I’m a huge fan of the Daniels Fund under the leadership of Hanna Skandera, the more so since the national part of their giving has grasped the nettle of civics education. And we at Fordham were longtime members of the Philanthropy Roundtable. (For a time, I served on its board.) So it was great to see funder and Roundtable recently teaming up to develop an online “playbook” for philanthropists wanting to “enhance” civics education around the country.
The good news is they say their Civics Playbook is a “living resource” meant to “be refreshed on a routine basis,” and I hope that turns out to be true. For the bad news is that the dozen organizations profiled in the debut version, while individually worthy and in some cases outstanding, are but the tip of a giant iceberg of engaged and worthy outfits in this space—and a couple of their initial choices are rather narrow in scope or outlook.
Omitted from the current Playbook, for example, are iCivics, the prolific source of civics-ed materials for educators and parents founded by the late Justice Sandra Day O’Connor; the University of Tennessee’s Institute for American Civics; the Institute for Citizens and Scholars; the Reagan Institute Center for Civics, Education & Opportunity and dozens of others. (You can find reasonably comprehensive lists here and on the website of the Hoover Institution’s Working Group on Good American Citizenship.)
A particularly curious omission is Arizona State University’s Center for American Civics, as it’s incorporating the Joe Foss Institute, which for a decade has been the strongest pusher for states to require their high school pupils to pass the national citizenship test before graduating!
As for what is included, it’s no secret that the Roundtable leans right—amusing when you picture a leaning round table—and that ideology sometimes influences its choices. That’s not the case with most of the groups found in the current Playbook, though the National Association of Scholars’ “Civics Alliance,” which produced a useful draft of state social studies standards, is somewhat tarnished by its executive director’s propensity to engage in cultural warfare against other organizations (the Fordham Institute included).
Several nonprofits on the list focus on individual states, as do many philanthropists (including Daniels), but once one opens that box, the sky’s the limit on how many to include and how to select among them. An amusing selection here is the Georgia Center for Civic Engagement, amusing not because it doesn’t do creditable work in the Peach State, but because it’s party to a project funded by the National Endowment for Humanities via Educating for American Democracy, which I think well of, but which is endlessly criticized by the aforementioned head of the Civics Alliance; and the Georgia Center’s involvement with which has been savaged by another stalwart of that Alliance!
Bottom line: Three cheers for the Daniels Fund for sponsoring this effort, and two to the Philanthropy Roundtable for having the guts to fish in the vast pond of civics education. But so far, it’s failed to land some excellent specimens while netting one or two that might better be thrown back.
