Education / Youth

The Value of Pontificating

I’ve been scanning the local news I missed during the past month, and duly noted coverage of a recent speech by Melina Kennedy on education. Kennedy (no relation–honest!) has focused her mayoral campaign on public safety, education and economic development, and has been delivering substantive proposals on those and related issues. In her education speech, [...]

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Historic Dyslexia

Republicans these days seem to be having an awful lot of trouble with timelines. Example #1: David Barton–Michele Bachmann’s very favorite constitutional “expert,” recently argued that the nation’s Founders “had already had the creationism-evolution debate.” Now I knew the Founders were brilliant men; what I didn’t know is that they had debated the theory of [...]

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Civic Literacy: Charting the Dimensions and Consequences of a Civic Deficit

Sheila Suess Kennedy Professor of Law & Public Policy Erin Braun, MPA Student Adriene Tynes, MPA Student School of Public & Environmental Affairs Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis Abstract Available data gives evidence of a widespread lack of constitutional competence and civic literacy in the United States. The consequences of this ignorance are profound; the [...]

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The Politics We Deserve

My speech to the Annual Meeting of the Jewish Community Relations Council. ___________ We have just emerged from one of the most depressing sessions of the Indiana legislature I can remember. It was anti-woman, anti-immigrant, anti-gay, anti-teacher, anti-public-employee…We passed a mean-spirited and largely unconstitutional immigration bill. We defunded Planned Parenthood, in violation of federal law, [...]

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Hate to be a Broken Record, but….

This morning, the American Constitution Society blog referenced a recent report from the Associated Press: “The Associated Press has provided new details about a push by the nation’s largest Tea Party umbrella group to teach the Constitution in public schools using materials from an organization that promotes the Constitution as a divinely inspired document. As [...]

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