Today is the second part in our series about the state of civic education in the US. We talk about how teachers choose what to teach, so-called "divisive concepts laws," and how we can approach disagreements without falling prey to "division actors."
This episode features
Louise Dube, Executive Director of iCivics and member of the Implementation Consortium at Educating for American Democracy
Justin Reich, Director at MIT Teaching Systems Lab and host of the TeachLab podcast
CherylAnne Amendola, Department Chair and teacher at Montclair Kimberly Academy and host of the podcast Teaching History Her Way
Click here to see a map of all the states that have passed legislation limiting what teachers can say regarding race, sex, gender, etc.
Click here to see the Interactive Roadmap by Educating for American Democracy.
And while we're throwing out links, click here to support our show, it means the world to us.
Transcript
c101-ed2.mp3
Archival: Anti-racism will not be taught in Virginia schools. The House of Representatives voted 65 to 32 to prohibit teachers from compelling students to learn a list of 11 concepts that deal with race, sex or religion.
Archival: Conservative uproar over critical race theory, which isn't taught in elementary or high school classrooms and still want it. Students actually drove more than four hours from Savannah to speak out against a divisive concepts bill that's moving through the legislature here [00:00:30] today. They're saying they're being silenced.
Nick Capodice: You're listening to Civics 101. I'm Nick Capodice.
Hannah McCarthy: I'm Hannah McCarthy.
Nick Capodice: And this is part two in our two part series about civics and social studies education in the US. Part one for those who haven't listened, was about the history of teaching history in the US. The attempts and failures to establish a nationwide civics or social studies curriculum, and the reasons why so few federal dollars go toward civics. Today we are [00:01:00] going to look at what's actually happening in classrooms through a teacher who is also a department chair. So she is helping make those curricular decisions. And we're also going to do a deep dive into so-called divisive concepts laws.
Hannah McCarthy: Okay. But first, Nick, in the last episode, you told us that by the end of this episode you would have a better understanding of how we are doing civics wise. Have you indeed come to a conclusion on the current state of civic education? [00:01:30]
Nick Capodice: Sort of.
Louise Dube: Well, the current state of civic education is vastly underfunded and underperformed and more importantly, narrow.
Nick Capodice: This is Louise Dube. She is the executive director of iCivics. Icivics is the premier nonprofit civic education resource provider in the country. We here at Civics 101 love them deeply, unabashedly.
Louise Dube: And it's really important to us who care about keeping this [00:02:00] nation together, that we talk more and engage more. The devil, if there is one, is division actors, shall we call them that, who are using our division to fuel them into a situation in which we can't we don't know what the truth is. We can't tell. We believe these things. We have no evidence for them. And yet and we are being used by these kinds of actors for their own purposes.
Hannah McCarthy: When Louise says division actors. [00:02:30] Who is she speaking about specifically?
Nick Capodice: I think it's similar to what Danielle Allen in the last episode referred to, as she put it, conflict entrepreneurs. These are people or organizations that gain power from stoking division. And neither Danielle nor Louise named people or organizations specifically. But I'll name one that I see as such. Moms for Liberty, which is recently designated as an extremist group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. [00:03:00] This is a group that shows up at school board meetings, sometimes alongside hate groups like the Proud Boys to interrupt to sow discord. One teachers union president in Florida said, quote, I can be sitting in a meeting minding my own business, and they turn around and scream at me that I am a commie and teachers want to see all kids fail, end quote.
Louise Dube: And the reality is, if you were to be able to engage in more conversations at the community level and rebuild, you would find a great deal [00:03:30] more agreement. And I am just... But we're going to be fighting this for quite some time. This is not a movement that makes the headlines. It's not one that gets the media's interest other than you guys. But it's it's a story that needs to be told because this is not theoretical anymore, right, for us. People are speaking directly about breaking up the country. The country is strong because we're together. And [00:04:00] if we let that happen, so engage with people you don't know or you don't you don't agree with because frankly, I think you'll be able to get through it. And, you know, these may make for very difficult conversation, but but at the end of it, we'll all be stronger together.
