In the same issue, a conservative from the Family Research Council opposed standards of all kinds as "an exercise in government-approved truth" that intrudes upon the rights of parents. As the Education Week editor of this Commentary panel put it, Robert G. Morrison's view argued that "parents need not look past their own backyard for direction." Interestingly, the split that exists among professional educators was quickly revealed when Nel Noddings, an influential professor of child education at Stanford, fired off a critical letter to Education Week (June 19, 1996) in which she argued that national standards are not fair when they expect "poor kids [to] meet the same standards as the well-to-do." After all, it is in the local classroom where decisions will be made: "....[E]xactly what will be done with those topics [of a set of standards] must be determined by teachers and students working together toward mutually constructed and accepted objectives."
The range of views about standards, especially as handled by the Palisades summit, was further illustrated in the June 1996 issue of the Excellence Network's "News and Views," which contained a dozen articles most of which approved the idea of national standards. But the conservative attack on the U.S. History Standards was reaffirmed by Lynn Cheney who still did not like the revised version now approved by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and Diane Ravitch. And the Governor of Pennsylvania, Tom Ridge, argued that national standards to be judged by their ability to fit into a restructured "consumer-oriented system" of public schools that honors charter schools, school choice, and loosening the hold of teachers unions on the schools.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Education's Community Update for June 1996 continued to be upbeat in its biennial report about the way Goals 2000 were spreading, at least in part because the Secretary had "the authority to waive many federal rules and regulations if they interfered with local or state education reform strategies." This loosening of rules forecast a growing tendency among states to ask for federal funds largely to buy computers and upgrade technological effectiveness of schools without any special attention to the original purpose of Goals 2000, which was to aid states in upgrading academic achievement of all children in important core studies of the curriculum symbolized above all in the adoption of national standards.
By August 1996 two surveys, approaching standards from quite different political points of view, indicated that standards were making mixed headway among the states. The American Federation of Teachers issued a report drawn up by Matthew Gandal, senior associate in AFT's educational issues department, which found that only 15 states were developing standards which AFT deemed to be of passing grade for clarity, specificity, and sufficiently grounded in scholarly content in all four of the core subjects of English, math, science, and history. It was found that all states ((excepting Iowa and Wyoming) and the District of Columbia claimed to be at work on standards, but only eight states had achieved exemplary standards requiring a rigorous curriculum in one or more of the four subjects. Only Virginia received honors in all four subjects.
Of particular interest here, the AFT report points out that the controversies over the early national standards in history and English had apparently held back development of strong state standards in those subjects. In commenting on this report in his Sunday column in the New York Times (Sept. 29. 1996), Al Shanker also cited a new book by E. D. Hirsch entitled The Schools We Need agreeing fully that all children should be guaranteed a chance to study the same high-quality curriculum that gives them the knowledge they will need to participate and prosper in American society. Shanker agreed with Hirsch that such access is "a civil rights issue."
In August 1996, Chester Finn and Diane Ravitch issued a report from the Educational Excellence Network to its Education Policy Committee and the American people on the general status of "Education Reform 1995-1996." Their chapter on standards was entitled"Much Talk, Not Much Action." So they could give standards only a B-minus which meant they were on the low side of "Good Work." They were pleased that the Palisades summit was dominated by business and the state governors in contrast to the Charlottesville summit led by President Bush, although they admitted that President Clinton "delivered an excellent address to the summit-goers." They found that the efforts of the states were uneven at best, but that leaving standards to 15,000 local school districts or 110,000 public and private schools would be worse.
However, Finn and Ravitch agreed that the states should be the proper focus of the activity, even though there should not be an "Ohio English, Oregon math, or Vermont science. Further, looking at what states have produced to date, we find a motley collection, uneven in quality and rigor....In most states the standards are typically vague, overly broad, and undemanding." In their discussion of the eight subject fields in which national standards have been finished, they confined their remarks to the four that were finished in 1995-1996, calling them a mixed bag. They mentioned science ("some solid academic standards"), English ("a travesty"), foreign language ("a fair level of clarity"). and the revised U.S. history ("defensible").
I was disappointed that Finn and Ravitch could not bring themselves to mention approvingly the civics and government standards issued in 1994, which both had praised more than faintly on other occasions. They represent a strong contingent of conservative educational and political leaders who could, if they only would, argue that common civic values should be studied as part of the core studies in school on a level with English, science, math, and history and that therefore there should be "no Montana civics and no Texas government."
Such support could span much of the political spectrum inasmuch as Al Shanker remained until his death on February 22, 1997 a strong advocate of the civics and government standards. Shanker was a member of the National Review Committee of the civics standards and, earlier, he had been a member of the National Review Council of CIVITAS, chaired by Ernest Boyer. Shanker came to our meetings to review and criticize both volumes, and he always took an active part. It was most significant to have this consensus about the value of the civics standards from leaders who were basically political adversaries and who differed radically about the values of public education and the threats to public education from vouchers, parental choice, and privatization.
