| Spring 2005 |
Volume 11 No.1
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| Project
Profiles |
| Spring 2005 |
Volume 11 No.1
|
| Project
Profiles |
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Supported by the Civic Mission of Schools, 18 statewide coalitions have launched action plans to strengthen civic-education policies and practices in their state. Some have formed public- and private-sector task forces to implement education policy reform. Others are working to improve K–12 programs, assessment tools, professional development, and student participation in education reform. This is the first in a series of profiles Service-Learning NETWORK will publish featuring the Civic Mission of Schools State Campaign Teams. [Alaska] [California] [Idaho] [New Hampshire] [New Jersey] [North Carolina] [Pennsylvania] Alaska Teaching Justice Network The Alaska Teaching Justice Network plans to identify resources for K–12 civic learning in Alaska and assess the state of civic knowledge of Alaska’s youth, while educators and social scientists conduct focus groups for students, parents, and community members. This research will serve as the foundation for a white paper offering recommendations for strengthening Alaska’s civic education. NETWORK spoke with Barbara Hood, Co-Coordinator for the Alaska Teaching Justice Network. Alaska is unique in its size and population distribution. There are also many real-life issues involving tribal versus state jurisdiction, but not all Alaskan villages have a tribal structure. You can’t use the same tools everywhere. Civic-education initiatives might work well at a village level, but Alaska’s rural and wilderness areas are isolated, making it difficult and costly to collaborate. We have obstacles to overcome. Once we set up civic education programs, will we have the resources to follow through? How do you measure learning with limited resources? Teacher turnover is a real problem in Alaska’s rural areas. But we have great forward momentum. We’ve been able to form partnerships. We’re really just a network of people working in law and education who said, “We’re going to form a coalition.” Now, University of Alaska educators are ready to design civic-education surveys and implementation plans while dedicated teachers and lawyers run on volunteer sweat to improve teacher education in the bush. There’s something going on all the time in our ad hoc Alaska civic-education network. For more information, contact Barbara Hood, Alaska Teaching Justice Network, (907) 264-8230, or visit the web site. California Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools The California Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools, a collaborative project between Constitutional Rights Foundation and the Center for Civic Education, is allied with the National Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools (CMS). The California Campaign has enjoyed an active first year with 12 school districts participating to review current civic-education practices and develop plans to address the goals, recommendations, and practices as put forth in the Civic Mission of Schools report. The Campaign has developed task force groups including student representatives from the participating school sites. Each task force is assigned a different topic for examination: campaign policy, educational practices, public outreach, evaluation, and school site involvement. The California Campaign has also developed a "Civic-Education Best Practices" component that will provide K-12 civic-learning practices to support CMS goals of the Civic Mission of Schools report. To showcase examples of best civic-learning practices, participants download and complete an online form for consideration by the Cal Campaign Education Committee. For more information on the California Campaign, contact Todd Clark at (213) 316-2103, or visit the web site. The Idaho Coalition for the Civic Mission of Schools A coalition of Idaho’s educational, community, and policy leaders plan to focus on school-based accreditation and teacher preparation to improve civic education in Idaho. The project focuses on site reviews and scoring rubrics to document commitment to civic education and engagement in Idaho schools. Higher-education leaders are designing a model unit of civic education and engagement methods courses for Idaho social-studies teachers. NETWORK spoke with Dr. Dan Prinzing, the director of the Office of College School Partnerships at Boise State University in Idaho. In Idaho, we already have a strong strand of civic-education standards K–12. We offer a full year of American government studies, but there are no set methods for addressing these requirements. We want to give civic engagement some real meat: What are teachers doing to address those standards? We want to offer state accreditation to model schools. If a school principal was covering nothing more than a civics text, that wouldn’t be enough. Accreditation will call for civic engagement, with students attending city council meetings, writing legislators, generally finding their voices as citizens. What’s our next step? Principals can request a site review that would determine—Is this really a good citizenship class? Civic-education school? We would partner with the Idaho Senate to co-sponsor “Civic-Education” schools and present them with awards. Future partnership plans include collaboration