K-12 Education

Civic Education: From the Classroom to the Polling Place

On National Voter Registration Day, our special guest author is Rhode Island Secretary of State Gregg M. Amore.

Preparing our next generation of civic leaders, engaged voters, and informed citizens starts in the classroom. In Rhode Island, young people are eligible to pre-register to vote as early as age sixteen. We know that when voters are engaged early, they’re more likely to vote consistently throughout their life. As a former educator, I feel it is essential that we lay the foundation to support students and young people, encouraging them to become civically engaged – as voters, advocates, community members, and even elected officials themselves. As we recognize National Voter Registration Month, we must think about how we set our next generation of voters up for success, including inspiring and encouraging them to register to vote.  

I was sworn in on January 3, 2023 as Rhode Island’s thirtieth Secretary of State, but my election as Secretary of State wasn’t my first step into politics. I first ran for elected office in 2012, serving the residents of my hometown of East Providence, Rhode Island as a State Representative for a decade. My role as a part-time legislator, coupled with my career as a civics and history teacher, afforded me the opportunity to advocate for my students both inside and outside of the school environment. 

Perhaps one of my proudest moments as a Representative was the passage of the Civic Literacy Act, a bill I sponsored that emphasizes “action civics,” requiring students to demonstrate proficiency in civics education through a project-based, immersive curriculum before high school graduation. Another bill I was proud to sponsor that recently became law in Rhode Island allows 17-year-olds who will turn eighteen by a general election to vote in the primary that determines the general election’s candidates. Better civic education as well as increased access to the ballot box are key to encouraging young people to become lifelong voters. 

My classroom and legislative experiences made clear to me what was needed in order to ensure that students have the tools they need to succeed as citizens and participants in civic life. There’s no doubt that the policy-making and legislative process can be intimidating, especially if you’ve never been invited to be part of the process before. As a teacher, I encouraged my students to take the concepts and lessons we learned in the classroom and apply them to the real world. In one of my last years in the House of Representatives, my East Providence High School students researched, discussed, and debated an issue of importance to them, compensation for individuals who had been wrongfully convicted, eventually helping to inform a bill that I was able to co-sponsor. That bill was signed into law by the governor – a great outcome. But another positive outcome was that my students got to see that the State House wasn’t only for legislators, and they could truly make a difference by being civically engaged. 

Reading Reform on the Ground: How SoR Policy is Showing Up in Schools

On International Literacy Day, we publish a guest post by educator, researcher, and author Callie Lowenstein who shares her incredible perspective of the in-depth thinking teachers offer to their practice and how sincerely teachers want to meet the needs of students.

One thing about teachers: we want to get our instruction right. 

After decades of mixed messages and misinformation in our professional development (PD), teacher training programs, and curricular materials, many classroom educators are eager to get on top of the science, to ensure that our efforts and hours, our lesson planning and detailed feedback and materials prep and book purchases and deep care for our students, are not being wasted. 

Indeed, after a major balanced-literacy leader published an unapologetic deflection of the science of reading movement last year, a group of teachers from across the country wrote our own open letter, collecting over 650 teacher signatures in a matter of days, attesting to the ways we, teachers, wished we had done better by our students.

As authors Susan B. Neuman, Esther Quintero, and Kayla Reist so expertly and carefully highlighted in the Shanker Institute’s Reading Reform Across America report, it’s not just us. 

Decades of Dedication to the Science of Reading

MARY CATHRYN
As director of the Albert Shanker Institute, the think tank endowed by the American Federation of Teachers, I had the privilege of leading the development and release of the ASI’s new report released in late July, Reading Reform Across America. It’s a survey of reading legislation adopted over the course of four years by states across the country, with good and bad news. The report was met with immediate interest, and attention.

To the good, states are finally noting that the research underlying strong reading instruction is not typically matched by the curriculum and instruction in most schools, and they are taking legislative action. Also, despite fears that much of the legislation might only call narrowly for phonics, most states called for the full range of instruction noted as essential in the renowned 2000 National Reading Panel report.

On the downside, the legislation is generally too narrow. In almost every state, there is scant attention to the importance of background knowledge, oral language, and even writing, now understood to be vital to strong reading comprehension and overall literacy.

