harness their energies and current modes of communicating into civic action. But we could do far worse than to help students to explore the scope and limitations of their rights through court cases. Through examination of legal texts, we can help students answer these critical questions: When and how can they speak out, and on what topics? What can the government do to control their behavior or pry into their lives? What freedoms do they have from government intrusion? Is it okay to disagree with the government (including judges and court opinions)? How can they engage the political and legal systems to change laws or policies with which they disagree? What does the law have to say about treating others fairly and respectfully regardless of their background or beliefs?

Encouraging these inquiries in the classroom is within our power. By doing so, we are providing students with the skills they need to enter the public sphere, and to demand—and even lead—the change they want to see. Our democracy depends on this kind of teaching—which, if you think about it, is one of the most important actions of civic engagement a person can take in these troubled times.

Robert Kim is a leading expert in education law and policy in the United States. He is the author of Elevating Equity and Justice: 10 U.S. Supreme Court Cases Every Teacher Should Know (Heinemann) and co-author of Education and the Law, 5th ed. and Legal Issues in Education: Rights and Responsibilities in U.S. Public Schools Today (West Academic). From 2011 through 2016, he served as a deputy assistant secretary in the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights. He was also a civil rights attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union and a policy analyst at the National Education Association.

ADDRESSING EXCELLENCE GAPS: UNIVERSAL SCREENING By Jonathan A. Plucker

Jonathan A. Plucker is the Julian C. Stanley Professor of Talent Development at the Center for Talented Youth at Johns Hopkins University, where he is also a Professor of Education. He currently serves as President of the National Association for Gifted Children board of directors. His opinions do not necessarily reflect those of Johns Hopkins, CTY, or NAGC.

In my previous column, I presented an intervention model to close excellence gaps, achievement gaps between groups of students at high levels of performance. For example, far fewer low-income students perform at high levels of achievement compared to higher-income students. On the 2019 NAEP math test for Grade 4 students, 3% of students receiving lunch assistance scored advanced, compared to 14% not receiving lunch aid.

The intervention model contained seven interventions: Providing better access to opportunities for advanced learning, identifying talented students using universal screening with local norms, including some form of ability grouping, improving K-12 accountability systems, doing a better job with educator preparation and support, and providing psychosocial interventions (but probably only in college). Those six interventions depend on the foundation provided by a seventh intervention, frontloading - preparing students for advanced opportunities by raising the rigor and challenge level of early childhood and elementary experiences.

This column focuses on universal screening, which has recently been identified by researchers as a promising practice to identify a more diverse group of talented students than more traditional approaches. For example, the National Research Center on Gifted Education has found that universal screening alone would substantially increase the odds of a low-income student being identified as gifted.

This makes sense if you consider traditional approaches to talent identification. In most cases, schools accept parent or teacher nominations of students to be screened for academic talent. Athletic, musical, and artistic talent identification work similarly, but with more self-nominations. For example, the soccer coach at your local high school doesn’t have every single student try-out for soccer, nor does the chorus director have every student audition; in both cases, they would almost certainly identify highly talented students who otherwise

would have flown under the radar, but we’re OK with that because those areas of talent are considered to be special additions to the regular curriculum.

But finding academic talent can no longer be a nomination-first situation. Parent and teacher nominations favor children with parents who have time to understand the system and students who had high-quality pre-school experiences. Neither are universally available to all students, which is one reason why researchers suspect nomination-first approaches lead to few low-income, Black, or Hispanic students being identified for gifted education programs, therefore leading to excellence gaps.

Universal screening is very straightforward: Rather than wait for nominations, you look at data for every single student. It’s not more complicated than that. As districts around the country have implemented universal screening, we are seeing a wide range of approaches. And researchers certainly recommend several different ways to go about it. These strategies vary widely in complexity and cost, but the end goal is the same: Every single student is screened in some way for academic talent.

Some districts use existing data they have on each student, others administer one or more tests such as the Naglieri Nonverbal Ability Test or Cognitive Abilities Test. Many appear to administer an additional test then use individually-administered intelligence tests, teacher and parent rating scales, etc., to students identified by the universal screener. But again, I’ve worked with one program that just uses the prior year’s state achievement test data, which allowed them to identify a number of low-income students who otherwise would have been overlooked. How you do it probably doesn’t matter, as long as you ensure every student is being fairly considered.

Universal screening doesn’t close excellence gaps by itself, but it helps identify disadvantaged students who otherwise wouldn’t even be considered though traditional nomination processes. In next issue’s column, I will describe how pairing universal screening with local norms can be the best path forward for identifying academically talented students.