In his final column on March 2, 1997, "Where We Stand," a column which had appeared in the Sunday New York Times for 25 years, Shanker's autobiographical statement of 1990 is quoted as follows:
I believe that public education is the glue that has held this country together. Critics now say that the common school never really existed, that it's time to abandon this ideal in favor of schools that are designed to appeal to groups based on ethnicity, race, religion, class, or common interests of various kinds. But schools like these would foster divisions in our society; they would be like setting a time bomb....Public schools played a big role in holding our nation together. They brought together children of different races, languages, religions, and cultures and gave them a common language and a sense of common purpose....I know that keeping public education together is worth whatever effort it takes.Such a view demonstrates where the purposes of civic education and of public education coincide. It is a view that the advocates of choice, vouchers, privatization, charter schools and parental rights must come to terms with. The very least they can do is to accept, nay insist, that private and religious schools do at least as well as public schools in preparing their students for the rights and responsibilities of democratic citizenship as set forth in CIVITAS and in the National Standards for Civics and Government. It is fine for conservatives like Finn and Ravitch to be in favor of national standards, but it is difficult to see how standards can be achieved if public education is weakened in the process or if states are not somehow moving in a similar direction. Sending federal dollars to Alabama under the Goals 2000 program and allowing the state to use the money simply to strengthen its technology in the schools, as was approved in September 1996, does not necessarily promote education for civitas, or any other subject field for that matter.
One way to provide some continuity across state lines was envisioned at the Palisades summit of governors and business officers in March 1996, namely to establish a nonprofit, nonpartisan, nongovernmental "entity" called Achieve to act as a clearinghouse of information so that states can compare what progress they are making. Achieve was a political compromise. As of April 1997, a director for Achieve had still not been announced, but co-chairmen Governor Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin and Louis V. Gerstner, CEO of IBM, announced that a director would soon be named and the entity up and running. It was a political compromise to replace the National Education Standards and Improvement Council that had been part of the Goals 2000 Act. It was to be "national" but to have no "Federal" role or power to enforce or mandate anything. As Peter Applebome of the New York Times (December 8, 1996) put it, the nation is divided by the need to develop higher educational performance by meeting higher standards but which is opposed by the history of faith in education as a local enterprise: "What emerges is an odd dance of trying to establish guides that would lift national achievement without ceding an iota of local control." The year's delay in launching Achieve seemed to indicate that private, corporate, and state action sometimes can be no more efficient than the Federal Government itself.
Throughout the fall of 1996 the debates over standards continued to be featured in the public and professional press. For example, Sara Mosle, a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, argued in the Magazine (October 27, 1996):
Education is a campaign issue without a focus. The school reform that really matters is not vouchers or charter schools or breaking the unions or wiring the classrooms. It's a curriculum set in Washington, and monitored in every town and city through testing....Resistance to testing comes from both liberal and conservative quarters. Progressive educators worry that a national curriculum would lead to more rote exercises, unimaginative teaching, and a greater reliance on standardized tests, which they see as biased against poor and minority-group children. And conservatives, who you might think would cozy up to standards, are deeply suspicious of any sort of outside meddling in their neighborhood schools. Several districts, for instance, have turned down federal funds offered under Goals 2000 rather than cede any perceived control of their schools to the Federal Government.Mosle comes down on the side of national standards, citing conservatives Diane Ravitch and C. D. Hirsch as well as liberal Al Shanker as the leading advocates of standards. She insightfully points out that "Standards advocates like Shanker have essentially offered a trade-off with more progressive-minded educators: standards for charter schools. It's a deal that those on both the left and right can accept." She also had it right when she says that "Choice makes no sense without standards."
As the year 1996 ended, the question about what to do about national standards continued to be debated from all quarters of the political spectrum. In her valedictory article in the final issue of Network News and Views, Diane Ravitch was proudest of the work it and the Excellence Network had done on behalf of national standards and praised William Galston, President Clinton's domestic adviser during his first term, for advocating rigorous academic standards and examinations with high stakes attached. And at the beginning of the new year, standards emerged front and center on the political as well as the educational scene.
In mid-January 1997, Education Week issued a first-ever report entitled "Quality Counts: A Report Card on the Condition of Public Education in the 50 States." It compared and rated all states on 75 different indicators lumped into four categories, the first of which was "Standards and Assessments." Standards are being discussed in every state and the work in this area seems to be paying off. It is the one in which the states over-all earned their highest average grade = a B. Twenty-two states earned an A, thirteen a B, seven a C, two a D. Two states received F (Iowa and Wyoming) because they decided not to develop statewide standards and assessments. In generalizing, the report said:
Public education systems in the 50 states are riddled with excellence but rife with mediocrity. Despite 15 years of earnest efforts to improve public schools and raise student achievement, states haven't made much progress. As the new millennium approaches, there is growing concern that if public education doesn't soon improve, one of two outcomes is inevitable:Echoing these sentiments and those of his own Inaugural Address, President Clinton spelled out his educational agenda in his State of the Union Address on February 4, 1997. He said education would be the top priority for his second administration. He listed ten points of which the very first was to promote national standards that designate what all students must know to succeed in the 21st century and to create voluntary new national tests of student achievement in reading at the 4th grade level and in math at the 8th grade level. The first round of testing would be held in 1999. By concentrating on the relatively non-controversial subjects of reading and mathematics and the use of tests that were already well respected in these fields, Clinton hoped to gain support from a wide spectrum of the public and of educators.Our democratic system and our economic strength, both of which depend on an educated citizenry, will steadily erode; or,
Alternative forms of education will emerge to replace public schools as we have known them....
Either would be a sad loss for America.
