High School Confidential (The Role of Civics in K-12 Ed)

>> Chester Finn: Isn't it crazy to keep expecting American schools to teach kids anything about civics? We've been trying for decades, maybe, maybe centuries, to get schools to teach kids American civics, and they seem to come out not knowing anything. Shouldn't we just. Shouldn't we just quit trying?

>> Paul Peterson: Well, we've had a constitution for over 200 years, and it's still in place, and our people still support their government, and they must have learned this somewhere.

And the schools couldn't have been too bad for the system to work as well as it does today. So I think that's a pretty extreme statement, actually. Mr. Finn.

>> Chester Finn: Well, I'm given to extreme statements, and I'm happy to see you here today. I'm Chester Finn, known as Checker, and I am here today with Paul Peterson, Professor Government at Harvard, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, and head of Harvard's Program in Education Policy and Governance, and an old friend of mine.

And we are here to talk about civics in American education, mostly elementary, secondary. It's great to be with you. So what are your thoughts about the essential elements that the schools should be imparting to our kids during their K12 years?

>> Paul Peterson: Well, I look at this from the point of view of a person who teaches students arriving on college campus, finishing high school.

They're now ready to move on to more specialized studies. And I'm teaching Introduction to American Government, the very first course they take in politics on the campus. And I find them falling far short of where they need to be.

>> Chester Finn: This is at Harvard?

>> Paul Peterson: And this is at Harvard, and it's a pretty good place.

And there's a pretty talented group of students. And I'm not talking about every student. There's some who really do know a lot about the American institutions and American political history. But there's, sadly, a very large number of students who know very little. They know a lot about the Revolutionary period, or at least about some aspects of the revolutionary period.

And they may know a little bit about the Civil War or the Gettysburg Address, but there's a lot of material that they're completely unaware of. So I would say we really need to teach our political history to young people in a more thorough way than we have in the past and to show how our institutions today emerge out of the experiences of the past.

So that we are a dynamic society that's been constantly changing, but we're fundamentally structured by. By the Constitution, which was written back in 1789.

>> Chester Finn: So do you find your students just sort of ignorant or. The ones you're talking about, or are they also kind of biased? Do they come in thinking that America's a terrible place because that's what their courses have been teaching them, or are they triumphalists who think that everything's hunky dory and it always has been?

>> Paul Peterson: Well, of course, there's some of both. There's some who think the American system is the best thing that's ever happened, and there's some people who think it's terrible and has to be changed. But I would say the bulk, the large bulk of them are just uninformed, do not know very much, and are eager to learn.

I actually love teaching this course because there is such eagerness among young people to know more about their institutions. I don't think this is a hard task. This is a task that young people are eager to participate in. So I don't think it's like giving them some medications, a teaspoonful of cod liver oil in the morning.

>> Chester Finn: So imagine if the K12 system was doing a really good job of this, both the civic side and the history side. Would your current course still be necessary or would it change in a big way?

>> Paul Peterson: Yeah, no, I'd like to make my course unnecessary. I don't expect to be fired soon, but it would be nice to, To.

To have this as too redundant. We've already done, and for some students it is. And I, when they come by to see me, they've. If I tell me they've had an excellent education in this area, then I say, you should go to more specialized courses. Go learn something about Congress or about the presidency or the court system and in greater detail.

Yes, there are some that are like that, but too many really need. And even the people who helped me teach the course, and these are now graduate students, will not have an understanding of the system as a whole, though they may know a lot of quantitative information about some specific aspect of it.

>> Chester Finn: So nobody thinks about Harvard as a remedial institution for its entering undergraduates? On the contrary. And yet you're describing something that in many respects is a compensatory or remedial course for things they should have already learned. Or am I mishearing you?

>> Paul Peterson: Well, I think there's some truth to that.

It's true that we travel over this material much more quickly than you would at the high school level. It's true that we go into details much more extensively than you might do in the high school context. But yes, there's, for example, people have a very little understanding of the federal system?

What is the division of responsibilities between the national government and the state governments? How much money is being spent by state governments? Is it really half of all of our domestic expenditure is being raised locally and spent locally by our local governments and our state governments? When I tell my students that, I think that this is striking information that they have never thought of and wouldn't have believed if somebody had told them that out of the classroom, that's really interesting.

>> Chester Finn: You're, in effect, it sounds like merging government, civics, and history in your approach to teaching this in your mind. Are these commingled subjects in high school? They're typically taught separately.

>> Paul Peterson: One of the things I love to do is to talk about the different periods in American history.

The founding period, the Jeffersonian period, when the plantation owners from Virginia take over the national government. And then when the Jacksonians come from the west and they trample on the furniture in the White House and they change, the spoil system comes into play. And then all of a sudden, we have the Civil War and Abraham Lincoln comes along and, and.