Why Does Knowledge Matter?

We recently released a report examining reading laws enacted by states in the past four years. One finding that has generated interest is the fact that these laws pay almost no attention to the role of background/content knowledge in reading. Specifically, 6 out of 46 states that passed reading legislation between 2019 and 2022 mention background/content knowledge in their laws; of these, only 4—Arizona, Florida, Michigan, and Pennsylvania—include a more substantive (if brief) mention.

Florida’s law, for example, requires the state’s department of education to “develop and provide access to sequenced, content-rich curriculum programming, instructional practices, and resources that help elementary schools use state-adopted instructional materials to increase students' background knowledge and literacy skills.” But language like this is almost non-existent in the corpus of over 220 reading bills we examined. Why does this omission matter?

There's widespread agreement within the reading community regarding the association between knowledge and reading comprehension: the more you know, the more you understand when you read, and the more you gain from reading. Furthermore, there's a growing body of evidence (also here and here) suggesting that this association is causal. Thus, building knowledge, particularly through a content-rich curriculum, is expected to enhance general reading comprehension. While this is a encouraging finding, shouldn't we value knowledge for its own inherent worth? Beyond its essential role in comprehension, why else might knowledge matter?

Demystifying the Science of Reading

Over the past year, the Albert Shanker Institute has been examining four years worth of literacy legislation — stay tuned for our report, which will be released soon. In discussing our findings with colleagues and friends, we often find ourselves starting from scratch, filling gaps, and debunking misconceptions. This post aims to address one question we frequently encounter.

What is the science of reading?

While organizations such as the Reading League have put out useful materials about what the science of reading is, we aim to keep it simple here. Essentially, the science of reading is synonymous with academic research on reading. It refers to the vast body of knowledge that scholars have accumulated over decades about how people learn to read. Thus, the phrase is a shorthand for work of hundreds of scholars in countless studies. This body of knowledge includes things that are known with certainty, those that we are just beginning to understand, and everything in between. Like any scientific field, reading science is dynamic and evolving. It is not settled.

Experiential Civic Learning for Democracy

Our guest author is Wilfred Chirinos, an associate on the Policy and Advocacy Team at Generation Citizen.

In the recent past, commentators such as David Leonhardt in his New York Times article ‘A Crisis Coming’: The Twin Threats to American Democracy," have spoken to some of the greatest threats against our democracy at this moment, including the heightened sense of partisanship with calls for a “national divorce”¹; the ilk of authoritarianism on the edges of the ideological spectrum, and amplified through the coverage of our political discourse; and the rapid development of social media and AI technology in what some have labeled a “post-truth” era.² These concerns are rightfully identified as looming threats to democracy. Taken together, they suggest that we stand at a pivotal moment in American history. While some contend that these issues are intractable, reports collected by the Center for American Progress and my experience within civics education suggest that revitalizing our democracy can begin with civic learning in our classrooms.

As said by AFT President Randi Weingarten, “Experiential learning engages students through problem-solving, critical thinking, teamwork, and learning by doing. We need to help kids engage with the world, with ideas, and with each other….”³ Through experiential learning, we can encourage students to engage creatively in their education to develop life-long skills. Experiential learning catalyzes their journey of becoming engaged citizens with the tools to interact meaningfully with the world around them.

At Generation Citizen, students are provided with an experiential learning opportunity through our action civics programs. Students are taught to engage with their community by identifying relevant problems,  researching issues that they select, and presenting evidence-based policy solutions to stakeholders and decision-makers. The goal of this process is to instill a spirit of civic duty and engagement while enhancing their practical civic knowledge. Students learn about the history and structure of their local governments while connecting with these institutions, which often feel far removed. As they engage these institutions, they themselves are changed in the process and can influence the public policy process in significant ways, that reverberate far beyond the classroom.

Rethinking the Revenue Side of the K-12 Funding Equation

Most discussions of school funding focus on “how much.” There is a good reason for this: the end goal of any finance system is for all school districts to have enough to meet their students’ needs. Yet achieving this goal is as much about how money is allocated as it is about how much is raised (or spent) overall.