Not surprisingly, his proposals on standards received approval from Checker Finn, Diane Ravitch, and Republican Governor George Engler of Michigan as well as Democratic Governor Roy Romer of Colorado, the National Alliance of Business, and the Business Round Table. Conservatives were split, with opposition coming from the Eagle Forum's Phyllis Schafley and FairTest. Liberal educators were not altogether happy, as witnessed by Professor Richard Wolf of Teachers College. But the heads of both teachers unions told the National Press Club that they supported higher standards for student achievement. And, surprising to many, was the report of a survey by Public Agenda which revealed that three-fourths of American teenagers readily admitted that they would work harder on their studies if they were required to meet higher academic standards as measured by rigorous tests.
At the end of April1997, it was still too soon to judge how "national" the practice of creating and assessing national standards will become and how widely national or international tests will be used to assess achievement of the standards among the states and localities. President Clinton proposed that voluntary national tests be developed comparable to those of the highly regarded National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) to assess reading achievement and those of the Third International Mathematical and Science Study (TIMSS) to assess mathematics achievement. However, the anti-Washington mood was still so strong that this was greeted by the warning that "it would be wrong for the White House or Congress to start mandating what those [national] standards should be." So said Republican Governor Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin in the New York Times on February 21, 1997:
"It should be up to the states and local school boards to decide what the students need to learn. Education is a local issue....Setting world-class standards for our schools will be successful only if it is done from the ground up--by parents, teachers, administrators, businesses, and local tax payers,...So while the state [of Wisconsin] is developing a model set of standards, it is up to each school district to adopt that model, modify it or establish its own standards....Most of us agree that rigorous academic standards will help us improve our schools. It's best if the parents of Elroy, Wis. and other communities across America set those standards."Governor Thompson's views reflected the views of a critical mass of state and local officials as well as conservative educators and states-rights citizens like John Silber, chairman of the Massachusetts Board of Education, and Edwin Delattre, dean of Boston University's School of Education. At a luncheon meeting of governors and business leaders at the National Press Club on March 27, Governor Thompson and Louis Gerstner reiterated the view that educational reform could be achieved from the ground up by states and localities. They praised the efforts of several governors since the summit of March 1996. One way to spread knowledge about these efforts is through the new web site now established by Achieve. It will enable the states and localities to learn about what other states and localities are doing about standards and assessments and to compare the quality so that states can compete scholastically as they do in other ways. Already 30 states are on the internet web and an executive director will soon be appointed.
In answer to questions, Governor Thompson praised the great leadership of Al Shanker of the AFT and said he was heartened by the recent views of Bob Chase, new president of the National Education Association and would meet with him later that day. He also wished that controversies over national standards would cease and leave the matter to the states. Similarly, he was willing to leave the U.S. Department alone to do its work. Mr. Gerstner also argued that internet access would help the process of developing standards from the ground up. Standards will look alike if teachers will get with it. He also offered a provocative challenge to government and business: For every dollar spent on computers, we should spend a dollar on educating teachers. I hope he meant that the education of teachers should include more than simply how to run computers. This brings me to my final Afterword topic.
The underlying theme of these three papers was that the professional preparation of all teachers should include a core program of studies devoted to what I called the "civic foundations of education." This civic core should be universally present, indeed required, in the liberal arts education and in the professional training of all prospective teachers. I argued that the civic foundations of education should accompany the other three elements usually required in high grade programs of teacher education, namely, substantial academic preparation in a major field of teaching, pedagogical knowledge and expertise in the ways students learn, and practical experience in the classroom under the tutelage of a master teacher. I argued that for a decade the major players in educational reform had paid little attention to teacher education for civitas; I cited the 1983 Excellence Commission and the Holmes Group of education deans in 1986.
Nor was the civic goal of teacher education highlighted in the initial policies and perspectives of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards in 1989, even though Lee Shulman and Gary Sykes at Stanford had included in their report to the Carnegie Forum on Education and the Economy in May 1986 a category of assessment that would have embraced such a goal. One of the eight categories they proposed for assessment of what highly competent professional teachers need to know was called "Foundations of Professional Understanding" (including history and policy; philosophy and psychology; cultural and cross-cultural factors; professional ethics). I do not know what happened to this category, but the final categories did not seem to assess civic understanding among the best-qualified teachers of the nation.
The same story continued. The Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium (INTASC), a project sponsored by the Council of Chief State School Officers, was initiated to develop a model set of standards for beginning teachers that will identify the "common core" of knowledge and skills that all new teachers should possess and to make the initial licensure requirements of the states compatible with the advanced certification principles of the National Board. Again, I did not notice any particular mention of the need for beginning teachers to know about the fundamental principles and values of constitutional democracy or about the basic civic mission of public education in preparing youth for citizenship.
I argued that the new licensing and certification goals being set by these new agencies could begin by adapting the volume CIVITAS as an excellent basis for such a civic foundations program. And I expressed the hope that the federal enactment of Goals 2000, then being prepared in both houses of Congress, would be favorable to such ideas. I said in my Indiana paper:
The prospect that national education goals will be embodied in federal law is truly a landmark in the history of American education. The time is therefore now for those in teacher education to make sure that our historic rhetoric from the time of Jefferson and Madison, extolling the role of public education in forming all American youth into good citizens, can be more fully realized than ever before.My optimism was further heightened by the fact that civics and government had been added to the list of "challenging subject matter" courses of core studies in the Goals 2000 legislation to improve K-12 education. The prospective legislation also included federal funds to the states for "the improvement of preservice teacher education and school administrator programs " so that they will equip educators with the subject matter and pedagogical expertise necessary for preparing their students to meet challenging standards. And Congress did in fact add "Teacher Education and Professional Development" as a seventh national education goal.