And the slaves are freed and a new era is begun. And we have a Republican Party and the Democratic Party for the first time. And then you go down to William Jennings Bryan, and William Jennings Bryan is a fascinating force who never becomes president. But nonetheless ensures that the Republican Party will be the dominant party until Franklin Delano Roosevelt comes along and Franklin Delano Roosevelt changes America.

And then we have Barry Goldwater. So, you know to get an overview of American history by seeing how all of these political eras fit together and tell a story. And the story is a complicated one. It's not a simple one. It's not like, okay, this is the greatest country marching forward, upward and upward without any slips and tumbles.

No, it's not that. But nonetheless, it's a story of hope and progress.

>> Chester Finn: So you are intertwining the civics and the history in the way you approach the subject. If I'm hearing you correctly.

>> Paul Peterson: The basic question I ask is, is this a. An exceptional country now Donald Trump says we're exceptional other people say we're not exceptional.

I say the question is the United States exceptional or is it simply different? We know that it's different. We have different institutions from our European friends, from our Asian friends, that it's a unique set of political institutions that were created by our Constitution. We have a federal system, we have separation of powers.

Well, does that make us exceptional or does it just make us different? And you can argue that question both ways and in the end, I leave it up to the students to decide.

>> Chester Finn: This is fascinating and as you know, we're having this conversation partly because in a few weeks Civic Learning Week is going to descend upon the United States in March. And including a marvelous one-day civic summit at the Hoover Institution co-sponsored with civics to sort of capstone of this week and in anticipation we are paying a lot of attention to how civics is. Or is not being taught and learned at both the K12 level and the higher education level?

And you're an interesting sort of linchpin between those two levels, albeit at an elite institution. So the approach to how these things can and should be taught as you're articulating, it's really very interesting for me and I suspect for a lot of educators in this field. But speaking of educators in this field, are we preparing them adequately?

That's one of the jobs of universities, is to train the teachers that teach the kids in the schools social studies. My impression is they might not know very much about it themselves.

>> Paul Peterson: Well, I've never taught inside a school of education, so I don't really know how it works there.

But I tend to feel that teachers are being encouraged to focus on the rights of students. So what is teachers tend to say, what are your rights? When can you use them? How to use them? How can you participate more effectively in your local community, in your national community?

So there's a lot of focus on engagement of the student in political activities and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. I have just finished reading a book about Mitch McConnell and he was a student body president in high school.

>> Chester Finn: Why am I not surprised, okay?

>> Paul Peterson: And he plotted that.

He, got all the, the basketball team and the cheerleaders to all support him. And even though he had a limp because he had had polio, he didn't, wasn't able to do. Although he was a pretty good baseball player, he nonetheless found a way to get the support he needed to win that election.

And one of the things he said. And if you don't mind, I'd like to just quote it because it's such a neat little statement that he made. He said the student government's purpose. Now he's elected is not student body. The student government's purpose is to foster such a loyalty, cooperative spirit.

That students will assume all responsibilities outside the classroom, thereby practicing citizenship in preparation for participation in city, state, and national affairs. So what he does is responsible. We need to learn how to be responsible so that we can be entrusted with running everything at this school having to do with student affairs.

So on the one hand, he's calling for democracy, for student control, and on the other hand, he's calling for student responsibility. And I think that's really how we should think about that participatory dimension of instruction for preparation and for citizenship.

>> Chester Finn: This is important partly because what some people call action civics is controversial in many circles.

As if going and picketing the city council was taking, substituting for learning about the wheel, how the wheels of government work and how bills become laws and so forth and so on. You're describing and you're an enthusiast for a participatory element, at least to the civics education.

>> Paul Peterson: For those who want it.

It's not the case that every student in a high school is gonna want to be a member of the student government. And that's to fully understandable. Some students are gonna be much better off playing on the basketball team or participating in the theater program or learning how to play the cornet or the or the violin.

And so you wouldn't want everybody to be engaged in the way Mitch McConnell was engaged in high school.

>> Chester Finn: Probably not, though I could see distilling a bit of a civics lesson out of being on the basketball team or in the orchestra. I mean, there's a degree of collaboration, cooperation give and take, compromise.

Many of the elements of student government arise in an orchestra or a team.

>> Paul Peterson: That's actually a really important insight checker that you've just articulated, that so much of what high school is about is learning how to be cooperative. And to work with your colleagues and to work with your fellow students.

And sometimes that's better taught in our extracurricular activities than in the core subjects that were being taught in high school. And maybe we need to think more about how we could have education, peer group education could benefit a lot by thinking about how do kids learn how to play the violin?

I have a granddaughter right now who's learning how to play the violin. She learns from her fellow students more than anybody else.

