Category Archives: Education / Youth

Justice Souter

David Souter died earlier this month.

When George H.W. Bush nominated him to the Supreme Court, I watched the confirmation hearings on television. I saw a brilliant, thoughtful jurist. His purported “evolution” on the high court bench didn’t surprise me; his jurisprudence remained grounded in precedent and reverence for what I call the American Idea.

A few years after he retired from the Court, I was fortunate enough to attend a small conference on civic literacy at Harvard Law School, convened by then-Dean Martha Minow. Both Souter and Sandra Day O’Connor participated, and I was especially impressed by Souter’s remarks. I asked him if he would allow a copy to be published in the Journal of Civic Literacy –a publication of the Center I’d established at IUPUI (now IU-Indy). He graciously agreed. That was in 2013, and his observations have become even more pertinent.

Here they are.

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Dean Minow: Nearly three years ago, Justice Souter gave a truly extraordinary commencement address here at Harvard, upon receiving an honorary degree. In his exploration of the tensions among the values embodied in the United States Constitution, he offered deep insights into important decision making by the Supreme Court and equally conveyed the hard work that is necessary to advance the values of democracy and freedom, individual rights, and democratic participation. We are so touched and honored by your participation here today, which I know reflects your admiration and affection for your colleague, Justice O’Connor, and also your deep abiding commitment to this subject [civics]. Why does it matter to you so much?

Justice Souter: I’ve come by stages, I guess, to the answer. I’ll take you through the stages. By the way, I should issue two disclaimers to begin with. The first is, we are talking about civics and I’m going to talk in terms of civics. But, you cannot have civics without history. So, I might just as well be making the argument for history. The second disclaimer is, I don’t mean to take positions in the pedagogy controversy. I don’t know how to teach, I don’t know where the proper midpoint is between interactive learning and book learning and participatory exercises and so on. I’m not taking a position there. Maybe with one exception, and that is, if you’re going to test in math and reading you better test in civics or it’s going to be a poor child of the curriculum.

On the question why I think it matters, as I’ve said, I’ve come to my feelings by stages and the first stage was set by Justice O’Connor at a series of conferences she and Justice Breyer sponsored in Washington, provoked by the concern for the independence of the courts. The judiciary at the time was under a lot of attack and almost from the beginning the thing we learned there was the degree of civic illiteracy. We learned the statistic, which I believe is still true today, that there are only about a third of the people in the United States who can name the three branches of government. And the lesson that everyone learned was that without some knowledge of the structure, without, frankly, some constitutional knowledge, the value of an independent judiciary is a value that makes no sense. Independent from whom? From what? Well, we know the answer. The rest of the government, etcetera.

But, the first point of focus that came to me was that without a bedrock grounding in a lot of fundamentals that my own generation did learn as kids, constitutional values will frequently make no sense because there is no context for them.

The second stage of thinking why this subject of civics matters has come as a result of the recent calls for constitutional amendment and constitutional change, which we have been getting from all corners. There have been calls for an amendment in response to Roe v. Wade, calls for an amendment in response to the Citizens United campaign contribution limitation decision, calls for change in response to the possibility of a disparity between the Electoral College vote and the popular vote, and so on. It’s pretty obvious that someone who has no idea of what we have in the Constitution to start with is in no position to make any kind of critical judgment about what we might change, whether we ought to change it, and if so what change we ought or ought not to make. Ignorance is no foundation for constitutional thinking but, like it or not, we are being asked as a country to engage in constitutional thinking. None of it may in fact lead to a formally proposed amendment, let alone a convention, but who knows. So, I guess the second point in my feeling was about what is at stake: simply the need for a foundation for critical judgment on the part of citizens.

But finally, I’ve come, to a third, umbrella position, which certainly subsumes the two stages that I’ve already mentioned. And I will warn you right now that my ultimate line is like the remarks of several other people here this morning. Let me make my point this way. The American constitutional system is in effect a constant exercise in balancing, and perhaps a precarious balancing, between two very fundamental tendencies in American society and American political organization: the tendency to fragment into pursuit of individual interests and the tendency to pull together.

I could spend a long time this morning, which I won’t, simply cataloging what seems to me the growing force of the former sort, the centrifugal tendencies that pull us apart. Just think about these.To begin with, the very nature of the United States as it has developed is a conglomeration of fragmenting tendencies. We do not have a national religion. We do not have a homogenized national private culture, as distinct from political culture. We are in fact an amalgamation. We are a patchwork. We are a nation of immigrants, and people remember where they came from, whether they look back one generation or fourteen. There is a disuniting tendency built into the very nature of the United States, and it’s not going to go away. And I don’t suppose there’s anyone who wants it to go away entirely. I don’t.

Number two, there is great force in a philosophical tenant that we like to think of as ours. It’s not a coincidence that Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American. Consider the notion of Emersonian individualism, Emersonian self-reliance. They feed a kind of admirably atomistic tendency that I suppose can be called a widely shared character, a powerful element of our scrambled culture.

