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September 30, 2010

what our social studies teachers think

The American Enterprise Institute has released a new survey called "High Schools, Civics, and Citizenship: What Social Studies Teachers Think and Do." I know four of the authors and respect their work in general as well as this particular survey.

Ideology is inescapable when we consider civic (a.k.a. political) education. AEI is generally seen as a conservative organization, but that does not mean that the report is biased or designed to reach conclusions convenient to conservatives. On the contrary, it rebuts the kind of sharp conservative critique represented by Chester Finn and colleagues in a 2003 Thomas B. Fordham Institute report entitled Where Did Social Studies Go Wrong?. Finn claimed that students emerged "from K-12 education and then, alas, from college with ridiculously little knowledge or understanding of their country’s history, their planet's geography, their government's functioning, or the economy's essential workings." The underlying problem, he asserted, was that social studies teachers had bad values. By the year 2001, he wrote:

This assertion was not based on any data whatsoever. In contrast, the new AEI survey finds:

In the AEI survey, 60% of teachers think it is "absolutely essential" to teach students to "follow rules and be respectful of authority." Many fewer (37%) think it's absolutely essential to teach students "to be activists who challenge the status quo of our political system and seek to remedy injustices." Four out of five consider it absolutely essential to know the components of the Bill of Rights and to have "good work habits such as being timely, persistent, and hardworking." One in five think that education professors are overly critical of the US; eight percent think those professors are overly appreciative.

The AEI results are consistent with our own finding that many more young Americans recall studying "great American heroes and virtues of the political system” than "racism and other forms of injustice.” I don't necessarily object to the balance that exists in most American classrooms, but I do think leftists critics have more empirical basis for their complaints than conservatives have. If the ideological valence in our schools is wrong, it's not that students receive an overly cynical account of American history but rather than real injustices are ignored.

On most of the questions about values and goals, public school and private school teachers respond similarly. But their actual practices are different. For example, 86% of private school students say they expect their students to keep up with the news, compared to 44% of public school teachers. That could be in part because laws and policies that govern public schools make no place for current events. Forty-five percent of public school teachers in the survey--but only 9 percent of private school teachers--say that "social studies has been deemphasized" because of No Child Left Behind.

September 30, 2010 1:48 PM | category: advocating civic education | Comments

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