By Stanley Kurtz
Monday, March 15, 2021
With last week’s introduction in Congress of the
misleadingly named Civics Secures Democracy Act, we are headed toward an epic
clash over the spread of uber-controversial pedagogies — Critical Race Theory
and Action Civics — to America’s classrooms. I don’t know whether the country
will wake up to the danger of this legislation before or after it passes.
Sooner or later, however, the truth will out. When it does, the culture war
will have merged with K-12 education-policy disputes to a degree never before
seen.
Because this new legislation is a backdoor effort to
impose a de facto national curriculum in the politically charged subject areas
of history and civics, the battle will rage in the states, at the federal
level, and between the states and the federal government as well. The Biden
administration’s Education Department will almost certainly collaborate in this
attempt to develop a set of national incentives, measures, and penalties that
effectively force Critical Race Theory and Action Civics onto states and
localities. The likelihood of education controversies moving from third-tier to
first-tier issues in federal elections has never been greater.
The Republicans who have co-sponsored the “Civics Secures
Democracy Act” in the Senate (John Cornyn) and the House (Tom Cole) have been
hornswoggled and hogtied into backing legislation that is about as far from
conservative as a bill could be. It should be said in extenuation of their
decision that the bill is careful to bury its true ends under anodyne jargon.
You have to know a lot about Action Civics, for example, to understand that
this bill is designed to force it onto the states. Most conservatives don’t
even know what Action Civics is, much less understand its misleading jargon.
The very term “Action Civics” is a euphemism for political protests for course
credit, something close to the opposite of a proper civics course. That’s one reason
why the “Civics Secures Democracy Act” is so egregiously misnamed.
There have, of course, been many important education
battles in our time. The conservative movement was founded by William F.
Buckley’s 1951 book, God and Man at Yale, an early attack on the
secular socialism of the university. Cultural issues remained important to
movement conservatism, yet the focus soon turned to politics and policy in the
ordinary sense. The 1960s gave birth to a series of intense cultural battles,
with universities as epicenters of controversy. Yet many of the clashes were
over the war and the draft. For the most part, the federal government kept out
of higher-education controversies in that era.
The battle over the teaching of Western Civilization at
Stanford in 1987 kicked off a decade-long culture war over multiculturalism and
political correctness, the ancestor of our clashes today. At this point,
education battles began to seep into national politics, especially via the
actions of Education Secretary William Bennett and National Endowment for the
Arts Chair Lynne Cheney. Even so, universities incubating what eventually was
to become today’s woke culture were largely insulated from government
intervention by academic freedom.
The Obama administration pushed the K-12 Common Core on
states, but the founders of Common Core made a calculated decision to omit the
controversial subjects of history and civics from that effort. They understood
the dangers of mixing education policy with high-intensity culture war issues.
Now, however, in an attempt to complete the creation of a de facto national
curriculum, the top supporters of Common Core (including, sad to say, a few
conservatives) have formed an alliance with the top national advocates of
Action Civics and Critical Race Theory. The result is what we see in the
“Civics Secures Democracy Act” — and what we’re likely to get very soon from
the Biden administration — a de facto national curriculum in Action Civics and
Critical Race Theory. And all of this is happening as woke culture is spilling
out of the campuses and into the wider society. Once the reality of this new
push for education “reform” comes into the open, we will see the culture war
merge with the details of federal education policy in unprecedented fashion.
What does the not-so-civic “Civics Secures Democracy Act of 2021” actually do? Above
all, it appropriates $1 billion for federal grants to support K-12 curriculum
development, teacher training, and research on the K-12 teaching of history and
civics. Sounds good, if expensive, until you look at the fine print. Priority
for grants is decided according to two basic criteria.
First of all, priority goes to grants that support
“evidence-based practices.” The bill goes on to list these supposedly
evidence-based practices, which are essentially the menu of troubling teaching
techniques favored by the movement for Action Civics (Bill Page 5, Line 16-Page
6, Line 5). These are the very same practices I have written model legislation to block at the state level. They
include: 1) directing teachers to discuss current social and political
controversies in class; 2) out-of-class political protests and lobbying (nearly
always for leftist causes) for course credit (in the bill, called “projects”
and “experiential learning”) and 3) internships with (invariably leftist)
lobbying and advocacy organizations for course credit (in the bill, called
“service learning”).
Programs in “media literacy” are also marked as a
priority. These programs ostensibly warn students away from dangerous
conspiracy theories. In practice, however, they discourage students from
looking at conservative sources and hold up mainstream media fact-checkers
(largely left-biased) as sources of ultimate authority. Essentially, “media
literacy” programs favored by advocates of the new civics inculcate the
Democratic Party’s position on “fake news.”
The upshot is that the lion’s share of this billion-dollar
jackpot will support mandatory leftist protest, lobbying, and indoctrination,
while supporters of traditional civics and history will be frozen out.