Number three, we are living at a time when the class divide in the United States is growing larger and the possibility of bridging that class divide is in fact shrinking. We are at a point now where the spread of wealth disparity is greater than it has been for over a century. And it is now a very unfortunate fact of life in the United States that social mobility is greater in a number of European countries than it is in this one. Parents in the United States cannot assume that their children have a real opportunity to be better off than they were.

Number four, there is an increasingly apparent divisiveness inherent in current developments in the news media. You can cherry-pick the news you want on the device that you hold in your hand. A substantial portion of the country is not even exposed to the breadth of traditional newspapers.

And, finally, I’ll stop by simply echoing what others have said about the growing tendency toward cynicism about the processes of government for which there is a very good foundation. Too many people are realistically looking upon government as basically a clash between a public interest and more powerful interests, exerting power through lobbies financed by huge amounts of money, with the names of the people behind them being to a great extent undisclosed. These are conditions, historical and contemporary, that drive us apart and tend to disunite us. What have we got pulling on the other side? By and large, what we have pulling on the other side is an adherence to an American Constitutional system. The American Constitution is not simply a blueprint for structure, though it is that. It is not merely a Bill of Rights, though it is that, too. It is in essence, a value system, a value system that identifies the legitimate objects of power, the importance of distributing power, and the need to limit power by a shared and enforceable conception of human worth.

That value system is the counterpoise to the divisive tendencies that are so strong today, and civic ignorance is its enemy. It is beyond me how anyone can assume that our system of constitutional values is going to survive in the current divisive atmosphere while being unknown to the majority of the people of the United States. So, what is driving me right now is simply the indispensability of our increasingly unrecognized and ignored constitutional value system. Without it, there is no chance of overcoming, of surviving the polarization that everyone decries. It is only in the common acceptance of that value system that at the end of the day, no matter what we are fighting about, no matter what the vote is in Congress or the State House or the town meeting, we will still understand that something holds us together.

Ultimately, what is driving me in working for the renewal of civic education is the need to share the threatened aspirations that should mark us as people who belong together as a nation.   

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Indeed.
 
 

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About That War On Education…

I know, I know–those of you who follow this blog are tired of my periodic rants about MAGA’s war on public education. But the evidence–which keeps accumulating–is overwhelming.

A state’s economic development is critically dependent on the existence of an educated workforce, and Indiana’s legislature continues to demonstrate that most of its members don’t know what an education is, or how it differs from job training. Worse still, they have consistently attacked the state’s public school system, establishing voucher programs to siphon tax dollars from schools established to serve children from all backgrounds in order fund religious schools serving distinct tribes.

Voucher schools (which, as I always have to emphasize, are different from charter schools) were promoted as a way to allow poor children to escape “failing” public schools. They were sold on the premise that they would improve educational outcomes. Those improvements didn’t come; indeed, research after a number of years shows that public school outcomes are superior. (Private schools catering to the children of wealthy parents do perform well, but most of those schools don’t accept vouchers.)

Given all the evidence that vouchers do not improve educational outcomes, drain our public schools of critically-needed resources, and have an enormous negative budgetary impact in a state where legislators keep telling us we don’t have funds to continue summer food programs for children or medical care for the poor, Hoosiers might wonder why our GOP overlords continue to expand the program.

The Indiana Citizen recently answered that question. The Citizen interviewed Josh Cowen, a researcher who initially had viewed vouchers positively, but who–thanks to his research– has become an outspoken critic of the programs. I have been reading Cowen’s 2024 book “The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers,” and I recommend it. It describes how Christian nationalists and wealthy libertarians joined forces to “push vouchers from a fringe idea to the conservative mainstream.”

The report began by acknowledging the research:

Studies of statewide programs in Indiana as well as Louisiana and Ohio, found what Cowen describes as “some of the largest academic declines on record in academic research,” comparable to the impact on learning of Hurricane Katrina and COVID-19, which dramatically lowered test scores by disrupting students’ lives and keeping them out of schools for extended periods of time.

For Christian nationalists, Cowen said, vouchers amplify their ability to use K-12 schools to promote a version of Christianity marked by alignment with right-wing politics, a hostility toward reproductive freedom, LGBTQ+ rights and racial justice initiatives, and, in some cases, a literal interpretation of the Bible, including the biblical creation story.

Private school vouchers are a huge part of the Christian nationalist long-term strategy, the idea that this kind of specific, right-wing interpretation of Christianity should dictate public policy and the law. These folks believe that education, from birth to adulthood, is absolutely key to the idea of, to quote Betsy DeVos, advancing God’s kingdom on earth. She laments that, in her words, public schools have displaced churches as centers of community. She sees vouchers as a cure for that.

Cowen points out that, unlike groups like Catholics that have long prioritized religious education, Christian nationalists have a very specific hostility to public schools.