Hannah McCarthy: So Louise is encouraging civil conversation, encouraging unity versus divisiveness. This might be a good time to talk about those things that are called, quote, divisive [00:04:30] concepts laws.
Nick Capodice: I think you're right, Hannah.
Hannah McCarthy: What are they?
Nick Capodice: So, real quick, before we get into them, we got to talk about the name first. These laws bill themselves as divisive concepts laws, and you're going to hear me and our next guest refer to them as such. But again, that is the language used by the people who write these laws. And when we use that language, we reinforce it, we normalize it. The concepts in these laws, which they might consider divisive, are things you and I might not. Hannah We talk about these [00:05:00] things in 90% of our episodes. So listener, as it is an audio format we are working with here. Please imagine I'm making air quotes around divisive concepts every time I or my guest say it.
Justin Reich: Divisive concepts laws have been introduced in almost every state. They have been passed. In some states they are a range of laws, so there's not one type.
Nick Capodice: This is Justin Reich. Now, [00:05:30] first, full disclosure. Absolutely. Coincidentally, Justin was a friend and fellow pinball obsessive of mine in high school, specifically the game Grand Lizard. But more importantly for today, he is the director of the MIT Teaching Systems Lab, and he's the host of the Teach Lab Podcast. It's a show where he talks to teachers about these laws.
Justin Reich: They're not well defined. This is a key feature of these laws, is that they ban a bunch of things, teachers from doing things [00:06:00] without specifying what those things are. There are different levels of specification, so some laws very specifically say something like you cannot teach a child that they are responsible for historical events because of their race or that they should feel guilty for events that were perpetrated by their race. I think the law is specifically thinking about white children here, although it doesn't specify white children.
Hannah McCarthy: Now, Justin said these laws have [00:06:30] been introduced in almost every state. But how many states exactly have signed them into law?
Nick Capodice: As of this recording, August 2023, 18 states have imposed bans or restrictions. And while a lot of them share language because this is the sort of legislation that gets copied and pasted from other states, you really have to look at it on a state by state level. I'm going to put a link in the show notes to a website that's got all the laws on one page. Check it out. But one thing I want to make sure to note [00:07:00] here, Justin is not opposed to interaction between legislatures and teachers. Teachers are state employees.
Justin Reich: If legislatures get together and tell teachers, here's a specific thing that you cannot tell children, they should be able to do that. That's how we regulate teacher speech. The problem, though, is that children, people who study the history of this country will feel guilty about things that their ancestors did. That [00:07:30] is a that is a normal feeling. That is a feeling that people have. And so where it becomes more complicated is to say, well, not only can you not say that specific line, but you cannot teach things that make children feel that way. Well, if you teach things that might make people feel uncomfortable or feel guilt, you are removing a huge swath of what we study in history. Moreover, there are other laws and regulations that require teaching topics that [00:08:00] are related to that.
Nick Capodice: One of the biggest problems Justin told me about is contradiction. So every state has requirements about what has to be taught. So what do you do when there's something you have to teach by law and at the same time, by law it is restricted.
Justin Reich: So a teacher who's in a state that has a divisive concept law, they might have a divisive concept laws which says something along the lines of you can't teach things that make children feel guilty because of their race. You are also required [00:08:30] to teach the Trail of Tears and the civil rights movement and the Tulsa Race massacre and these other kinds of events where those feelings might emerge. So now teachers are in this position where they are faced with both contradictory guidance and the divisive concept laws are ambiguous. Another thing that shows up in these divisive concept laws is some kind of riff on the what has been colloquially called Don't say gay. You know, in Florida [00:09:00] passed the first of these laws, which originally said you cannot discuss topics related to sexual orientation and gender in I think it was kindergarten through fourth grade. And then you can only discuss them in developmentally appropriate ways afterwards.
