Chester E. Finn Jr. is the Volker Senior Fellow (adjunct) at the Hoover Institution and leads the Good American Citizenship Working Group at Hoover’s Center for Revitalizing American Institutions. He spoke about the group’s recent research, his priorities for civics education, and the upcoming “summit” on civics education.
Chris Herhalt: Reading the latest work by Hoover researcher Jed Ngalande into states’ requirements for civics education, I was struck by the different requirements across the country. I know education is said to be thirteen thousand fiefdoms, but could we benefit from some sort of standardization or unification of requirements?
Chester Finn: Sure. The decentralization of American education has reverberations all over the place, including in civics, but it’s also true in reading, math, science, and so on. And it produces very disparate requirements and expectations from state to state, even sometimes from district to district within a state. We’ve gotten used to this decentralized system as a country, and we’re not likely to change it. Meanwhile, several efforts to standardize the whole country have gotten into political trouble already.
Even though it’s a big country with big disputes about elements of civics and US history, we would be better off if all of our kids were held to the same expectations and standards, and then assessed and judged in the same way on some kind of common metric.
It would be a good thing—maybe in civics more than any other subject, actually, because it’s important to hold together as a country. I think there’s a risk right now of ending up with red-state civics and blue-state civics. And that would be a problem.
Herhalt: Your group did a historical review of the content of civics textbooks through the ages. You found that there was a general shift from a focus on the structure of government—what is its function—to, in recent decades, more about teaching kids about the individual.
Finn: The textbooks are sold around the whole country, but there are so many of them that which ones get used where is mostly a local decision by individual school districts, of which we have fourteen thousand, as well as thousands of private schools and charter schools and so on. An important finding of our study is that as the country has evolved, the textbooks have evolved along with it. In civics, that has meant we’ve gone from the nuts and bolts of how the government works to more of a preoccupation with our individual rights and our individual connections to civil society and to government.
This is a mixed blessing, honestly. It tends to shift us from thinking about the common good to thinking more about our own good. And in a big, complicated society that has some risk of coming apart, it would be better if more people spent more time thinking about the common good.
Herhalt: You’ve remarked twice about the risk of the nation coming apart. If you think about your whole shelf of recommendations for civics instruction in America, what’s your top recommendation, given these worries?
Finn: My own top recommendation would be to do a much better job than we’re doing today of generating common data on how their students are doing in civics, particularly state-by-state data, so that each state could decide for itself whether those results are satisfactory and, if not, what to do about it.
We already have an instrument called the National Assessment of Educational Progress. It’s given to kids in grades four, eight, and twelve in a number of subjects, including civics. But right now, NAEP, as it is known, has two shortcomings in its handling of civics. First, this subject is tested only in eighth grade, not in twelfth. So, we don’t know anything about what kids know at the end of high school; we know only about the end of middle school. And second, civics is not one of the subjects where NAEP gives states their own data. It only gives national data for this subject. That’s true in several other subjects, too, but in reading and math each state gets its own data about how its students are doing.
This is an example of an area where, if we gave every state common data, ideally at the end of twelfth grade, on how much its kids do and don’t know, then Rhode Island could look at Texas and say, are they doing this better than we are? That would be a good thing. And it’s a policy-imaginable, budget-imaginable thing we could actually do. It’s a budget issue—but not much more than that.
Herhalt: When I read the work that comes out of the Good American Citizenship Working Group, I think of those man-on-the-street video interviews where people are asked basic civics questions. And the person questioned always fails miserably.
Finn: We have a population that knows very little about how its own government works. People may know that, at the national level, each state has two senators. But people don’t know how their own state government works, or how the municipal government in their own city or county or town works. And as a result of not knowing much about government, they find it hard to engage with it. It’s hard to care why I should feel compelled to vote if I don’t know anything about what I’m voting for.
This problem starts in the schools; it continues in the colleges. And one of the things we’re focusing on at Stanford and at Hoover, in the working group, is not just K–12 civics but also higher-education civics. Stanford’s taken some good steps in this regard. If we have kids come out of K–12 not knowing much and then they go to college, which also doesn’t teach them anything in this area, when are they going to learn it?