between the Idaho Secretary of State and Dr. Marilyn Howard, the Idaho Superintendent of Public Instruction to create a voter-education act, produce materials on state and local government, conduct statewide mock elections, and advocate for online voter registration. When Dr. Howard recently spoke before the Idaho State Legislature, she told them they could expect increased emphasis on civic education. We plan to work together to implement her wishes. For more information, contact Dr. Dan Prinzing, Director, Office of College School Partnerships, Boise State University, (208) 426-1991. New Hampshire Alliance for Civic Engagement The New Hampshire Alliance for Civic Engagement plans to research civic education strategies at the K–12 and higher-education levels. The Alliance will identify effective strategies that New Hampshire educators are using to prepare engaged and responsible citizens and to disseminate and showcase these strategies to other civic educators and to local and state education policy makers. NETWORK spoke with Mica Stark, Director of Civic Education, New Hampshire Institute of Politics at Saint Anselm College and Vice Chair of the Alliance. A recent social studies survey of K-12 schools conducted by the New Hampshire General Court revealed that New Hampshire schools are doing a good job teaching civics and are engaged in a number of high-quality programs like We The People, Project Citizen, Mock Trial, Mock Election and service-learning. The Alliance seeks to follow up this study by asking educators to share lesson plans, activities and syllabi that they think are effectively engaging and preparing students to be active citizens. The Alliance is focusing on civic-education skill-building activities and find methods to share knowledge, methodologies, and resources with other educators. “In our search for a method to accomplish this goal, we found it easy to get our hands around the Promising Approaches put forth by the Civic Mission of Schools. We decided that these approaches would serve as an effective organizer for developing a statewide civic-education best practices guide,” said Stark. The collection of information takes person power and person power means partnerships. The Alliance is establishing strong relationships with lawmakers to build support for civic learning in New Hampshire. “At the conclusion of our research and information gathering, we will present our findings and recommendations to education leaders and the New Hampshire State Legislature.” To that end, “we will assemble student and teacher teams, hopefully each representing one of six promising approaches to articulate to lawmakers how they are practicing civic engagement and measuring its impact.” The Alliance is currently organizing a demonstration showcase event with lawmakers for later this spring to highlight the impact and effectiveness of quality civic education learning. One of the desired goals is to develop working partnerships with local elected officials and local school boards. New Hampshire communities like being locally controlled, making statewide initiatives more difficult. The Alliance will also be pursuing a communications plan and seeking to expand the number and range of organizations associated with the Alliance. For more information, contact Mica Stark (603) 222-4101or visit the web site. New Jersey Coalition to Support the Civic Mission of the Schools 360 words The New Jersey Coalition to Support the Civic Mission of the Schools plans to bring together educators and public policy makers to review the current state of civic education in New Jersey and develop a plan to identify, develop, and share exemplary civic-education programs, curricula, and online materials; conduct civic-education professional development workshops; and create public awareness and support for the Civic Mission of Schools. NETWORK spoke with Arlene Gardner, Director, New Jersey Center for Civic and Law-Related Education at Rutgers. New Jersey has no civic-education teeth because there is no testing in that area and nothing that says you must teach civics at any grade level. Only a small percentage of high school students take civics courses in New Jersey. Social studies teachers tend to take the lack of civic awareness personally, saying, “Well, I’m not doing a good job.” So, if the problem is a lack of civic education in New Jersey schools, then the question arises—What does good civic education look like? The Civic Mission of Schools provides a great springboard for beginning to answer this question. Following the First Congressional Conference on Civic Education in September 2003, we began to invite educators and public policy makers to come together to enhance civic education in New Jersey. The New Jersey Coalition to Support the Civic Mission of the Schools was created in March, 2004 and met again in May and September of 2004. The Coalition includes the former governor and a supreme court justice, members of the New Jersey Legislature, high-ranking members of the Department of Education. Statewide councils for the social studies, the humanities, history education, civic and law-related education, the League of Women Voters, and the State Bar join hands with faculty members from public and private universities, school superintendents, principals, social studies supervisors, teachers and students. The Coalition will be sending a civic-education to every school