The report says, to improve civic education, schools should implement six proven practices.

A 56 page report published in September, “Guardian Of Democracy,” decries the deplorable state of civic education in America and gives recommendations as to what schools should be doing to better prepare and empower students to be effective citizens.

The report published in partnership with the Leonore Annenberg Institute, is an expansion of a 2003 study on the “Civic Mission of Schools” published by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

The report shows that 2/3 of high school graduates are sorely lacking in their knowledge of civics. It says that most American schools, “either neglect civic learning or teach it in a minimal or superficial way.” The report shows that the poor state of civic education is a threat to our nation’s future. It says, “While citizenship is formally acquired through either birth or naturalization, all of us must learn to become Americans. …Knowledge of our history, ideals, and system are not innate, but acquired through education.”

The report states, “Self-government requires far more than voting in elections every four years. It requires citizens who are informed and thoughtful, participate in their communities, are involved in the political process, and possess moral and civic virtues. Generations of leaders, from America’s founders to the inventors of public education to elected leaders in the twentieth century, have understood that these qualities are not automatically transmitted to the next generation—they must be passed down through schools. Ultimately, schools are the guardians of democracy.”

One reason civic education is failing, according the the report’s research, is “The competitiveness movement in education shifted national focus to math and science, often at the expense of other disciplines, including civics. Concerns about introducing controversial issues into the classroom, the very issues most important for students to discuss, has led some teachers and districts to shy away from current events. And the omission of civics from many assessment regimes provided yet another excuse for ignoring civic learning altogether. The absence of civic content from assessments signals its status as a second-class subject, a conclusion held by too many superintendents, principals, teachers, and students nationwide.”

The report urges that schools implement six “proven practices” :

1. Classroom Instruction: Effective civic learning begins with classroom instruction in civics, government, history, law, economics, and geography. High-quality instruction in each of these subjects (usually grouped together under the umbrella of “social studies”) provides students with both civic knowledge and the skills needed for democratic participation.
2. Discussion of Current Events and Controversial Issues: Political controversy is ever-present in democratic nations, and that is as it should be, since controversy is an intrinsic part of the political process and is necessary for the very survival of democracy. But civic learning often fails to reflect or include such controversy. As a result, young people may not learn how to engage productively with the issues and events that animate our political system today and will continue to do so in the future. To ensure that school-based civic learning is authentic, we need to dramatically increase the attention given to discussing controversial political issues—meaningful and timely questions about how to address public problems. Students should learn that such issues are fundamental to the nature of a democratic society, that they can be discussed in civil and productive ways, that there are strategies for engaging in such discussion, and that these issues deserve both their own and the public’s attention.
3. Service-Learning: Service-learning is an instructional methodology that makes intentional links between the academic curriculum and student work that benefits the community by providing meaningful opportunities for students to apply what they learn to issues that matter to them. Service-learning is far more than community service alone; high-quality service- learning experiences incorporate intentional opportunities for students to analyze and solve community problems through the application of knowledge and skills.
4. Extracurricular Activities: Extracurricular activities provide forums in which students can use skills and knowledge in purposeful experiences that have both meaning and context. … According to some studies, school-group membership is an even better predictor of adult engagement than more commonly recognized factors such as education and income. A wide range of extracurricular activities have civic benefits. Not surprisingly, explicitly civic activities such as mock trial, model congress, speech and debate, and model U.N. all have positive impacts on students’ civic knowledge and engagement.
5. Student Participation in School Governance: One of the ways in which schools can prepare students for a lifetime of democratic participation is to train them in self-government within the school context. Students often have good ideas about how to improve their schools and communities as places for civic life and learning, and formal structures for considering students’ views are a valuable way of modeling democratic practices and teaching students civic skills.
6. Simulations of Democratic Processes: In addition to the obvious benefit of increased civic knowledge (about judicial and legislative processes, respectively, as well as more particular content), students learn skills with clear applicability to both civic and noncivic contexts, such as public speaking, teamwork, close reading, analytical thinking, and the ability to argue both sides of a topic. All of these are skills that prepare students both for active citizenship and for future academic and career success.

