Policy for Civic Reasoning

• Published date: 01 January 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00027162231193276
• Author: Linda Darling-Hammond,Kent McGuire
• Date: 01 January 2023
• Subject Matter: Insights for Research, Policy, and Practice

232 ANNALS, AAPSS, 705, January 2023

DOI: 10.1177/00027162231193276

Policy for Civic

Reasoning

By

LINDA DARLING-

HAMMOND

and

KENT MCGUIRE

1193276ANN THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMYPOLICY FOR CIVIC REASONING

research-article2023

Preparing young people for citizenship requires signifi-

cant change in our public schools, including a commit-

ment to preparation of the education workforce for

today’s diverse learners and paying more attention to

culture and identity in what is taught. Schools should be

designed and organized in ways that help students

understand the obligations that members of a society

owe one another. Policy can be an important lever in

promoting changes that foster civic reasoning and

engagement: curriculum policies can support civic

reasoning and discourse within and across subject areas,

assessments can support civic reasoning through com-

petency-based approaches, and well-designed gradua-

tion requirements can reinforce attention to civic

learning. This article describes various frameworks to

guide policy development, each with the potential to

prepare young people more fully for citizenship.

Keywords: civic reasoning; design; policy; civic edu-

cation; school reform

This volume has, among other things, taken

up what science tells us about civic reason-

ing and provided insights into the effectiveness

of well-designed schools and classrooms for

Correspondence: kmcguire@hewlett.org

Linda Darling-Hammond is the president and CEO of

the Learning Policy Institute and Charles E. Ducommun

Professor of Education Emeritus at Stanford University,

where she founded the Stanford Center for Opportunity

Policy in Education and served as the faculty sponsor of

the Stanford Teacher Education Program. She also

serves as president of the California State Board of

Education.

Kent McGuire is the program director of education at

the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. He leads

the investments of the foundation’s teaching and learn-

ing and open educational resources strategies, with a

focus on helping all students succeed in college, work

and civic life. He has served in various leadership roles

in philanthropy, academia, and government, including

as the assistant secretary of the U.S. Department of

Education from 1998 to 2001.

POLICY FOR CIVIC REASONING 233

fostering civic learning. What the preceding articles confirm is that we can, in

fact, do a better job of fostering both competencies and skills, on the one hand,

and civic engagement and participation on the other. And yet the evidence sug-

gests that we are not succeeding in providing widespread opportunities for young

people to participate in citizenship and to wrestle, along the way, with difference

across groups, inequality, or the role of government in strengthening society.

Students of color and young people from low-income households are particularly

underrepresented in gaining access to these opportunities.

There are numerous roles for policy in supporting civic reasoning: policy can

signal the importance of civic reasoning and engagement, incentivize new

approaches to pursuing these competencies and skills, and align resources to

sustain and expand the reach of these practices across many schools and school

systems. But the immediate challenge is that our education system, with its cur-

rent preoccupation with basic literacy and low-level skills, is not designed to

pursue this goal. What is needed is nothing short of a new mission for schools,

one that prepares young people for jobs and occupations that do not yet exist

while providing the skills and analytic tools to grapple with new and emerging

problems with the help of rapidly changing technologies. Moreover, these new

citizens will need to be comfortable and competent in working effectively with

people from widely varying backgrounds and cultures.

If we are to fully realize the dual responsibility of preparing young people

for work and citizenship, our public education system will need to change in

many ways. We will need to create the time and space in the school day and

year for a more varied set of student learning opportunities, ones that open up

greater possibilities for students to learn out of school as well as in school set-

tings. One can imagine the new opportunities for students to engage in work

that develops their civic interests as well as their civic skills and competencies.

But as we do, we will also need to find ways both to assess and to assign credit

for these experiences.

Yet another needed change, one we have struggled to embrace, is normalizing

the idea of teaching as a profession in such a way that classroom teachers have

the autonomy and agency to practice in ways that foster thinking and reasoning.

This change would pay big dividends in terms of organizing student work around

ideas and problems that are meaningful to the lives students lead. We have more

to say about this below.

Contemporary Challenges

To be sure, these are long-term ambitions. And yet there are things we can focus

on now to get our education system on a path that prioritizes learning and prob-

lem solving across the curriculum. Three opportunities for transformation, each

representing a current barrier to developing the various competencies required

for effective civic reasoning, come to mind.