Conducted By Christopher Chen 

Ted McConnell is the Director of the Campaign to Promote Civic Education. The program is based with wthe Center for Civic Education, a nonprofit, nonpartisan educational corporation dedicated to promoting an enlightened and responsible citizenry. 

The platform of the Campaign to Promote Civic Education states, “Civics and government is a subject on a level with other subjects.” Should it be tested like subjects that have been perceived as more critical, such as mathematics and reading? As the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) has come under much fire for its emphasis on testing, why should there be civics testing?

Civics absolutely should be tested. We live in an era of standards and accountability-based education. If it isn’t tested, it isn’t taught. We’re really talking about two separate issues here. There is the federal level testing requirement through the NCLB provisions of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, and then there’s state level
testing. While we have advocated for the inclusion of key disciplines within the social studies—civics, history, economics, and geography—in the reauthorization of NCLB, our focus is to make sure that every single state-level accountability system includes civic learning. I use the term “civic learning” to include service learning, character education, and new methodologies to help develop civic character.
Another point on this: We also advocate assessing civic learning beyond paper-and-pencil tests. A very important outcome of civic learning is dispositional growth—that is, whether the students have internalized the importance of civic engagement and make a commitment to it. In fact, high-quality civics education generally has that outcome. But you can’t test that with paper-and-pencil tests. Students can memorize the historical knowledge through multiple-choice, true/false paper-and-pencil tests, but dispositional growth is best tested through things like classroom-based assessments and portfolio assessments, wherein a student researches a public policy issue, takes a stance on it, and defends his or her stance. I’m pleased to tell you that more and more states are taking a look at making this part of their assessments. The state of Washington will begin classroom-based assessments of civic learning with the 2008-09 school year. It’s a huge breakthrough.

Considering the serious problems affecting the American education system in general—namely, the inequalities among different schools in different areas and a national high school dropout rate that has been estimated to be as high as 30 percent—why should there be more of a focus on civics? Doesn’t the government need to devote more funding toward simply helping students graduate?

It’s not an either/or question. Closing the achievement gap is a vitally important task for our country. Certainly, there is a great deal of promise toward that end in NCLB, and we believe that Congress needs to fully fund the provisions of NCLB that would do so. However, we’re very, very concerned about the achievement gap in civic education. This is the central mission of public education. So again, it’s not an either/or; we can close the achievement gap and be true to the duality of mission in preparing students for both citizenship and the workplace.

Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings recently stated, “For the past five years, No Child Left Behind has help[ed] students become stronger readers…. The Nation’s Report Card on U.S. History and Civics proves NCLB is working and preparing our children to succeed. While critics may argue that NCLB leads educators to narrow their curriculum focus, the fact is, when students know how to read and comprehend, they apply these skills to other subjects like history and civics.” Do you think NCLB has really had a direct influence on civics education?

I can see the Secretary’s point, that NCLB has had a certain measurable positive effect on reading. At the same time, there has been much criticism of primary, or elementary, reading material. We would like to see students and policymakers utilize civic learning in an interdisciplinary, integrated manner to help boost student reading comprehension. Getting back to the Secretary’s point, there is a body of data that suggests that she’s missing the point here. In fact, NCLB has narrowed the curriculum, with its testing requirements overlaid on top of state testing requirements in the subjects of science, technology, electronics, mathematics, and reading. The Center for Education Policy here in Washington has, for the last four years, done studies on the narrowing of the curriculum. Schools that are having trouble meeting Annual Yearly Progress under the NCLB Act are decreasing time and attention to the social studies. On average, this decrease works out to a little over fifty percent.

Could you elaborate on how schools can institute more civics education, especially by integrating it with other subjects?

Civic learning—again, accepting the premise that it is one of the dual missions—can be used to great effect across the curricular lines. Others in the field have been very, very critical of the nearly vapid primary reading material that exists now. Rather than having students reading something like, “See Dick and Jane run after Spot,” how about having them read age-appropriate stories about the Founders of this country? Age-appropriate stories on the elemental concepts of representative democracy such as authority, privacy, responsibility? So at the same time we increase their reading skills, we increase their civic virtue.
This can be used in any other curricular area as well. In the visual arts area, schools have implemented service-learning projects in which students go into the community and paint over graffiti-strewn walls, for example. The students come back into the classroom and learn about the negative effects of graffiti, as well as the validity of graffiti as an art form. This is service learning at its finest. They are giving back to the community and they are learning the public policy aspects of this issue, as well as increasing their learning in the whole subject area—in this case, the visual arts.