Archival: Florida's controversial legislation, dubbed by critics as the Don't Say gay bill and gaining national attention has been sent to Governor Ron DeSantis to sign. The governor already signaling he supports it.
Justin Reich: You know, lots of ambiguities immediately showed up. There was a [00:09:30] state legislator who was quizzing a colleague who was introducing one of these laws and said, well, can we you know, can you introduce Martha Washington lady?
Archival: You mentioned George Washington, who is Martha Washington.
Archival: His wife.
Archival: Under your bill, how could you mention that in a classroom?
Archival: So to me, that's not sexual orientation,
Archival: Really.
Justin Reich: And part of the problem is, is that the actual point [00:10:00] of these laws is to prevent people talking about homosexual couples, to talk about gender identities, which are not historically, you know, recognized straight male and female identities. But the law doesn't say that specifically.
Hannah McCarthy: To my understanding, most of these laws have been passed fairly recently. Do we know if there have been any repercussions yet, like teachers who faced that contradiction and were punished as a result?
Nick Capodice: Absolutely. Many [00:10:30]. Justin told me about one in particular, a social studies teacher in Ohio.
Justin Reich: Who looks at the Ohio State standards and says, I'm supposed to teach about civil rights, goes to the Ohio model curriculum, where it says, One of the ways that you can teach about civil rights is about Stonewall and the gay liberation movement. And he goes, That's great. I'm gay. Some of my kids are gay. Like like I'm in, let's do this. So he he builds this whole unit, he builds it in, sort of aligned with the way that he's taught other kind of controversial topics [00:11:00] before. And he runs it by his mentor teacher. He runs it by his school principal. He teaches it for three days. It seems to be going really well, really liking it. And then a parent complains and a cascading series of events gets him. He's told to stop teaching the unit. He's administratively separated from the school and then he's sent to teach in another school. So basically he loses a job that he had. He's just a guy who's very carefully [00:11:30] designing this unit like like he can he can just talk in such compelling ways about like, here are all of the guidelines that I followed in all the steps that I took to be able to teach this in a way that, you know, honors my commitment to what Ohio regulations and law has to say about what I'm required to teach and recognizes that there's sort of sensitivities in my community around these kinds of issues and, you know, and wanting to make sure [00:12:00] like, you know, that that that it's teaching hard history. That's not indoctrination. All the kinds of things that good social studies teachers do. But doing it just like really kind of to the nth degree.
Nick Capodice: And to be clear here, once again, Justin does not think that parents should be excluded from the dialog about what their kids learn. It's a compromise. That's how we've always done it. And parents statistically like what teachers are doing. Justin said about 80% of parents are satisfied with how their kids are being taught, which [00:12:30] is a massive majority. It's some of that minority, the 20% plus outside groups who don't actually have children in the schools and districts and states where they're pushing these bills, who are driving these changes.
Justin Reich: Every community has people with extreme views. You know, views are very different from their neighbors. We've known that for years. But one of the things public schools have to do is create a curriculum that works for as many students as possible. There's no way to do that. There's some of our neighbors are [00:13:00] always going to have really strong opinions about things. We call those extreme views. Historically, the way we've dealt with that is we've said, okay, parent, if you don't want your student learning about this topic, you can have your student not participate in that learning experience. This happens pretty commonly in things related to health and sex ed. Parents say, I don't like the way that the school the state has You teaching that topic. As a parent, I have different values. I don't want my kid participating in that. It happened some in English language arts and in social [00:13:30] studies. I don't want my student watching this movie. I don't want my student going on this field trip. I don't want my student reading that book. I think that's a good, healthy way of negotiating some of these issues we've got, you know, that student from that family is participating in most of the public school experience. They pick a few things that they're not participating in. They're still, you know, having the kind of civic community building experience that public schools offer. What these divisive concepts and other related laws are doing is trying to change that fundamental [00:14:00] ground rule and saying that if a parent objects to a piece of content, it has to be removed from the school system that none of the children can have access to, that that that book has to be banned, that they can't go on that field trip, that teachers can't teach about that topic to everyone.
