Paul Gagnon, Albert Shanker Institute
2003
Historian Paul Gagnon, now senior research associate at Boston University's Center for School Improvement, authored this 200-page report for the Albert Shanker Institute. Essentially, it's a critical review of states' social studies standards to determine whether and how well they promote the teaching and learning of a "civic core," i.e. concepts, knowledge and skills that foster successful citizenship. The backdrop is a 1987 statement called "Education for Democracy" that was jointly produced by the American Federation of Teachers (with which the Shanker Institute is affiliated), Freedom House, and the Educational Excellence Network (founded by Diane Ravitch and myself and now subsumed within the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation). Though that "civic core" is never crisply defined in this volume, Gagnon eventually sets forth five criteria by which he evaluated the states' standards. These include such desiderata as whether "the vital insights, ideas and topics of civics, economics and geography [are] presented, whenever appropriate, in the context of the historical narrative of people in real times and places" and whether "the standards contain the topics essential to a common core of learning for the political education of citizens." He then evaluates the states' standards documents against the five criteria. Bottom line: no state's standards "largely meet" all five criteria and only one (Alabama) attains that status on four. Several more states (California, Indiana, New York) "largely" meet three criteria and "partially meet" a fourth. And so on. Among the most interesting parts of this complex and hard-to-summarize study are 40 pages of state responses that range from defensive to apologetic to peculiar. It's too bad this large amount of erudite and well-founded analysis is so hard to get one's mind around at the national level, but one supposes that individual states will find their "report cards" informative (if rarely welcome), and we're all better off knowing that one reason young Americans aren't learning a heckuva lot about history and civics is that most of them reside in states that don't even expect it. At least part of the report will be available soon on the Shanker Institute website at http://www.shankerinstitute.org/. For hard copies you will need to contact the institute directly at: The Albert Shanker Institute, 555 New Jersey Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20001, Phone: 202-879-4401.