The House Education Committee in Ohio’s Assembly, recently recommended legislation, HB136, that provides for a radical expansion of Ohio’s EdChoice program. Currently, 60,000 Ohio students, from failing schools, may receive “vouchers” for tuition to attend private schools. Almost all of the eligible private schools are religious schools. HB136, if passed into law, will make over one million Ohio students eligible for vouchers, from all of Ohio school systems. Tax generated state funding now received by local public school systems will, instead, fund these vouchers for use in private schools.

Vouchers have long been a pet project of political thinkers who view themselves as “Libertarians,” but, in fact, there is a division in Libertarian thinking about the issue of vouchers, and some Libertarians are strongly opposed.  Libertarian thinker, Laurence M. Vance, for example, predicts, “Vouchers will make the present system worse. Rather than increasing educational opportunity, vouchers will increase the government’s grip on education, increase the costs of education, increase people’s dependency on the state, and increase the overall power of the state.”

The grandfather of voucher advocacy is Nobel prize winner, Milton Friedman. In this video clip, made in 2006, shortly before his death at age 94, Friedman condemns the deplorable state of public education as a “disgrace” that undermines a “decent free society,” and says the route to reforming the present system is to use the power of the free market:

It is not a public purpose is to build brick schools and have students there. The public purpose is to provide education. You are a producer,  producing a product. And if you want to subsidize the production of that product, there are two ways you can do it. You can subsidize the producer, or you can subsidize the consumer. In education we subsidize the producer, we subsidize the school. If you subsidize the student, instead, you would have competition.  The student would choose, which school he would go to. And that would force schools to improve.

Some Libertarian thinkers, however, like Vance, cited above, believe that, on this issue, the highly revered Friedman is flat wrong:

• Marshall Fritz in Can you say “en·ti’·tle·ment?” states, “Twelve percent of America’s schoolchildren are not on the school dole. Their parents are financially responsible for their children’s schooling, some at great personal sacrifice. The voucher approach will seduce many of them onto the school dole. … State-granted vouchers would make welfare recipients out of many of those 12% who have managed so far to resist the temptation to have others pay for their children’s education.”
• Marshall Fritz in What About Vouchers? states, “Vouchers are still state financing of schools, which comes with endless meddling, regulations, strings attached rules about what can be taught, said, displayed, who can be hired, testing requirements, not to mention continued dependence on government for our preparation for life. It wouldn’t be long before a private school system turned into another top-heavy, enslaved, mediocre government system. It’s the nature of the beast. “
• Jacob G. Hornberger, in Libertarian Paternalism, states, “Vouchers are the antithesis of libertarianism, whose genuine principles dictate a complete separation of school and state, just as libertarianism calls, for example, for a complete separation of church and state. After all, can you imagine libertarians calling for a mixed system of state churches, private churches, charter churches, and church vouchers and suggesting to people that that is what libertarianism is all about?”
• Ari Armstrong, in A Libertarian Case Against Vouchers, states, “But won’t private schools be better off with vouchers? No, they will merely become more regulated by the government. Entities that accept tax dollars are subject to government regulations — or they soon will be. Conservatives who doubt this need only imagine the public outcry when a school associated with Satanism, radical Islam, or David Koresh-style Christianity applies for tax dollars. Taxpayers will also demand that subsidized schools meet certain politically-determined academic standards. Tax subsidies very quickly turn into puppet strings.”

The constitutionality of Ohio’s present voucher system, originally limited to poverty schools in Cleveland, was established in a landmark Supreme Court 5-4 ruling in 2002, Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, that held that the plan did not violate the Constitutions’ establishment of religion clause.

Justice Stevens in his dissent stated: “Whenever we remove a brick from the wall that was designed to separate religion and government, we increase the risk of religious strife and weaken the foundation of our democracy.”