Herhalt: I read your essay in The74 about incoming President Trump’s signals regarding the Department of Education. Some things have changed since it was written in December, and I’d like to know where you think it’s going. Is Trump going to ax the Department of Education? How do you feel about that?
Finn: Well, anything I say right now is likely to change on January 20, so this is total blue-skying. The Trump folks have two competing ideas for what they want to do about education, and I don’t know which is going to prevail. Maybe we’ll have a mix of both. Some people just want to get the federal government completely out of education and to send everything home to mom and dad and the local community, maybe the states. Another group wants to use every bit of power and influence they can to get schools all across the country to teach kids the things they think they should be taught—that is, to impose on the curriculum a kind of Trump agenda. These are very different ideas: getting out of it, or getting forceful about it.
The Department of Education has now been around since 1979, and it’s probably not going be abolished. Other presidents have proposed to do so and gotten nowhere in Congress. It would require an act of Congress; it’s not something the president can do with an executive order.
But there’s another point. Before there was a Department of Education, all those programs that it runs were already in existence, only they were part of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. The Education Department was carved out of that department. You could abolish the sign that says, “US Department of Education,” but what are you going to do about all those programs? They would almost certainly go somewhere else but yet remain.
Herhalt: You also wrote recently about the benefits and costs of Advanced Placement (AP) exams, and whether they’re getting easier. You weren’t fully taking one side or another.
Finn: I’m a huge fan of the Advanced Placement program. I’ve written a book about it. I’m a fan of the smaller International Baccalaureate program also. These are ways of giving advanced students a leg up on college. It helps if they do well at it. They learn more. They are likelier to get into the college of their choice. They’re likely to skip those boring freshman courses in that subject when they get to college, and they might get credit and accelerate their degree and save money and time.
That used to be frequent, but it’s less frequent now. But you still get to skip the boring course and take the advanced course, or you get out of a requirement because you’ve already done it in high school. You don’t have to bore yourself with repeating something you’ve already learned.
So, the more kids that can do this, the better. That said, the Advanced Placement program has been letting its passing standards slip a bit in a number of subjects. They have a good argument: they say it’s because the colleges have gotten easier, too. It’s like grade inflation. If colleges are going to give kids an A for a given level of performance, why shouldn’t the similar Advanced Placement test give a passing score for the same level? This is a consequence of softening in higher education.
So, it’s a mixed blessing. I would like the AP program to be rigorous, but I would like colleges to be rigorous, too, and they’re not heading in that direction. I’d also like to maximize the number of students who benefit. Roughly one in four high school students today take at least one AP course, but so many more could and should. The fraction should be a lot larger, half or more.
Herhalt: So, that would be a big expansion.
Finn: Yes, and it would be a good thing. Yet there’s a tradeoff. Obviously, the harder it is to pass an AP exam, the fewer kids will bother trying. And there’s a cost involved, too. Not only the cost of hard work in high school that you wouldn’t have to do if you weren’t taking the AP course, but actually a dollar cost. Somebody has to pay for the $99 exam fee at the end of the year. Often the schools pay for it. Sometimes the College Board gives you the equivalent of financial aid to help pay for it. But in many cases, parents are shelling out hundreds of dollars to get their kid into multiple AP exams.
Herhalt: Tell us about the Civic Learning Week that’s going to happen here in March.
Finn: For the first time ever, the Hoover Institution, through the Center for Revitalizing American Institutions (RAI), is collaborating with the iCivics organization, a legacy of the late Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’Connor, to co-sponsor a civics education summit on March 13, 2025, on the Stanford campus.
It’s never been west of the Potomac before. It’s a very big deal in the world of K–12 and college-level civics. It will be keynoted by Hoover Director Condoleezza Rice, and a couple of state governors are coming to speak along with some other VIPs, scholars, experts, and practitioners. This forum is meant to highlight and underscore the importance of civics education and how we could do a better job of it as a country.
I hope a lot of people, including some from west of the Mississippi, come to this. This will give the annual event a broader ideological and political base than it has had as long as it was just a Washington gathering held by East Coast organizations. I believe this is a great thing.
