Sen. Dick McCormack, D-Windsor, guesses that he has been introducing bills requiring that high school students pass a civics course to graduate since the 1990s.
The legislation has never gone anywhere, but this year McCormack’s bill easily won the support of a third of the Vermont Senate — including members from across the ideological spectrum. Sponsors of the legislation, S.17, include Sens. Anthony Pollina, P/D-Washington, arguably the chamber’s most progressive member, and Josh Terenzini, R-Rutland, one of its most conservative. A similar bill is expected to be introduced in the House by Rep. Jessica Brumsted, D-Shelburne.
These civics bills could very well suffer the same fate as their predecessors. But McCormack thinks the uptick in enthusiasm for the legislation suggests a growing concern, following the insurrection Jan. 6 at the U.S. Capitol, that Americans need to get back to basics on the subject of democracy.
“You can argue over whether a pitch was a ball or a strike,” he said. “But you can’t play baseball at all if you don’t agree three strikes make an out.”
The problem with McCormack’s bill? Vermont already essentially has such a rule on the books.
Krista Huling, a social studies teacher at South Burlington High School, wholeheartedly agrees that civics education is vital. That’s why, when she chaired the state Board of Education, she pushed the board to adopt a new set of standards that established a framework for social studies in K-12 schools across the state.
The Green Mountain State takes a local-control approach to education, which means local districts set their own graduation requirements and write their own curriculums. But these must be aligned with state standards, which set topline goals for what children must learn.
Those standards, for example, call on high school seniors to be able to explain “how the U.S. Constitution establishes a system of government that has powers, responsibilities, and limits that have changed over time and that are still contested.”
Jay Nichols, executive director of the Vermont Principals Association, said he agrees that a primary function of schools is teaching children “key aspects of how our government works and how to be an effective member of a democratic society.”
But given the standards already in place, he thinks the legislation is “absolutely” a solution in search of a problem.
“We don’t necessarily think having a required course titled ‘Civics’ is the way to ensure student knowledge in this area,” he said.
Huling freely acknowledges that the existing system is messy, and results in wide variability across the state. As a teacher, she thinks there’s “big room for improvement” in how subjects are taught and what students learn.
But she thinks if lawmakers in Montpelier really want to help move the issue forward, they ought to consider investing resources — not writing redundant mandates.
“The state has required all the outputs that they want,” she said. “The next thing we need to concentrate on is the input.”
McCormack, for his part, argues that what’s required clearly isn’t prescriptive enough. The current approach emphasizes experiential learning, he said, which is all well and good, except that it means “certain bodies of fact [are] simply neglected.”
“It is possible to graduate high school and simply not know certain things,” he said. “I’ve had American citizens say to me that they don’t believe in this liberal nonsense about a separation of church and state, because the Constitution says we’re one nation under God.”
McCormack added that, since introducing his bill, he’d been contacted by a national advocacy group, CivXNow, which pushes for better civics education in America’s schools.
In its policy platform, the group encourages states to press schools to give civics more time, to include civics in standardized testing, invest in teacher training and place a premium on youth civic participation and activism.
But its No. 1 recommendation? That states “make their standards fewer, clearer and more rigorous by drawing on the College, Career, and Civic Life C3 Framework.” The very same standards Vermont adopted during Huling’s tenure on the state board.
Social studies educator Andy Tufts has been teaching civics, history, and economics at Windsor High School for a little over 30 years. The entire time he’s been there, he said, the school has had a pretty robust civics class that’s been a requirement to graduate.
Tufts doesn’t think McCormack’s bill — or a similar proposal — will help or hurt much. He just thinks it’s a bit beside the point.
With testing so narrowly focused on math, English, and science, civics “always gets pushed to the back of the line,” he said, particularly in the elementary years, when children should be learning the basics.
“Some of the basic factual knowledge about government and democracy and all of that, that should be ingrained in those early ages so that when you get to high school, you can have real substantive discussions and lessons that really dig into what’s going on. That’s hard to do if kids don’t even know that the Legislature is made up of two branches,” he said.
Sen. Brian Campion, D-Bennington, who chairs the Senate Education committee, said the civics bill likely won’t make it to the floor as-is. He said the Agency of Education will be surveying schools to get a better sense of what the landscape of curricular offerings really look like.
“But this is an important topic, given the state of our democracy in our country,” Campion said. “And I think we’ll look forward to partnering with the agency to see what we might do to be supportive.”