Justice Souter in his dissent, developed the Libertarian argument that vouchers will mean government control and a degradation of freedom in private schools.  He wrote, “When government aid goes up, so does reliance on it; the only thing likely to go down is independence.” He wrote:

In Ohio, for example, a condition of receiving government money under the program is that participating religious schools may not “discriminate on the basis of … religion,” Ohio Rev. Code Ann. §3313.976(A)(4) (West Supp. 2002), which means the school may not give admission preferences to children who are members of the patron faith; children of a parish are generally consigned to the same admission lotteries as non-believers, §§3313.977(A)(1)(c)—(d). This indeed was the exact object of a 1999 amendment repealing the portion of a predecessor statute that had allowed an admission preference for “[c]hildren … whose parents are affiliated with any organization that provides financial support to the school, at the discretion of the school.” §313.977(A)(1)(d) (West 1999). Nor is the State’s religious antidiscrimination restriction limited to student admission policies: by its terms, a participating religious school may well be forbidden to choose a member of its own clergy to serve as teacher or principal over a layperson of a different religion claiming equal qualification for the job.23  Cf. National Catholic Educational Association, Balance Sheet for Catholic Elementary Schools: 2001 Income and Expenses 25 (2001) (“31% of [reporting Catholic elementary and middle] schools had at least one full-time teacher who was a religious sister”). Indeed, a separate condition that “[t]he school … not … teach hatred of any person or group on the basis of … religion,” §3313.976(A)(6) (West Supp. 2002), could be understood (or subsequently broadened) to prohibit religions from teaching traditionally legitimate articles of faith as to the error, sinfulness, or ignorance of others,24  if they want government money for their schools.

 

Recent posts:

• Ohio’s Proposed Voucher Law HB136 — Should Tax Money Be Used To Fund Religious Education?, September 29th, 2011
• Kettering Treasurer Says Local Cost Of Voucher Plan, HB136, Is $2.5+ Million Yearly — 2+ Mills Of New Taxes, September 30th, 2011

Kettering School Treasurer, Steve Clark, estimates that, if Ohio House Bill 136 is approved, Kettering Schools will lose at least $2.5 million in state funding and, in order to recoup this lost revenue, the school district eventually will need an increase in local property tax of at least 2 mills.

HB136, also known as the Parental Choice and Taxpayer Savings Scholarship program (PACT), allows all of the state tax money allocated to a public school district to be spent on “vouchers,” to finance tuition to private schools. See my post: “Ohio’s Proposed Voucher Law HB136 — Should Tax Money Be Used To Fund Religious Education?”

HB136 has been approved by the House Education Committee and now will be debated by the entire House. Jim Butler, Kettering’s representative to the Ohio House, serves on the Education Committee and voted “Yes” to approve the legislation.

In a memo to the Kettering Board of Education, Mr. Clark explains that for every Kettering student who receives a voucher, $5,783 in state funding will be subtracted from funds that Kettering Schools would otherwise receive from the state. Parents would receive a fraction of this amount — depending on their family income. He explains, “Parents of voucher students would receive 40% to 80% of the $5,783 withheld from KCSD. The state would pocket the rest!”

Clark estimates that 443 of the 652 Kettering resident-students currently attending nonpublic schools in the district would be eligible for a PACT scholarship and warns that, because he has no data of how many KCSD resident-students attend nonpublic schools outside of the district, the financial lost could be higher. All of the resident-students would be eligible to apply for PACT scholarships, and each scholarship would subtract funds from Kettering Schools.

In addition, because of the prospect of receiving free tax money, a whole new set of students may decide to leave Kettering Schools and enroll in a private school. If all of the state money allocated to Kettering Schools would be diverted to PACT scholarships, Kettering Public Schools could lose 20% of its student population.

Mr. Clark concludes his memo: “It might be a good idea to contact your state representatives and let them know how you feel about this proposed law, before the full Ohio House of Representatives votes on it.”