Several studies have shown that students are often less willing to participate in political life after taking a government course than before. If students aren’t interested in civics, how can teachers motivate them to develop a passion and learn more?

Civic learning is much more than a course on how a bill becomes a law or on the three branches of government. At the same time as we’ve seen a decrease in civic learning opportunity in schools there have been new teaching strategies and methodologies developed that are proven to engage the student—for example, simulations and modeling like the Center for Civic Education’s We the People: The Citizen and the Constitution program or the Model UN programs.
Other strategies include the opportunity to discuss current events in the classroom. For fear of litigation and community disapproval, far too many educational administrators and far too many teachers are afraid to bring a discussion of current events into the classroom. One of the most important ways of getting a student interested in a topic is making it relevant. How more relevant can you make it than to bring a contemporary issue into the classroom and solicit students’ opinions on it? At the same time, you help students build the skills needed to discuss matters in a respectful manner, have tolerance of others’ points of views, and learn to give-and-take. The bottom line is that it is essential to capture student interest in civic learning by making it relevant to them. Once it is made relevant to them, they are more likely to want more civic learning, more likely to view being civically engaged as a positive attribute.

A recent Time article claimed, “Polls show that while confidence in our democracy and our government is near an all-time low, volunteerism and civic participation since the 1970s are near all-time highs. People, especially young people, think the government and the public sphere are broken, but they feel they can personally make a difference through community service.” Do you think civics education should focus more on public service through the government or the community?

It is an irony that at the same time public confidence and youth confidence in our institutions of government are at an all-time low, student volunteerism is at an all-time high. Study after study shows this. Volunteerism is vitally important and is a long-standing American tradition. It’s important, though, that during K-12 schooling, students learn about the consequences that make volunteering necessary. For example, it’s much more important that before working in a soup kitchen, students learn about homelessness—why it happens and what can be done—than to just go into a soup kitchen.
In terms of focusing civic education, I think civic participation is equally important in community groups and when affecting public policy. The behavior that civic learning promotes is essential. It is vitally important that we vote and that we join together with others with a similar point of view to affect policy. The beauty of civic learning is showing young people not only that it’s possible that one person, or people taking collective action, can make a difference, but that it’s essential to maintaining a healthy democracy.

Several presidential candidates have proposed increasing civic involvement through universal national service. What do you think of the desirability and feasibility of this plan? How would it fit in with the Campaign to Promote Civic Education’s own programs?

In my view, it is highly desirable to encourage volunteerism to tackle community and national problems. What we’re about, though, is the effort to restore the civic mission to the schools. It is about affecting behavior not just in terms of volunteerism but civic virtue as well. Anything that increases people’s civic participation is good; volunteerism is good, but this effort goes much further in terms of providing the knowledge, skills, and disposition necessary for informed and engaged citizenship.
Civic virtue implies more than just a willingness to work at the soup kitchen or to stuff sandbags if the community is flooded. Civic virtue includes participation in voting, serving jury duty instead of throwing the notice away, and testifying on issues that are of concern to you before the various governmental entities—zoning boards, alcohol control commissions. Civic virtue is much greater than just volunteerism.

Whose responsibility is it to address the lack of civic education?

Education policy is still a matter for the states. It is the responsibility of every education policymaker in every single state and the District of Columbia, every single local board and local superintendent, every single principal, every single teacher, and the community at large. Again, what we’re talking about here is passing on the knowledge and skills necessary to maintain our democracy. When Horace Mann and other pioneers first advocated for our first system of public education in this country in the early nineteenth century, their principal motivation for doing so was a realization that a representative democracy was a new thing to the world and we had to educate our citizens about it in order to maintain it.

As director of the Campaign to Promote Civic Education, what difficulties have you experienced in encouraging communities and lawmakers to adopt increased civics education?

As in any public policy campaign, the first difficulty is awareness of the issue. Reacquainting people with the historic civic mission of schools and making them aware of the declination of civic learning opportunities is always a challenge. A secondary challenge is over-testing in other subjects. Lastly, the final refuge of any school policymaker or administrator is, “How are we going to do this in an already overcrowded school day?” My response is, “There are ways; you can find them.” We are talking about one of the twin missions of public education. A nation of laborers that don’t participate in the government or the community is a nation doomed to fail.

---