I believed that if teacher education were embedded in our national education goals, this too would mark a genuinely new chapter in the history of American education. It would mean that teacher training programs (both pre-service and in-service) should be geared to the subject matter areas for which national standards of achievement for students were being developed. As John F. Jennings put it in the Kappan (December 1992): "It makes no sense to have agreement on what students should know and be able to do in these various areas unless teachers are trained in this content." And if the components of teacher education are limited to (1) competence in the subject matter of a particular major field, (2) psychological knowledge and skills necessary for effective teaching and learning, and (3) supervised practical and clinical experience in the classroom, it is likely that the citizenship goal will be passed over in the federal initiatives for national education reform as it has been in most of the educational movements by professional and state agencies since 1983.
I would define the "civic foundations of education" as that aspect of teacher education which prepares all teachers to play their civic and vocational roles as professional decision-makers in an educational system devoted to strengthening a democratic society. (For elaboration, see "The Time Is Now:-To Frame the Civic Foundations of Teacher Education" in the Journal of Teacher Education, November/December 1993.)
The civic foundations of education should take seriously and explicitly the historic argument that the primary reason for establishing and maintaining universal education in the American Republic is to develop among all students, whether in public or private schools, the knowledge, sentiments, virtues, and skills of democratic citizenship. This surely includes a reasoned commitment to the fundamental values and principles of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights as well as an understanding of the issues and controversies that still confront educators today. Teacher education programs should enable all members of the teaching profession to develop a coherent intellectual and moral framework of the meaning of democratic citizenship from which to view the role they should play as professional educators in American democratic society. This task was the original purpose of the "Foundations of Education," as first developed at Teachers College, Columbia University during the 1930s to the 1950s and carried on by the American Educational Studies Association and by twenty professional education associations collectively organized in the Council of Learned Societies in Education, now a constituent member of the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education.
The fundamental character of a profession is the capacity of its members to make informed judgments about the public good and to promote the general welfare as well as the individual welfare of the particular persons for whom they have special responsibility. If teaching is to become a genuine profession, it must include foundational studies that bring the scholarship of the academic disciplines to bear upon the policies, practices, and public issues facing education, especially those involving such basic values and principles of American constitutional democracy spelled out in CIVITAS and the National Standards for Civics and Government. I treat them very briefly in my Minnesota lecture: the public good, justice, freedom, equality, diversity, truth, and patriotism. (pp. 38-43)
The codification of national education goals in federal law under the "Goals 2000: Educate America Act," could truly be a landmark in the history of American education. And as federal funds are allocated to states and institutions of higher education to help improve pre-service and in-service teacher education, we in the organized profession of education should be doing all we can to see that such funds are not limited, as they now are, by the narrower purposes to equip educators with subject matter and pedagogical expertise.
New standards for teacher education should be defined in such way that the primary civic purpose of American education is appropriately and specifically cared for. If the civic foundations of education are simply ignored or tucked in under the headings of "subject matter" or "pedagogical expertise," the civic purpose will be lost. And if the general "foundations of professional understanding" are recognized but do not specifically center upon the role of schools in a democratic society, the civic purpose will be muted at best.
As I say in my article in the Journal of Teacher Education:
I would not leave the [foundational] task solely to courses in the academic studies of general or liberal education or to case studies in the pedagogical methods or practice teaching periods of training. To understand and carry out the appropriate role of education in a democratic society, all teachers need (1) to know what the fundamental values and principles of a democratic society are, and they must (2) undertake sustained and specific study of those values, principles, and institutions in such way that they can then pursue their educative role in preserving and regenerating those democratic values and principles. The first point cannot wholly be learned in general education nor can the second point simply be left to the subject matter, pedagogical expertise, or practice of a particular school subject. Both goals should be knit together in an integrated teaching and learning process that I am calling the "civic foundations of teacher education.So, I urge the appropriate professional education associations to put that theme front and center in their emerging consensus-building process. If we do this seriously, we may be able not only to inject the civic foundations requirements into the new statement of accreditation standards developed by the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE), but we may also be able to influence the movement for national education standards being pursued by federal and state governments, by the major assessment agencies like the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and the New Standards Project, and by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. If we can achieve model national standards for the study of civics and government in the schools K-12, as we have done so successfully, why not do the same for the civic foundations of teacher education? Unless we mobilize our efforts around the civic foundations, I believe that what is now usually called "the social foundations of education" in teacher education will become still further marginalized in the 1990s.
In the past year, my hopes for the civic foundations of education were lifted by President Clinton's support for states to push forward with national academic standards, with federal funding to develop national assessments in math and reading and with his proposal for federal support of the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards. These moves and his often repeated references to the importance of character and civic education were encouraging. I even had hopes that these moves would make it possible for the key players in teacher education to give more attention to the fundamental civic mission of American education in their efforts to reform American education.
Up to now, the most widely publicized projects of the educational reform movement have scarcely addressed the civic mission. For example, in July 1992 when the New American Schools Development Corporation announced its eleven Select Design team to receive millions of private money to "reinvent the American school" and to design "break the mold schools," I found sparse mention of education for citizenship aside from a few references to voluntary community service of some kind. The dominant themes were learning by doing, hands-on-experience, active and experiential learning, student-initiated projects, parent participation, and so on. Except for frequent references to high technology and "total quality management," I had the eerie feeling that I had just arrived at Teachers College in the 1930s and was listening to William H. Kilpatrick expound on John Dewey and the project method in progressive education.