superintendent in the state, identifying exemplary programs, and demonstrating promising approaches that focus on current events and simulations. For more information, contact Arlene Gardner, (732) 445-3413 or visit the web site. North Carolina Civic Education Consortium The North Carolina Civic Education Consortium plans to work with several state and national partners to conduct two pilot studies of best civic-education practices. One study will identify and evaluate new forms of civic education assessment and accountability, while a second will develop current-events resources for North Carolina teachers. NETWORK spoke with Debra Henzey, Executive Director, North Carolina Civic Education Consortium, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. North Carolina schools are well-known for pioneering strong accountability in math and language arts. Although we have similar systems for civics and U.S history at the high school level, none exist for K–8. New legislation calls for more character and citizenship education but our schools are not held accountable for this work. The result? Some North Carolina schools focus on civic education while others do not. Because we had already participated in the development of the Civic Mission of Schools report, we understood the need and potential for developing civic-education initiatives. We were particularly excited with the prospect of partnering with other state and national organizations to promote civic education state- and nationwide. The North Carolina Consortium has gradually assembled huge array of partners. Our structure and goals are based on a partnership model. Over 20 Consortium partners will be directly involved in the pilot work and the development of current-events resources mentioned above. We can also tap other partners, such as the North Carolina School Boards Association and Social Studies Council to help spread the word about our endeavors. The State Board of Education has recently mandated that senior projects for graduation must include a civic-engagement component, extending accountability beyond typical test scores. This underscores our CMS plan to pilot a civic-engagement rubric to evaluate North Carolina senior projects. I see many benefits to partnering on these projects, including sharing lessons learned. Several state-based partners are doing different work than us, e.g., assessing existing classroom practices, that hopefully will develop civic-education models that we can all use. Finally, we can help cheer each other on when the going gets tough...and it will. To keep in touch with our partners, the Consortium has found that an e-mail listserve serves to post and respond to questions and to share documents. A blog is an exciting networking possibility and conference calls still help us generate collective input make decisions between meetings. Finally, we find time to get together at other civic-education conferences and events. For more information, contact Debra Henzey, Executive Director, North Carolina Civic Education Consortium (919) 966-5381 or visit the web site. . Pennsylvania Coalition for Representative Democracy (PennCORD) Through a district-level strategy, PennCORD plans to assess the state of civic education from student and teacher perspectives; to support student, parent and teacher advocacy for improved civic education; to strengthen local policies for implementing state standards for civic and government; and to support teacher training institutes. PennCORD is also building partnerships with Pennsylvania newspapers willing to publish student-written features on civic education. NETWORK spoke with Beth Twiss-Garrity, Vice President of Education and Public Programs at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. Pennsylvanians, like all Americans, have pride in our governmental system and a great affection for our way of life. But when you probe the specific application of educating in support of our democracy, we find serious deficiencies. Pennsylvania has standards for teaching civics but students are not tested on skills or knowledge. Subsequently, less and less time is being spent on civic education in today’s teach-to-test environment. We felt it time to make community members aware of the diminishing emphasis on civic education and to get behind promoting the notion that time needs to be carved out for civics in the same way it is for mathematics and science. We also knew we had to determine what kinds of civic-education resources we needed and provide them to teachers…quickly. At present, we work with 52 partners from business, education, government, and law. We also place students at the center of our advocacy process. We held a Civic Mission of Schools kick-off meeting that involved the Association of Student Councils, all concerned civic educators and local and statewide education policy makers to determine how we should approach the challenge of advocating, policy making, and teacher development. Not surprisingly, the students were incredible—enthused, articulate. They engaged educators and policy makers in animated conversations and volunteered to report out from a variety of break-out groups. Now all of us in the Coalition are looking for other ways to frame student contributions. For more information, contact Beth Twiss-Garrity, (215) 409-6670 or visit the web site. # # #
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