On average, about 45 percent of all K-12 revenue comes from state sources (e.g., sales and income tax), about 45 percent comes from local sources (mostly property tax), and the remaining 10 or so percent is federal aid. Yet these three revenue “streams” are typically handed out to districts in very different ways, and states vary widely in terms of their state/local “splits.” As a result, two states serving similar student populations might spend the same amount per pupil but exhibit vastly different adequacy and equity outcomes depending on the source of those funds and how they are allocated.

In a couple of recent Shanker Institute reports (here and here), we’ve been looking into this “revenue side” of the school finance equation, with a focus on finding better ways to collect and distribute all three sources of K-12 revenue (federal, state, and local), without necessarily increasing the overall amount of funding.

Teacher Pay: Five Reasons to Factor in National Board Certification

Our guest author is Erin E.H. Austin, a National Board Certified French teacher in Fort Collins, CO, and the 2023 CCFLT Teacher of the Year. She is the author of The Ultimate Guide to Selling Your Original World Language Resources and Going Global in the World Language Classroom (Routledge, forthcoming). Follow her on Twitter @Erin-EH-Austin.

“We as a country have minimized the teaching profession so much that we are okay with teachers needing a second job to survive. I am not okay with it, our teachers deserve better and at @usedgov we are working to make better happen.”

The quote above is from an April 6, 2023, tweet by U.S. Secretary of Education, Miguel Cardona. Similar tweets, media statements, and advocacy have been ramping up for months, spanning the Department of Education, Secretary Cardona, and other education-invested adults around the country. Teachers are no exception to this advocacy work, though for many teachers, it has, indeed, been a life-long pursuit falling largely on deaf ears.

Statistics that support the need for increased teacher pay abound. The National Education Association reported in 2019 that almost one in five teachers holds a second job at some point during the year, though the percentage of teachers who do have a second job is often dependent on age. Typically, the younger/newer the teacher, the more likely they are to have a second job. EdWeek reported similar numbers in 2022. The Teacher Salary Project surveyed 1,200 teachers in 2021 and found that 82% of the teachers surveyed held a second job either at the time of the survey or in previously during their teaching career.

Beyond the Blame Game: Remote Schooling Was Predicted By Spending Adequacy

Our guest author today is Mark Weber, a member of the research team for the School Finance Indicators Database project. He is also the Special Analyst for Education Policy at the New Jersey Policy Perspective, and a Lecturer at the Rutgers University Graduate School of Education.

It’s become an article of faith on the political right: teachers unions forced schools to go remote during the pandemic. But what if that’s not true? What if there’s actually more to the story?

In a new working paper, Bruce Baker and I consider another possibility: Schools that are inadequately funded were more likely to go remote in the 2020-2021 school year, the first full year after the pandemic hit. While we wouldn’t say that funding inadequacy was the sole cause of remote schooling, we do document a relationship between the two that calls into question the idea that unionization was the only or even primary reason for the loss of live schooling.

The Rise and Fall of the Teacher Evaluation Reform Empire

Teacher evaluation reform during the late 2000s and 2010s was one of the fastest and widespread education policy changes in recent history. Thanks mostly to Race to the Top and ESEA “waivers,” over a period of about 10 years, the vast majority of the nation’s school districts installed new teacher evaluations. These new systems were quite different from their predecessors in terms of design, with 3-5 (rather than dichotomous) rating categories incorporating multiple measures (including some based on student testing results). And, in many states, there were varying degrees of rewards and/or consequences tied to the ratings (Steinberg and Donaldson 2016).

A recent working paper offers what is to date the most sweeping assessment of the impact of teacher evaluation reform on student outcomes, with data from 44 states and D.C. As usual, I would encourage you to read the whole paper (here's an earlier ungated version released in late 2021). It is terrific work by a great team of researchers (Joshua Bleiberg, Eric Brunner, Erika Harbatkin, Matthew Kraft, and Matthew Springer), and I’m going to describe the findings only superficially. We’ll get into a little more detail below, but the long and short of it is that evaluation reform had no statistically detectable aggregate effect on student test scores or attainment (i.e., graduation or college enrollment).

This timely analysis, in combination with the research on evaluations over the past few years, provides an opportunity to look back on this enormous reform effort, and whether and how states and districts might move forward.