Nick Capodice: We are going to explore how teachers are taking curriculum laws, students, parents, etcetera, everything into consideration when they decide what to teach. But first, we got to take a quick break.
Hannah McCarthy: And before that break, if you [00:14:30] are the kind of person who wants to compare and contrast the wording in dozens of divisive concepts laws, you will like our free newsletter, extra credit. It comes out every two weeks. Nick and I never know what we're going to explore, but never always. But it's always fun. And you can sign up at our website civics101podcast.org.
Hannah McCarthy: You're listening to Civics 101. This is part two of our two part series exploring civics and social studies education in the United States. [00:15:00] So, Nick, we've looked at what gets taught in the classroom from the top down angle. State legislatures dictating what should and should not be taught. Now, I want to know how teachers take all of that, walk into a classroom and say, this is what we are learning today.
Nick Capodice: Yeah, I honestly don't know if I will ever understand how they do it. Hannah We have met so many teachers in the course of making this show and I never fail to be amazed by their efforts. But I'm going to give you one example. This is [00:15:30] CherylAnne Amendola. Hannah, you and I always look our guests up before we interview them. But in this instance, I was surprised. She looked me up.
CherylAnne Amendola: I was I was just like reading your bio. Just find a little more about you.
CherylAnne Amendola: And you love 1776 as much as I do. Open up a window.
Hannah McCarthy: The movie is inescapable.
Nick Capodice: If I had a switch, Hannah, that could turn off my love for the musical. 1776. I'd flip it, but I don't have that switch, do I? Anyways, CherylAnne teaches middle school history [00:16:00] and is the Middle School History department chair at Montclair Kimberley Academy. She's also the host of her own podcast, Teaching History Her Way.
Hannah McCarthy: So if CherylAnne is the department chair, does that mean that she decides what is being taught?
CherylAnne Amendola: Well, it really depends on the school. So in some schools, you have a curriculum coordinator who will be for social studies and will work with all the schools in the district. So I've seen public schools that work in that way. We have a curriculum coordinator, but then [00:16:30] we also have our department chairs at each level. But what's really wonderful about my school and there are a lot of schools that are like this too, is that as the department chair, I manage things, but I'm working with a team of teachers who puts the curriculum together. So all the curricular decisions that we make are made as a team, which is really wonderful because we're all really different. So we get a lot of different perspectives and we wrestle with a lot of things. So one of the things that [00:17:00] I really wish that people know or knew is that teachers are professionals who work together. We know what we're doing, and we pool our knowledge to make it so that the kids in our classrooms have the best experience that they can have based on what we know and what we know about them. Because a lot of times the decisions are made thinking about the population that's in the building. So it's never arbitrary. Let's start there.
Nick Capodice: As we talked about in the first episode, every state has social studies standards and CherylAnne's State New Jersey, the ninth [00:17:30] to 12th grade standards are from 2020. There are 51 pages in total. Interestingly, they use a diagram of a house as a metaphor for how students should learn. Really? Yeah. It's like the mission is the foundation. The practices are the roof performance expectations are the studs. Et cetera. And CherylAnne said, Yes, the state has standards all lesson plans she makes have standards on them. But that is not the most important consideration ever, number one.