Similarly, the early efforts of Chris Whittle's Edison project argued that the possibilities for restructuring their new, made-for-profit, private schools would be to "return pleasure to the learning process, abolish current academic subject boundaries, increase parental engagement and make learning fun again." I did not find reference to the civic goal of schooling, although I had strongly recommended just that when I sent a copy of CIVITAS to President Benno Schmidt before he left the presidency of Yale to undertake his new duties as head of the Edison project. Some time later, I received a letter from one of his staff members thanking me for my interest in the project.
The Commission set forth what it called a challenge to the nation and its education leaders, a challenge requiring unprecedented effort but not necessarily new theory: "Common sense suffices: American students are entitled to teachers who know their subjects, understand their students and what they need, and have mastered the professional skills required to make learning come alive." These three elements are repeated throughout the Summary Report and the full 150 page report. Naturally, I looked especially for what it said about the basic mission of universal education and its place in teacher education: education for civitas. I found one sentence in the Summary Report: "The education challenge facing the United States....is that schools must help the vast majority of young people reach levels of skills and competence once thought within reach of only a few, while also supporting a just and civil society that helps maintain our democratic life." (p. 8)
This statement is unexceptional and is one with which I thoroughly agree. The trouble I found was that the report constantly used only mathematics and science as subject matter examples of the ways the challenge could be met; it seldom mentions the other core subjects in the school curriculum; it never mentions civics and government as a core school subject or education for civitas as a core element in the education of teachers, either in the liberal arts background or as the civic foundations in teacher education. Whether this was an attempt to avoid examples from core subjects that might arouse controversy, as the history and English standards had done, or whether it was simply that high standards in math and science are readily acceptable to business and political leaders, I do not know.
I did note that the main body of the Report of the Commission spells out the ways that the education of teachers should be organized around the new standards expected of students. Eight points of a reinvented teacher education program are (pp.76-77):
On a more positive note, I applaud the Commission's effort to mobilize three major professional organizations to reach agreement on what teachers should know and be able to do in order to help students to achieve high standards: the National Council for Accreditation in Teacher Education (NCATE) to improve schools of education, the Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium (INTASC) to improve state licensing requirements for beginning teachers, and the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) to set standards for advanced professional certification.
Praise for the Commission's efforts came from many quarters. President Clinton, Secretary Riley and the U.S. Department of Education, and seven states almost immediately signed on. The New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, and I don't know how many other newspaper editorials bespoke approval, including my local Monterey County Herald. The Phi Delta Kappan's issue of November 1996 featured the Commission Report with seven articles written by the leaders of the major professional organizations that were seeking collaboration in teacher education: Arthur Wise for NCATE, Linda Darling-Hammond for the Report, Gordon Ambach for INTESC, and James Kelly for the NBPTS. Only Kelly coupled "the continual need for a well-educated citizenry to sustain the nation's democratic values and institutions" with the need for better-educated workers to bolster the nation's economic competitiveness.
However, I know from prior experience that Gordon Ambach favored the views of CIVITAS, for he was an active member of its National Review Council. He was also a member of the National Advisory Committee and of the National Review Committee of the National Standards for Civics and Government. He was one of those educators who were instrumental in getting civics and government added to the original "core studies" of America 2000 and Goals 2000, which at the outset were limited to English, math, science, history, and geography. Jim Kelly was a member of the National Review Committee of the National Standards. So, I would hope and expect that these several leaders would approve the kind of requirement in education for civitas that I believe should be imbedded in the accreditation, the licensing, and the certification of the new legions of teachers who will be needed in the very near future.
Among the other authors in that issue of Kappan, the only one who includes an explicit argument for democratic values and citizenship as a major ingredient in teacher education was, as I was ready to expect, John Goodlad. He makes it clear that "what schools should do above all else is development of democratic character: "enculturation of the young into a social and political democracy....The outcomes [of schooling] must constantly and unwaveringly be the development of individual and collective democratic character." Somewhat later in two Commentary pieces in Education Week (February 5 and 12, 1997), Goodlad expressed cautious optimism about the National Commission's recommendations and welcomed its support for strengthened schools of education.
I find Goodlad's views on democratic character thoroughly consonant with my own. I hope that his former leadership role as president of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE) and his present role as co-director of the Center for Educational Renewal at the University of Washington will enable him and like-minded leaders like David Imig, the chief executive officer of AACTE, to nudge the momentum to reform teacher education, now reenergized by the National Commission, to include explicit requirements for education for civitas in the accreditation of schools of education, the state licensing of beginning teachers, and the certification of outstanding professional teachers.
Of course, criticisms of the National Commission came from several other points of view. Chester Finn found it basically to be a reflection of the teacher education establishment, teachers unions, and schools of education, which he believes are basically inimical to American education; the report consists of a defense of the status quo with "a few token mild shaker uppers." The "Network News and Views" gave the Commission's Report in its October 1996 issue only a short and somewhat huffy notice. Others, as I have done, criticized the Commission for what it did not do. For example, in Education Week (February 19, 1997) Maxine Greene, William F. Russelll Professor Emeritus in the Foundations of Education at Teachers College, criticized the Report for "its all-too-familiar dismissal of the arts," which has been one of her major interests throughout her career.
