Scholars Put Civics in Same Category as Literacy, Math

Research papers lay out obstacles, opportunities

College-ready, career-ready … and citizenship-ready? Ten papers released by the American Enterprise Institute last week make the case that civics education is as critical as literacy and mathematics. They also explore what civics education should look like, how teachers can be prepared to create educated citizens, and future challenges and opportunities in the field.

Frederick M. Hess, the director of education policy studies at the Washington-based AEI, said the research discusses “how to make teaching and learning and schooling serve the needs of America and the needs of our children today.”

The research comes from scholars of various disciplines, according to David Campbell, an associate professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame and a coordinator of the research, which was released at a conference last week. “We want to build a community of scholars working on this issue,” he said.

One theme of the research is that civics skills and dispositions, like those of reading and math, can be evaluated, and that there are lessons to be learned from places that teach them well.

Data have shown that some private and charter schools imbue civic values with greater success than regular public schools, Mr. Campbell writes in one paper. Even though the data have come to light several times, he said, there has been little attempt to learn from those schools’ strengths, such as a schoolwide ethos of civic responsibility, to improve public schools.

Peter Levine, the research director of Tufts University’s Jonathan M. Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service, points to other models of strong civics education in another paper.

“If you ask the average person what they think is going on with civics education,” he says, “they’ll say, ‘They don’t teach this anymore the way they did when I was a kid.’ ” They’re right, Mr. Levine said in an interview, but the major difference is not a lack of knowledge about such facts as the branches of government, but the decline of applied skills, such as “being able to understand the news and form one’s own opinions about the news, and being able to affect one’s community in a productive way.”...

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