CherylAnne Amendola: First and foremost, [00:18:00] we're thinking about our students. So we're not just picking up a random textbook pointing to a page and saying we're going to have them read this. A lot that goes into it is who is sitting in my classroom? What is the socioeconomic background of the students sitting in my classroom? What is the racial and ethnic identity of the students that are sitting in my classroom? What are the gender identities of the students that are in my classroom? What are the sexual identities of the students that are in my classroom? If they know at the point that [00:18:30] we're teaching, what do the families in my classroom look like? Sound like feel like? What is the geographic area that we're living in? Because that makes a really big difference. Even in New Jersey, we have rural, suburban, urban. So figuring out what these students need to know, want to know is and their experience in us being able to teach it to them. So the vehicle that we use, it's not even just the material, but then it's also how do we do? It depends a lot on those factors because we need the [00:19:00] students to understand it. We also want them to buy in. We want them to learn it. We want it to relate to them. So there are so many factors that go into those curricular decisions. But first and foremost, we're thinking about the kids that are in our room.
Hannah McCarthy: What does CherylAnne think the relationship between parents and teachers should look like?
Nick Capodice: CherylAnne made it abundantly clear to me she considers herself very fortunate in this regard. She said the parents of her students are enormously supportive of her work. But she said all teachers [00:19:30] out there need trust.
CherylAnne Amendola: This is why we go to school. We went to school and we continue to go to professional development and learn all kinds of new things. I mean, believe it or not, history changes, but depending on what kinds of new new documents are found to be analyzed. So and. Pedagogy changes. There are different methods that, as educational researchers continue to learn about how kids learn, we adapt. How we teach. The way I teach now is not the same as the way I taught 17 [00:20:00] years ago. So we need to be trusted as professionals to do our job and that we know what your kids need.
Nick Capodice: And it's easy to imagine that a teacher can be told what to say or not to say, but they'll just go and do their job in their classroom and not worry about it. But it doesn't work that way. Consequences can be very real. So I asked her, what is the feeling right now in the US, in the teacher community around all this?
CherylAnne Amendola: I think that in [00:20:30] some of my colleagues there, there's a little bit or a lot of fear, fear for their jobs, fear, fear of intimidation. There are very loud constituents at school board meetings who may not necessarily be the largest number, but they are the loudest that make our may make many teachers decisions more difficult. I have always been screaming from the rooftops that history matters. Everybody's noticing that history matters, which on the one hand is awesome. History [00:21:00] and civics do matter. Bring it in, teach it all. But on the other hand, there are huge disagreements about whose history needs to be taught. And really what the answer is, is everybody's.
Hannah McCarthy: You know that thing that Rush Limbaugh said? You mentioned it in the first episode. He, of course, is the right wing radio host who is furious at the proposed national social studies standards in the 1990s. What was that exact line again?
Nick Capodice: History is real simple. You know [00:21:30] what history is? It's what happened.
Hannah McCarthy: Basically, it sounds like people are still having the same argument that Rush Limbaugh was all riled up about in the 1990s. Yeah.
Nick Capodice: I swear I wasn't going to bring it up. You did hear about the Romeo and Juliet thing, right?
Hannah McCarthy: I have a really hard time with this. I can't. It's, like, really upsetting.
Nick Capodice: Well, it's part of this. It's tangential, but it's part of it. And because it's not civics and we were both in the play, we can have an opinion about this. Hannah had the better part, by the way. She was Benvolio and I was [00:22:00] Abra.
Hannah McCarthy: Abra is not the worst part.
Nick Capodice: Yeah.
Abra: Do you bite your thumb at us?
Hannah McCarthy: Anyway, for those who hadn't heard, a school district in Florida is only allowing excerpts of Shakespeare's plays to be studied, not the full text due to a lot of innuendo. It is true and implied sexual content.
Nick Capodice: Thank you for letting me bring this seemingly unrelated thing up, Hannah. But it is an example of what Justin was talking about because eight Shakespeare plays are suggested in the Florida [00:22:30] State standards and at the same time censored by this House bill. Hb 1069. But away from the Bard and back to civic education, I asked Louise Dube, the executive director from iCivics, How do we bridge that gap? So if one person thinks history should be just a recitation of dates and famous people and not a discussion of hard topics like race, gender inequality, et cetera. And you got another person who says the opposite. What [00:23:00] do we do? How do we come to an agreement? Here's what she said.