As might be expected, Maxine, who was the second Russell Professor in the Foundations of Education, and I, who was the first, bring to bear our distinctive views of what the "Foundations of Education" should mean in teacher education. They also appear to differ in some notable respects from those of Linda Darling-Hammond, who is the third Russell Professor at Teachers College. As I indicated in my Minnesota Lecture and in this Afterword, I have been trying to convince the foundation's scholars in the American Educational Studies Association (AESA) and in the Council of Learned Societies in Education (CLSE) to hammer away at the certification and licensing agencies to make the civic foundations of education a required core in teacher education as well as in grades K-12 and in the liberal arts. In the past couple of years I have tried to persuade three university schools of education to do that very thing: Wisconsin, Indiana, and most recently Minnesota.
I warrant that the rhetoric of my Minnesota CIVITAS lecture and this Afterword will sound out of sync with that of many of the younger generation of foundations professors, but I sincerely hope that an effort will be made to find common ground among foundations scholars rather than emphasizing what is surely a generation gap. My emphasis on education for civitas includes a balance among the democratic values of the public good, individual rights, justice, equality, diversity, truth, and patriotism. These values evoke different responses from a younger generation devoted increasingly to diversity, pluralism, and multiculturalism, but I believe, as CIVITAS and the National Standards for Civics and Government do, that all seven civic values should be treated in good faith as bulwarks of democracy. Such ideas and values must be strengthened if public education itself is to survive and thrive.
I believe that the members of AESA and of CLSE should be "empowering" the public and the profession to withstand what Frank Rich in The New York Times (October 9, 1996) termed the "escalating passions of a bitter culture war that threatens to boil over after Nov. 5." Foundations scholars need to try to damp down and counteract the fiery attacks from Bork and Bennett, Robertson and Reed, the Christian Coalition, the Promise Keepers, First Things, etc., etc. they should try to extinguish the fires of incendiary efforts that would consume public education with the politics of mistrust and proposals for vouchers, parental rights, prayer, and privatization. They should vigorously try to inject the scholarly objectives of education for civitas into the accreditation standards set up by NCATE, of which CLSE ia a constituent part.
Meanwhile, I am cautiously optimistic that the Commission's What Matters Most will move forward a consensus on national standards for what teachers should know and be able to do in the civic foundations of education. The complete Report does indeed devote three of its 150 pages to the urgent need "to reaffirm a consensus about the role and purposes of public education in a democracy--and the prime importance of learning in meeting those purposes." Those pages (10-13) are eloquently "foundational," but I found no clue in the curriculum content or methods proposed in the report as to the ways that pre-service or in-service teachers will be prepared to join in or to lead this consensus-building process on behalf of public education and the democratic values it is designed to serve.
There is much talk with which I agree about the need "to develop and enforce rigorous standards for teacher preparation, initial licensing, and continuing development." There is praise for the standards being set by NCATE, INTASC, and the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, but the overall ingredients of a reinvented teacher education program seem to be summed up in the phrase that "the best teachers understand their subjects, know how young people learn, and have mastered a range of teaching methods." I don't find a distinctive foundational theme in those three familiar ingredients, no matter how reinvented or reinvigorated they may become. And I don't find specific attention to civic curriculum content in the teacher education program required of new or inservice teachers.
Perhaps the greatest contribution of the Commission Report will be that it caught the attention of public and profession alike, from President Clinton to local school districts. Especially valuable is the fact that several of the most important professional education organizations have been prompted to work together, along with key federal and foundational support. This is symbolized in the Education Week story (March 12, 1997) by Ann Bradley with the headline "Clinton Teacher Board Proposal Marks Milestone." She also points out that the "presidential stamp of approval is the result of cooperation among three present and former state governors, James B. Hunt of North Carolina, Richard Riley of South Carolina, and Bill Clinton of Arkansas." (Democrats all.)
That all would not be sweetness and light in the reaction of the states to the Commission was similarly illustrated in two articles in Education Week (April 9, 1997). One described a round-table conference at the White House in which Clinton was making "his pitch for new national tests" to measure achievement toward new national education standards. He received enthusiastic support from Delaine Eastin, California's State Superintendent of Public Instruction (a Democrat) and executives of 200 California technology companies. But sharp criticism came immediately from California's Office of Child Development which is controlled by Governor Pete Wilson (a Republican),
The problem, however, is not easily defined as a purely partisan "politics of standards." In the same issue of Education Week, two officials of the Council for Basic Education, a conservative organization favoring high academic standards, praised Clinton's campaign of "Stumping for Standards." They were pleased because the tests would not come from the Federal government but would be based on the NAEP, "a highly regarded exam that has been created through consensus by teachers and subject specialists and used by states for 27 years." Such tests would make possible comparisons of school achievement among the states. They agreed, however, with David Broder of the Washington Post that the President is not going far enough, that testing should eventually include many more subjects than just reading and math, and that it should continue beyond the proposed one year of testing in 1999. But, the politics of standards appears when the authors, Christopher Cross and Scott Joftus, argue that it would be politically unwise to include other subjects for testing at this time, because "there is simply not enough consensus over what all students should learn in such subjects as science and history, and such a debate would detract from the wide consensus that exists in reading and math."
Here, again, I believe that education for civitas could come to the rescue. The National Standards for Civics and Government have already been adopted by NAEP for its testing program in 1998. The civics standards have already arrived at the "consensus" that Cross and Joftus are worried about. To be sure, there will be controversy over them in the political climate in which we now live. But, I believe that the civics standards should not be avoided or skipped over because they might be controversial. What subject is more appropriate for teaching the civic understanding and the civility to be expected of democratic citizens? We should not wait until grown-ups become members of Congress before they try to solve problems with civility, as 200 members of the House of Representatives tried to do at Hershey, Pennsylvania in March 1997. We should begin in the elementary and secondary schools and carry on right through undergraduate college years and professional education. "Hands-on learning" has long been a by-word of educational reformers. The Standards for Civics and Government will enable us to talk more and teach more about "minds-on" learning as well.
