Panel discussion: Civic education.

• Position: Public Understanding and Perceptions of the American Justice System - Panel Discussion

ASSOCIATE ATTORNEY GENERAL RAYMOND C. FISHER(**): As the American Bar Association survey indicates, the level of education in this country about our governmental and our justice system is appallingly bad. Those of us who have been educated over the years can reflect on our own educations and draw our own conclusions about how good these educations were and where we think they might have been improved. One statistic that I took particular note of in the survey was that very few people really knew what the three branches of government were. Those that did, knew least about what I consider, obviously, the most important branch, the Executive Branch. So, therefore, I challenge this group and lawyers and judges to do the right thing and make sure that the citizens of our country know more about the Executive Branch!

I think, from my own experience, that the challenge that lies before us as adult citizens, lawyers, judges, and those of us working in the government in various capacities, is important and is serious. Therefore, even though we are the last on the program agenda for these two days, I think our mission is no less important because now we are really addressing the issue of how are we going to deal with public attitudes, because the other point in the survey is that most people, young people and adults alike, get their information about our form of government, our institutions of government, through their schooling.

We are now going to hear from a very distinguished panel, starting with Chuck Quigley, who is the executive director for the Center for Civic Education. I'm going to briefly introduce everybody. Chuck Quigley will speak on his paper, which is entitled Civic Education: Recent History, Current Status, and the Future. I highly commend it to you. Todd Clark, a good friend of mine, [is] a former colleague from the Constitutional Rights Foundation [CRF], of which you will hear more. Todd is the executive director of CRF in Los Angeles. Jean Craven is the director of curriculum and instruction for the Albuquerque Public Schools. That school system serves 80,000 students in 120 schools. Michael Hartoonian, is director of the Center for Economic Education and is a professor of education at the University of Minnesota. Linda McNeil is currently co-director of the Rice University Center for Education and is also an associate professor of Education at Rice. Chuck Tampio is vice president for programs at the Close Up Foundation, which is a nonprofit and nonpartisan civic education organization, and it is well-known for the various groups of students that it brings to Washington, D.C.

[Charles N. Quigley's remarks, occurring at this point in the conference, have been deleted. Instead, an edited version of Mr. Quigley's presentation appears above at page 1425.]

ASSOCIATE ATTORNEY GENERAL FISHER: We now have some comments. We have actually previewed some of these, so I won't pretend surprise. I'm going to ask Linda [McNeil] and Michael [Hartoonian] to address one of the issues that Chuck [Quigley] raised, which is the demand by the public of civic education, the driving need for it, and the concept of standardization, and then perhaps they'll raise the issue of tests. Linda [McNeil], why don't you start with your experience in Texas, and then we'll have Michael [Hartoonian] follow up.

DR. LINDA McNEIL: It is really a pleasure to be here with attorneys and judges and to have this chance to have a conversation with you about this issue of what our kids are learning. I was especially grateful to Judge McBeth this morning because what she said about who we are now and who our children are was stated very eloquently and very powerfully. She knows a school with 102 home languages. In the main district in the city of Houston, we have 150 home languages. I doubt if we can all name them, [with] subdialects and subgroups from all over the world. These are the children in our schools; [we have] a long history of Hispanic, Black, and Anglo student populations. So we have never been at a point where we have had greater need for the things that Chuck Quigley told us about.

There are so many children new to the country, so many people having to learn how to live together in a democracy. Interestingly, we have never had more rich resources. We have wonderful curriculum resources. I saw the other day a new biography of Rosa Parks, and there are many different biographies of Thomas Jefferson and wonderful things these organizations have developed, including the [ABA]. We know much more about how children learn. So this should be the opportune moment to put into practice the things that Chuck [Quigley] has so clearly outlined we need.

What we have, though, is a policy context that is making it, especially at the state level, increasingly difficult for teachers to deal with any complex information, for them to center their teaching on children's learning, for them to deal with cultural diversity in their classroom. These policies are coming, perhaps, with good intention, but with extraordinarily bad effects on the issues of what we are learning. These policies at the state level--my state is the lead state and the most famous, but most of your other legislators are racing to copy Texas. So I think that it is worthwhile to give our local story.

What is happening is the legislation and implementation through the state bureaucracies of testing systems, which at first sound very reasonable, but which in fact structure out the possibility for complicated study. In Texas, the testing system is called the Texas Accountability System. It is really meant to be an accountability system, and not an instructional one, to make sure the adults do what they are supposed to do. Over the past twenty years we have done the state tests in reading, writing, and math, and the curriculum in the state is supposed to be aligned with that. Teachers are supposed to follow the lessons exactly with what happens on a certain date. So taking the time to do a civics project like that would be virtually impossible. Our best teachers have always been able to work around the margins of bad curriculum guides or policies. What we are now seeing is principals spending the instructional dollars on commercial test prep materials rather than on the kind of instructional resources that most of us would hope that our kids would have access to. I'll just talk about two or three pieces of this system I hope will help crystallize what the structure is.

These test prep materials tend to start in the early grades. The reading comprehension test includes reading two and three paragraphs and then answering questions like, what was the main idea? What would be a good title for this paragraph? Which idea is not in this paragraph? The grammar [questions] are about the same. The writing section requires a five-paragraph essay of five sentences each, and some of you may have grown up on that. What is happening is that [the] subjects that are being tested are being trivialized. Teachers are being told to set aside the teaching of literature; to set aside real reading assignments they might read like Huck Finn or a biography of Jefferson and just read these practice [questions] that give students practice to take the test. What is happening, teachers are telling me, [is] principals are requiring that they spend at least half of every class period, especially in our lowest performing schools, preparing for the test.

In the school districts that have the demographics of middle class students who traditionally do fairly well on tests scores, these students are sailing ahead and having the regular curriculum. They have far less school time taken out for test prep. [For] our poorest kids, [test preparation] is the curriculum because their principals will lose their principalships if scores don't go up; [further] they will get several thousand dollars in bonuses if scores do go up. In a recent newspaper article, the superintendent in the main Houston district said he would receive a $25,000 bonus a year if the districts' scores go up. So principals are really requiring teachers to use test prep materials, which [can] cost between $20,000 and $25,000 per school, often the entire budget for the school's curriculum materials.

Subjects like history and sciences right now should be exempt from this, but what we're hearing from history teachers--one told me last week he has to dedicate at least a third of every class period to having his kids work through the math test prep materials. For the grades that aren't tested until March, the principals say, set aside your regular lessons until we get to the test. This past week was the TAAS test, and the kids had three days of testing. And a number of teachers said, "[Finally], now we can go back to our real curriculum." What we're seeing is our teachers that have been absolutely dedicated to urban kids, who have really cast their career with our urban kids, and who have spent enormous amounts of their own money bringing good resources into the classroom: [these teachers] are being told literally to set those aside to do hours of test prep, not teaching.

So what we have is a structure with an economic driver behind it: all these new vendors are springing up to create these test prep materials; consultants come in and do everything from workshops with the principals on how to get their teachers to participate in "TAAS pep rallies" with the kids. There is an enormous economic driver outside the system creating a constituency of people who are not a part of [the] old textbook publishers, but also not a part of the kind of authentic curriculum development that I think we would all affirm. These vendors are now a huge political pressure, obviously in favor of these testing systems. For the bureaucrats in the system, from the governor on down, the tests create the...