>> Chester Finn: That's really interesting. It also speaks to whether the teacher of a so called civics course can help draw lessons out of other experiences that the students are having, such as their extracurricular activities.

In other words, it doesn't have to just be a dry textbook course that says there's two senators per state. And here's how the federal system works. You can also relate it to things kids are probably engaged in one at one place or another.

>> Paul Peterson: Right and it's of course more interesting when you learn that we have two senators from every state.

When you know what a fight they did have at the Constitutional Convention over that very issue. That need not be a dull fact that you just learned. If you understand it in its historical context. It tells you a lot of things about ourselves and how we sought for compromise when we created this country.

>> Chester Finn: During that hot summer in Philadelphia, when they were arguing over big things like whether big states should have more power than little states states in the federal government.

>> Paul Peterson: Yes little did they well, there was a sense that they knew that state control was important to address the slavery question.

Because from the very beginning, slavery was a curse that the country had to deal with, and you couldn't deal with it in 1789. That was not a time in our history. We would have fallen apart as a country. We would never form. We would have had two nations.

We would have then been subject to foreign manipulation. So, the timing to solve the slavery question emerges gradually over time. And it's a struggle. And this can be taught in a very negative way as the. The New York Times would want it to be. But it can also be taught in a very positive way to show how this country managed to deal with this problem.

Not without tremendous. I mean, a million soldiers died in the Civil War, it's-

>> Chester Finn: The most of any war.

>> Paul Peterson: Most of any war. So it was a terrible thing. And then it was followed by a period of segregated institutions for century. So we have to understand the pain of our history as well as the great institutions that we have today.

>> Chester Finn: I want to shift gears with you a little bit because you are a well known, articulate and powerful supporter of school choice. Families having the right to pick their child's school. And that often includes differences in the curriculum that the different schools teach. And that's one of the reasons parents choose one school.

They like its curriculum better. But how does that work in a field like civics or American history? Does each school pick its own civics curriculum? Or doesn't a country like this need a kind of a common civics curriculum? Regardless of what school you go to, if we're going to come out as one country, how do you navigate the appeal of school choice with the desire for a kind of uniformity in some core subjects?

>> Paul Peterson: Well, of course, I think that every civics education program should help students understand the importance of the constitutional republic that we have. It's a democratic republic, but it is a republic that encourages compromise, encourages cooperation, recognizes differences, is afraid of the tyranny of the majority, recognizes the rights of majority.

But within that general framework, there are many histories that need to be taught. And everybody, every part of our country has its own history. States require that their state history be taught. I was taught about Minnesota. I learned a lot of facts about Minnesota, which I sort of still enjoy having learned.

But other people learned about Texas or Florida or California. And, you know, you want to know the regions, the places. Now there's also people come with different ethnic backgrounds, historical, historical experiences themselves, and they want to learn about it. Whether you want to learn about the Italians and how they came to this country, if you're, if your school has got a very substantial Italian population, of course you want to talk about the Italian migration, maybe spend more time on it than somebody who's never, you know, say, okay, well, that's a group, you know, like any other group, and I don't have to worry too much about them.

And the same would be true for people who come from Mexico or Puerto Rico or Haiti or from Any other part of the world.

>> Chester Finn: But you started with a common framework overriding these differences, that everybody's school should teach. Where does that come from? Is that a federal government?

Is that a state government? Is it government at all? Where does the common framework come from?

>> Paul Peterson: Well, we have. Our educational system is run by local school districts. Primarily, 80% of our students attend a school that's operated by a local school district subject to state regulation. So the states actually do lay down the criteria for the curriculum.

And so we primarily depend upon the states. I would not want to give this authority to the federal government because I think small groups of people could get control of a vast institution. So we're much better off with a decentralized system to set the terms for the understanding.

But I think it's really for the responsibility of our colleges and universities to set the tone and to sort of give guidance, general guidance to the culture as to what's expected of a citizen. And that's why it's sort of worrisome the way elite institutions have drifted in recent years.

And it's good to see corrective measures being taken from one higher educational system after another to restore a respect for what their mission is as providing educational leadership in our society.

>> Chester Finn: Let me come back to that state function in terms of setting a kind of standards or framework around the curriculum.

You're also a known believer in accountability, that there ought to be some evidence that people have learned something by the time they get out of school. These days, by and large, states expect evidence that kids have learned reading and math, but they don't, as far as I know, expect any evidence that kids have learned any history or civics at the end of their K12 experience.

Should this be added to the set of state tests or assessments or graduation requirements or something else?

>> Paul Peterson: Well, I think that's moving in a direction opposite of where the country wants to go. The idea of we're going to have more state standardized tests in every subject out there to make sure that people can pass that test.