In my Minnesota lecture and in this Afterword I concentrated mostly on education for civitas in schools and in professional education. Elsewhere, I have dealt with civitas in undergraduate college education, most recently in a paper on "CIVITAS@UWMadison" delivered at a joint conference of the University of Wisconsin Integrated Liberal Studies Program and the Meiklejohn Education Association. I will not try to revisit my own previous writings, but simply make the point that the central core of liberal and general education for all students after high school must include education for civitas as a significant requirement of all students.
One recent headline in the New York Times (March 5, 1997) reads: "A Plan Seeks to Inspire Civics and Big Questions." A committee of faculty members and students at UCLA have proposed to "replace traditional freshman classes like English Comp and Sociology 101 with a core interdisciplinary curriculum that encourages students "to ask the large questions and become good citizens." Among the three proposed required courses would be one on "Democracy." This sounds like education for civitas and like Alexander Astin's views that I quoted in my Minnesota lecture (p. 45). The importance of the UCLA program even fits nicely with an article by George Will in the Washington Post (March 30, 1997) in which he praised a new book by Anne Mathews entitled Bright College Years: Inside the American Campus Today. One statistic: One of the courses with the highest enrollments across the country is American Studies. Such courses could be logical candidates to rally around education for civitas as proposed at UCLA.
The intent of the project is that the Framework will become a resource for the development of civic education programs to prepare youth and adults for democratic citizenship in countries around the world, especially those that are emerging from some forms of authoritarianism. The Framework will be designed to be applicable to and adaptable by any country that has established or seeks to establish, consolidate, or maintain a constitutional democratic political system. The framework could easily be called "Education for Democratic Civitas."
The "Framework of Education for Democracy" is funded by the U.S. Department of Education and conducted with the assistance of the U.S. Information Agency. Although the project is supported by these branches of the U.S. Government, the developmental process and the Framework will be solely the responsibility of the Center for Civic Education and the international committees established for the project by the Center. Public and private groups alike, such as ministries of education, universities, teacher training institutions, independent educational centers, academic and professional associations, and textbook publishers as well as teachers and educational administrators from many countries will take part in drawing up the Framework. The goal is that it thus will be adaptable to the particular circumstances of different national states. As a private, independent, nonprofit educational organization, the Center for Civic Education has already demonstrated its ability to achieve these purposes in its twenty years of success in publishing curriculum materials widely used in the United States and around the world. Among these, CIVITAS: A Framework for Civic Education (1991) and the National Standards for Civics and Government (1994), were both originally focused on the United States. They now provide a basis for constructing world class standards in the teaching of civics and government.
The Center is in the process of organizing a number of international committees to undertake the project, aiming for completion by the fall of 1998.
The Framework Steering Committee, consisting of several academic scholars from several countries, was organized in the spring of 1997, and an early draft of the Framework was being circulated for preliminary discussion.
This international development to promote education for civitas in many countries of the world is of profound significance for the peace and progress of the world. It strengthens the efforts to raise the academic standards of students in the United States and in the newly independent states. In both cases, the education of teachers is a crucial link in the process.
Meanwhile, in Washington on April 17 - 18, a national forum was held entitled "Attracting and Preparing Teachers for the 21st Century." The forum included 50 of the 1997 Teachers of the Year and 50 university and teacher education leaders (by invitation only) for a candid discussion of the best ways to prepare teachers for the United States in coming years. I shall be interested to see if this American project devotes as much attention to education for civitas in the preparation of American teachers as does the international Framework.
And toward the end of April 1997 a whole galaxy of events and conferences highlighted various facets of the movement for educational reform that could have enormous bearing on strengthening education for civitas. However, this swirl of attention could also serve to undercut the movement by appeals that divert attention from embedding the three-fold aspects of education for democratic civitas in teacher education: civic knowledge, civic values and principles, and civic participation.
Simultaneously, in the effort to apply the values of volunteering to school practice on a more organized basis, a group of some 40 educational and social service agencies announced on April 14 the forming of a coalition called the "Partnering Initiative on Education and Civil Society." The goal of a ten-year program is to make service learning and "civil education" an integral part of linking schools to other community services. The potential is indicated by the fact that many of the leading professional education organizations have signed on to the idea of service learning, including: the National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers, the Council of Chief State School Officers, the National School Boards Association,the National Association of Elementary School Principals, the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, the American Association of School Administrators, the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, several other higher education organizations, and the U.S. Department of Education. The group was convened by the Corporation for National Service, which administers AmeriCorps and other federal programs of service learning.
According to Education Week (April 16, 1997), the initiative will stress seven principles of "civil education:"
Two examples illustrating possible confusion over what schools should be doing on behalf of education for civitas took place almost simultaneously over the last weekend of April 1997. From April 26 to 28 in Washington, D.C., 1200 high school students were taking part in the finals of a national competition called "We the People..." to see which teams from schools from all over the country displayed most convincingly their understanding of the U.S. Constitution. These students had been studying the Constitution during the school year and were the winners of competitions in the form of simulated legislative hearings held among schools in nearly all Congressional districts and states. These were the state champions. The knowledge, the thought, and the skill on display were exemplary examples of relating academic learning to active participation, conducted each year by the Center for Civic Education.