Louise Dube: I would just say, you know, a lot of people have kids, right? Go talk to your kid and and just ramble off a set of dates, see how it goes. Just try it and see, you know, are they going to remember this tomorrow? Probably not. Right? If you talk to historians, history is rarely set. And [00:23:30] we need to come to that more nuanced view of what history is. And when people say, I just want the facts, I say, okay, which facts do you want? The ones from my right pocket or the one from my left pocket? I don't know. There are many, many, many facts. Oftentimes, those are told by one set of people and the other facts are told by the other set of people. We need to engage in thinking like a historian and try to uncover documentary [00:24:00] evidence, but also multiple perspectives and a narrative that we need to uncover. That is why we created educating for American democracy as a set of questions.
Nick Capodice: Educating for American democracy is a cross-partisan initiative, and it's headed by Louise and Danielle Allen and ten others. These are these are among the top civic education minds in the country. So they have created, with the help of hundreds of scholars and teachers a framework. It's the EAD roadmap. [00:24:30] And this is not a national standard for civics education. This is something that states school districts, individual teachers can adopt. And it is about inquiry and discussion. It's not what year was the 12th Amendment ratified, it's centered on driving questions.
Louise Dube: Those are the only things I remember from my from my own education. When people asked me to take ownership of my own learning, enter into simulation, try it out, work with other colleagues to try to figure out what happened [00:25:00] here and create something out of this, an art project or something. Right. And so that's the you try it with your kids. I don't know. That's all I have to say.
Hannah McCarthy: Nick, do you have a I don't know, a final thought for all of this. I know civic education is underfunded, but if this were a State of the Union address, you're standing up there and you say, My fellow Americans, the state [00:25:30] of civics education is blank.
Nick Capodice: Okay. This is just my opinion as a co-host of a civics podcast. So, you know, take it with whatever grains of salt you want. So if you look at the most recent nation's report card, that is a study done each year by the National Assessment of Educational Progress. You could say the state of civics education in America is declining. Only 22% of eighth graders tested were considered proficient in civics. [00:26:00] This is the first significant decline since they first did this assessment in 1998. And you could blame Covid for this or lack of funding or budgetary woes. But these are eighth graders who are tested. And you might also consider that less than half of American students take any civics classes whatsoever in the K through eighth grade years. Now, if you look at the situation that many teachers are in, where curriculum laws tell you, you got to teach one thing and divisive [00:26:30] concepts, laws tell you not to. You could say the state of civics education is dangerous. Or I could, as we often do in the podcast business, do what we call ending the episode on a shrug. And we could just say the state of civics education is complicated. But I think knowing what Danielle Allen said in the last episode about federal civics funding increasing tenfold in the last year, and having had [00:27:00] teachers come up to her table at social studies conferences and talking about what their successes and challenges are. Here is my adjective. The state of civics education is hopeful. More and more states are adding civics requirements. People notice it when these assessments come out and they care. And ultimately, there is no community in the United States in which I have more faith than teachers. They are the plugged in, [00:27:30] tireless, passionate, caring people keeping education robust. No matter what. So, yeah, hopeful. And I hope I'm right.
La la la la.
Nick Capodice: Oh well, that is a wrap for this episode, but I doubt it is the end of [00:28:00] us talking about civics education because, you know, that's where it's us. We're here. I do want to give a massive special thank you to Danielle Allen and Louise Dubay and all the folks working at Educating for American Democracy. Check them out. This episode was made by me Nick Capodice with You Hannah McCarthy. Thank you always. Christina Phillips is our senior producer and Rebecca Lavoy, our executive producer. music in this episode by Jules Gaia, Dusty Decks, the shivers, Stationary Sign, Guustavv, Emily Sprague, Lobo Loco, Blue Dot Sessions, Asura, and the incomparable Chris Zabriskie. Civics [00:28:30] 101 is a production of NHPR New Hampshire Public Radio.