That's not acceptable by our population today. And I don't know that it's worthwhile trying to force it. I do think that when students are in high school, the courses that they take, they should be asked to take an examination that's not administered by the teacher in the classroom, but it's a more general test that the state or the district or some external group sets up as the standard for what you should be knowing.

If you're going to take this course I think if we could move our assessments in that direction, we could get higher levels of performance among high school. This is what, in fact, is done in European countries. It's not like this is inventing a new approach. You'll find this in Britain and France and Germany and Canada and most other places.

>> Chester Finn: It's what some people in the ed field call an end of course exam, which comes from outside the course, outside the teacher's classroom. Some states have end of course exams in some subjects that. I mean, you live mostly in Massachusetts, which until the other day had a graduation test that all the kids had to pass in order to graduate from high school.

>> Paul Peterson: Yeah, that's less interesting than the Advanced Placement tests. The Advanced Placement tests that we have for a relatively small percentage of our high school students is course specific, and I think that makes a lot of sense.

>> Chester Finn: And those are good, rigorous exams, actually, in the Advanced Placement program.

>> Paul Peterson: Yes.

>> Chester Finn: At the other end of the spectrum, however, something like 17 states now require their high school kids to pass some version of the naturalization test that immigrants have to pass to get into the country. You know, this famous test that's got a hundred questions, multiple choice, and if you are trying to get your citizenship, you have to answer 6 out of 10 or 7 out of 10 correctly.

Some states, mostly red states, but not entirely now have adopted a version of the naturalization test for their high school kids to pass. Wouldn't that be a good idea to expect every kid in America to show that they could become a citizen?

>> Paul Peterson: That's not the first Reform I would want to spend my time working for.

But it's not a bad idea. Certainly not a bad idea. But I think if you think about how you would want to create a system of education that would really prepare people for civic life, I would go back to the model that I was laying forth at the beginning of our conversation.

>> Chester Finn: I don't disagree. I'm just wondering where the, where the sort of policy push to make that happen would come from.

>> Paul Peterson: And you see preparation for this test could be very much. Here's a manual. And memorize this.

>> Chester Finn: Yeah, and it is for the naturalization test, like the driver's test that you take.

Here's a book of 100 questions you might be asked. Here are the answers. If you learn the answers to the hundred questions, you'll probably answer the 10 correctly that they actually ask you. And newcomers to the United States do have something like that they can study. On the other hand, if those entering Harvard students we were talking about a few minutes ago had all passed the naturalization test, they had arrived with some of the basic knowledge that you were saying they don't have.

>> Paul Peterson: Perhaps, but I think they would still need to take my class.

>> Chester Finn: The class that you're trying to make obsolete. We talked earlier about adding to today's conversation a kind of open ended opportunity for you to talk a little about what understanding of American democracy should be taught, especially in the K 12 years, but also in college.

And you've discussed that a little bit. But I wanted to give you a chance to elaborate a bit on that approach because we're heading towards Civic Learning Week and we've got a lot of educators interested in how to do this better than we're doing it. Just go back and say, what's the elements of American democracy?

Would you like students to learn?

>> Paul Peterson: Well, I think the main concern I have about a lot of the conversation over civic education today is that they say we need to have civic education for democracy. Maybe not even American democracy, just democracy. How can we make our system more democratic?

And by democratic, it too often is made synonymous with the concept of majority rule. A majority rule means that whoever manages to get 51% should be having total power over the system, whether we give it to the president or we give it to a majority in Congress or whatever.

And so the impediments to that are seen as a problem for democracy. And I do see this in conversations with students. They're concerned about the electoral college and they're concerned about the federal system where states don't go along with what the federal government, they want the same laws everywhere, instead of different laws in different places, depending on who happens to be living there.

So I think what I would like people to think about when they think about civic education is think about how to create a constitutional democracy, a democracy that encourages consensus. Madison, in his famous essay in the Federalist papers, the Federalist 10, he said, well, you know, the tyranny we have to fear the most is the tyranny of the majority.

The majority, once they get power, can impose a lot on those who don't have that power. And that can be a dreadful thing. And of course, it was a dreadful thing when the majority was white and they imposed a tyranny on the black slaves. So the tyranny of the majority is the thing to fear the most, not the tyranny of little minorities.

And so if we can have a civics education program that prepares people for participation in the constitutional republic, that's the kind of goal that I would like to see those who want to reform our civic education program always keep in mind.

>> Chester Finn: That was very Madisonian, and that was also, I think, a very nice way to conclude our lead-up to Civic Learning Week 2025.

And also to keep in mind as the United States embarks upon its new chapter in 2025 with a majority obviously in Washington, that is, we hope, going to do mostly good things. This has been Paul Peterson and Checker Finn, on behalf of the Hoover Institution, and we thank you very much for being with us today.