General Powell is leading the new organization for volunteerism called the Alliance for Youth. It's too early to judge how much further momentum the educators' "Partnering Initiative on Education for Civil Society" will gain from the Presidents' summit or whether they will be in competition. But it is surely clear that the Philadelphia occasion gained far more attention from the media and the public than did the students' display of knowledge and expertise about the Constitution in Washington. Whatever else, the Summit surely drew attention to the meaning of civitas: the role of government in the United States and the role of citizens in American society. At the outset, President Clinton said "I'm here because I want to redefine the meaning of citizenship in America." And the New York Times on April 29 summed up the Summit in the headline "Presidents Call for Big Citizenship, Not Big Government."
This multiplying of attention to the voluntary aspects of the role of citizenship in American life can only be beneficial if it supports and encourages and does not detract from the need for continuing, systematic, and professional education for civitas in schools, colleges, and teacher education. If they support each other, they could produce a bountiful opportunity to combat the "politics of mistrust." And I hope that they will energize the spread of an education for civitas whose goal the Times could call "Better Citizenship and Better Government."
But there are indeed ominous signs for public education and the role of government in civic education. In coming years, we must thread our way through the minefields being set for public education and for teacher education by extremists on the right as well as extremists on the left. The religious right is mounting national campaigns to elect conservative majorities on local school boards as well as in state legislatures and in Congress. These are largely devoted to reducing the role of government in education or at least increasing the role of religion in education. Campaigns to authorize public funds to provide vouchers for all parents to send their children to private and sectarian religious schools are being mounted in many states. The Supreme Court is reconsidering the constitutional precedents that it set in 1985 with the Aguilar v. Fenton decision, which prohibited public school teachers from going into parochial schools to give remedial lessons to low-achieving, poor children who qualified for federal funds under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. This reconsideration, supported by the Clinton administration, may well provide an occasion for an increasingly conservative Court to make still more permeable Jefferson's and Madison's wall of separation between church and state. We will know by June 1997 how firm is the wall's foundation. Since the agendas of some conservative organizations signalize clear and present dangers to the future of public education, I do not believe that public education will be saved by the rhetoric of programs in teacher education whose primary goal is touted to the public by professors of education who rely primarily on the development of a "critical pedagogy" that "empowers teachers" to become "transformative intellectuals who are capable of wondering, pondering, and critique."
Teacher education must not shrink from the historic educational goal called "civic virtue," defined as a citizen's obligation to promote the public good in a democratic republic. The idea of civic virtue as a prime value of public education was virtually laughed out of the classrooms and campuses during the student generations of the 1960s and 1970s, and thus is seldom heard in the teacher education programs of the 1980s. Perhaps, the revival of the volunteering mood to service learning will provide a more hospitable climate for professional educators to deal with the values of civic virtue in education. Indeed, the growth of the politics of mistrust of government has become so prevalent that the reenergizing of a sense of civic virtue in teacher education may be its most important agendum in the 1990s. We need more than ever not only a good public education but we need a public-good education. We will not achieve either one, unless we create a public-good teacher education.
On this note, I close this Afterword in the hope that the new enterprises of education for democratic civitas on both the domestic and international fronts can succeed in their own terms and in support of one another. For, above all, the success of democracy in any country in the world rests in the long run upon the success of education for democratic civitas in its schools, in its higher educational institutions, and in its education of teachers.
What permanent and prestigious American educational agency, non-governmental and non-partisan, could provide a powerful leadership for teacher education programs in such way that civic knowledge, civic values, constitutional principles, and civic participation are all nicely balanced in order to promote a healthier democratic government and citizenry as well as a vibrant civil society? For one, I nominate the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, which did so much under the leadership of Ernest Boyer to promote education for civitas from the early childhood years to the college and university years. This challenge to make civitas a core element in teacher education is especially suited to Boyer's successor as president of the Carnegie Foundation, Lee S. Shulman, who is Charles E. Ducommon Professor of Education at Stanford University.
I hope that Lee Shulman and other educational leaders will be able to synthesize the current educational reform efforts and focus them upon achieving (1) higher academic standards in the civic knowledge, the civic values and the civic participation for all students at all levels of education, (2) the accrediting. licensing, and certification of all teachers in the civic foundations of teacher education, and (3) the dispositions of civic virtue and the skills of civic participation that can best be achieved by service learning for all. If these three ingredients of education for civitas could motivate and inform one other, together and in concert, they could teach the civic lessons that all Americans must learn. The first priority of the next Educational Summit should be to bring together representatives of federal, state, and local government, the voluntary civil society, and the educational professions to begin the joint process of considering a Summa of Education for Citizenship (Summa Educationis pro Civitati) that will guide American education into the 21st century.
I know that many educators and politicians argue that educational reform must work from the "bottom up" rather than being imposed from the "top down." But how is general agreement and consensus to be achieved unless a wide variety of people try to talk seriously and work together to formulate the "summa" of a subject? My Latin dictionary defines the word summa as "the main thing, chief point, principal matter, sum, essence, substance." The Random House Dictionary of the English Language, 2nd edition, Unabridged, defines the English word summa as "a comprehensive work or series of works covering, synthesizing, or summarizing a particular field or subject." In Latin, or in English, or in any other language, "the main thing" needed in the world today is the security and flourishing of democratic republican governments in all parts of the world. And that is why it is so important for educators, government, and civil society to concentrate attention upon "the substance, the chief point, the principal matter" of the best type of education to serve democratic civitas.
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