Scholar Gives ‘A’ Grade to Proposed Florida K-12 Civics and Government Standards

 

A new report released Wednesday that provides reviews and grades of the nation’s leading civics programs has rated the proposed Florida K-12 Civics and Government Standards with a grade of “A.”

Dr. David Randall, author of “Learning for Self-Government: A K-12 Civics Report Card,” published at the Boston-based Pioneer Institute, told The Florida Capital Star during a phone interview the “social studies standards in the states really matter.”

“And part of good reform governance is not just vetoing the bills, but making sure you’re appointing people who are going to do the hard bureaucratic slog to make sure the standards are good,” said Randall, the director of research at the National Association of Scholars (NAS), and project director at the affiliated Civics Alliance.

Florida’s draft civics standards were created, he explains in the report, “in response to a law requiring greater civics instruction, and political will in the governor’s office and staff, to restore more traditional civics.”

In June, Governor Ron DeSantis (R-FL) signed three bills to “strengthen civics instruction and civics literacy education in Florida.”

The governor said in a statement:

The sad reality is that only two in five Americans can correctly name the three branches of government, and more than a third of Americans cannot name any of the rights guaranteed by the First Amendment. It is abundantly clear that we need to do a much better job of educating our students in civics to prepare them for the rest of their lives.

The following month, DeSantis vetoed a deceptive “action civics” bill that would have allowed Florida students to earn class credit for engaging in protests and political demonstrations in a way, he said, “that risks promoting the preferred orthodoxy of two particular institutions.”

Randall further detailed the proposed Florida standards:

They include, for example, an explicit acknowledgement of the Hebraic and Christian roots of our civic culture and a detailed requirement to study colonial history. The standards provide a framework for each grade through eighth grade, and then a detailed sequence for grades 9–12. Florida’s standards have been made more softly “bipartisan” by the usual practice of consultation with school administrators and teachers, but they show what state education machinery can achieve.

“Civics reformers should take note,” Randall emphasized, “no amount of civics materials will do any good in public school if they don’t align with the state standards.”

DeSantis, he told The Florida Capital Star, “has set the process for doing standards being revised. And if you look at them, and how it’s been done, it’s a long, slow process with lots of local input, including all the teachers.”

As a result, he continued, Florida’s civics standards will be a “compromise document.”

“And if you look at the standards, there’s some stuff … which may not be perfect,” he acknowledged. “There may be some compromise, but the point is, it’s still really good.”

“And what they’re showing is you can go through this process, you can make compromises as necessary, which frankly does get you some bipartisan buy-in, which ain’t bad,” Randall explained. “But if you try hard, and you appoint people, and you support them through the process, you can change this state bureaucratic machine as well.”

In his report, Randall offers the basic principles of what a civics education curriculum should provide, with further details available in the paper itself.

A civics curriculum, he says, should:

• Provide sustained coverage of colonial America, and not rush from the Mayflower Compact to the Declaration of Independence
• Tell students of the founding of their country — of Thomas Paine who argued that liberty was common sense, of Thomas Jefferson who wrote the Declaration of Independence, of George Washington who led the Patriot army to victory and independence, of James Madison who thought out how our Constitution could preserve liberty
• Provide sustained coverage of the desire to preserve and expand America
• Teach of the expansion of American liberty
• Emphasize the importance of national unity and of assimilation into a common culture
• Praise the virtues of populist revolt
• Give due weight to the power of moral crusade in American history
• Praise the virtues of moderation in the exercise of national interest

Randall assigned top grades as well to the Woodson Center’s 1776 Unites curriculum for grades 9-12, with grades K-8 anticipated;  Hillsdale College’s 1776 Curriculum for grades K-12; the teacher training resource Teaching American History by the Ashbrook Center; and the teacher training curriculum at the Jack Miller Center.

At the other end of the spectrum, the scholar assigned grades in the “F” range to the K-12 1619 Project curriculum, founded by Nikole Hannah-Jones; Generation Citizen’s K-12 program, which centers on “equity activism”; Educating for American Democracy, a K-12 framework designed to infuse “action civics” into each state’s standards; and the radical activist higher education curriculum offered at the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life, located in Tufts University, which trains teachers in how to bring left-wing action civics into their classrooms.

The entire list of leading civics curricula and their rankings can be found here.

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Susan Berry, PhD, is national education editor at The Star News Network. Email tips to [email protected].