The second criterion for priority applies to grants that
“improve knowledge and engagement” among “traditionally underserved” students,
as well as grants that promise to “close gaps in knowledge and achievement
among students of different income levels, racial and ethnic groups, and native
languages.” This gives the inside lane to Critical Race Theory, while largely
disqualifying those who believe that American history and civics can unify if
presented in a broadly similar manner to students of all incomes, races, and
ethnicities.
That may sound too strong. Keep in mind, however, that
the main public justification for the controversial, Critical Race
Theory-based “Culturally Responsive Teaching and Leading Standards” just
approved in Illinois was that they would be more likely to attract minority
teachers and more likely to appeal to minority students, thereby closing
achievement gaps. Yet those standards force teachers to call America
systemically racist, affirm the “fluidity” of gender, “mitigate” their
Euro-centrism and whiteness, and substitute activism for achievement when
grading students. Finding creative ways to present traditional civics to
minorities is one thing. Teaching radical activism is quite another.
Yet the movement for Critical Race Theory in education
essentially presents itself as fulfilling both priority criteria for grants
listed in this bill: “experiential” advocacy projects designed to appeal to
minority students. We are talking about Black Lives Matter protests outside of police stations
for course credit. And the grants will be disbursed by President Biden’s
Education Department, sure to be staffed by left-leaning bureaucrats who
believe — as does the president — that our country is “systemically racist.”
Put together the priority criteria and a Democrat-controlled Department of
Education and you will see a tremendous number of grants going to Critical Race
Theory-based political advocacy programs, all under the label of “civics.”
Critical Race Theory, of course, is antithetical to the
classically liberal principles upon which our constitutional republic rests.
Teaching it is actually a form of anti-civics. Yet that is what hundreds of
millions of dollars disbursed by the “Civics Secures Democracy Act” is going to
be used for.
So, the “Civics Secures Democracy Act” is a massive
boondoggle in support of politicizing students and teaching them to trade away
equality and individual liberty for identity politics and the redistribution of
. . . well, pretty much everything. But there’s more. On top of its
billion-dollar lure, the bill revamps a key national test as a backdoor way of
imposing a de facto national curriculum on the states.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP),
famous as “the nation’s report card,” is the national test that allows us to
tell how well the states are doing at teaching basic knowledge and skills. NAEP
allows us to see that, whereas America’s reading and math scores had once been
headed up, Common Core has brought them down. Yet NAEP was never intended to create a
national curriculum. On the contrary, NAEP was deliberately designed to make it
difficult or impossible to link its results to state or local curricula. If
anything, by revealing the failure of Common Core, NAEP has already discredited
the very idea of a de facto national curriculum.
For decades, however, some have dreamed of
using NAEP as a way of imposing what amounts to a national curriculum on the
states. If NAEP could be aligned to specific history or civics standards, and
administered in such a way as to facilitate state-by-state comparisons between
results, the test could effectively force a federal curriculum on states and
localities. Variable state NAEP results could then be tied to the awarding of
federal grants. State-by-state rankings would have a profound effect on
parental satisfaction with schools, and thus on migration in and out of state
by both individuals and businesses.
The Civics Secures Democracy Act of 2021 is very much
part of an effort to use NAEP to force a revisionist history and civics
curriculum down the throats of unsuspecting states and localities. The bill
would increase and regularize NAEP assessments in history and civics,
facilitate state-by-state comparisons, and condition grants on the willingness
of a state to participate in the history and civics portions of the test on a
regular basis. Grant renewals would also be conditioned on statewide
performance on the reorganized NAEP.
Combine this with the ambitions of the new, supposedly
bipartisan, Educating for American Democracy (EAD) initiative
(aptly described as a “Trojan Horse for Woke Education”). The leftist leaders of
EAD, who just happen to be the chief public backers of the Civics Secures
Democracy Act of 2021, issued a draft report on implementation that I have
seen, but that seems not to have been released to the public in final form.
That draft report calls for NAEP to be redesigned to align with EAD. This would
be an inexcusable national power-grab and an affront to the proper purpose of
NAEP. It’s clear, however, that this is exactly what the bogus leftist “civics”
coalition wants. (For a new report by the Heritage Foundation critical of EAD
and its national ambitions, go here. For more critiques of EAD, go here and here.)
In effect, we are looking at an effort to impose a new
federal Common Core in the politically explosive subject areas of history and
civics. Worse, the program in each of these areas does more than just lean a
bit toward the left side of the political spectrum. Instead, it sharply breaks
with fundamental assumptions in American education, first by promoting
illiberal Critical Race Theory, and second by turning what should be a
politically neutral classroom into a training ground for leftist advocacy and
lobbying.
All around us, the culture war has broken the bounds of
the university and spilled into our day-to-day lives. Conservatives and
traditional liberals are rightly up in arms about the woke assault on our most
fundamental freedoms, extending to inculcating guilt and shame in
elementary-school students for the color of their skin. The Democrats in
Congress, in league with the Biden administration and the leftist Action Civics
movement, are about to supercharge this culture war by injecting it into the
heart of federal education policy. Whether sooner or later, this is destined to
become the greatest education battle of our lifetimes.
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