Where Teachers and the Public Agree, and Disagree, on Civics Education
by Frederick M. Hess • Jun 17, 2011 at 8:14 am
Cross-posted from Education Week
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ShareThe past decade has seen remarkably little attention to citizenship education in American schooling. That, I'd argue, is one factor contributing to the latest, dismal NAEP results in civics and history. What such results don't tell us though is what Americans themselves think about citizenship education. Do they think it's important? Do they think particular topics deserve more attention? Do they have strong feelings about how it's taught? Indeed, the last study to address this question was Public Agenda's 1998 report "A Lot To Be Thankful For;" the annual Phi Delta Kappan/Gallup poll has not asked about this topic since 2000.
That's why I've been championing more serious and sustained attention to these questions. Last fall, you may recall, my AEI shop published Steve Farkas and Ann Duffett's study "High Schools, Civics, and Citizenship: What Social Studies Teachers Think and Do," which examined the behaviors and beliefs of high school civics teachers. Farkas and Duffett found that social studies teachers felt marginalized in the NCLB era, with few confident that their students were mastering key elements of citizenship like, you know, being able to identify protections in the Bill of Rights.
Now, in a companion study, my colleagues Daniel Lautzenheiser, Andrew Kelly, and Cheryl Miller, have crunched brand-new data they've collected on public attitudes to examine how similar or different are the