It really gets back to this idea that public schools reflect this diverse, multicultural, pluralistic society in the United States. To the extent that these people don’t want a diverse, multicultural, pluralistic society, they really don’t want children spending eight hours a day in an environment that educates them to value those things.

Given their inability to claim better educational outcomes, Indiana legislators now argue that parents know best how their children should be educated. But as Cowen notes, if parental choice was really the motive, the state would require private schools to tell parents how they perform– to disclose student test scores and other relevant data. Instead, policymakers “have bent over backward, whether in Indiana or elsewhere, to make sure parents know as little as possible” about voucher school performance. There’s a reason for that.

Over the last decade, as vouchers have gotten bigger in Indiana and elsewhere, when you ask how private schools funded by vouchers are doing compared to public schools, the results are dreadful.

In Indiana, over 90% of voucher students spend our tax dollars at religious schools–and we know very little about what they are teaching. As Cowen says, “If the argument is that parents should have the right to teach their kids creationism, instead of science, I would say, “OK, fine, but not on the taxpayer dime.”

Read the article–or better yet, buy the book.

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Dropping The Pretense

So disappointing! A friend recently sent me a copy of a post that has been making the rounds: it shows the letter that Education Secretary Linda McMahon recently sent to Harvard–a letter filled with vitriol and announcing the cut-off of any further grants to that University–with copious red mark-ups correcting its numerous grammatical and spelling errors. The post suggested that Harvard had returned the letter with those mark-ups to the Education Secretary.

Unfortunately, it turned out not to be true. (Granted, had Harvard done so, it would have been petty and unnecessarily provocative.) As it was, the circulation of the post simply underlined the fact that McMahon–like all of Trump’s appointees–is massively unfit for her role.

One thing the letter did accomplish–probably accidentally–was the abandonment of what has always been a phony motive for Trump’s assaults on higher education: his purported concerns about anti-Semitism on the nation’s campuses.

As an article in the Atlantic recently observed,

What you will not find in the McMahon letter is any mention of the original justification for the Trump administration’s ongoing assault on elite universities: anti-Semitism. As a legal pretext for trying to financially hobble the Ivy League, anti-Semitism had some strategic merit. Many students and faculty justifiably feel that these schools failed to take harassment of Jews seriously enough during the protests that erupted after the October 7, 2023, terrorist attack on Israel by Hamas. By centering its critique on that issue, the administration was cannily appropriating for its own ends one of the progressive left’s highest priorities: protecting a minority from hostile acts.

Now, however, the mask is off. Aside from one oblique reference to congressional hearings about anti-Semitism (“the great work of Congresswoman Elise Stefanik”), the letter is silent on the subject. The administration is no longer pretending that it is standing up for Jewish students. The project has been revealed for what it is: an effort to punish liberal institutions for the crime of being liberal.

As the article noted, McMahon’s letter contained a “disconnected grab bag of grievances.”

The original reason given for the assaults on academia–concern about anti-Semitism–was always laughable, especially given Donald Trump’s own amply documented history of anti-Jewish bias. Wikipedia even has an entry detailing that history. It includes everything from his constant use of anti-Semitic tropes, to his weird accusation that Jews who support Democrats are “disloyal to Israel” and that Jews who are Democrats “hate their religion.” (I assume this accusation follows his acceptance of the old canard that America’s Jews have “dual loyalties”– loyalties that mean we are supposed to favor Israel over other countries, no matter what Israel is doing at any given time and no matter how many of us see its government’s actions as grossly inconsistent with time-honored Jewish values.)

A gratifying number of Jewish organizations have issued denunciations of Trump’s efforts to pretend that his assaults on universities have anything to do with legitimate concern for the Jewish students on those campuses. These “not in our name” statements reject what they’ve accurately labeled as Trump’s effort to use Jews as pawns masking an overtly political agenda.

Trump’s animus toward universities–especially Ivy League universities–is undoubtedly rooted in his festering and well-documented resentment over his failure to be accepted by the graduates of those institutions who dominated elite society in New York, and who dismissed him as the needy and pretentious buffoon he was.

MAGA’s rage at institutions of higher education, however, has more ideological roots, as displayed in a 2021 speech by JD Vance, titled “The Universities Are the Enemy.” As the article in the Atlantic noted,

Then–Senate candidate J. D. Vance declared that universities, as left-wing gatekeepers of truth and knowledge, “make it impossible for conservative ideas to ultimately carry the day.” The solution, Vance said, was to “honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.” We’ve been seeing the aggressive part of that formula for two months. With the McMahon letter, the administration has gotten much closer to honesty.

I think Vance has confused “conservative ideas” with reactionary ones. Conservatives typically seek to preserve an existing social and economic order, while reactionaries typically want to return to a perceived golden age, and to reverse the current direction of society. Project 2025 is an excellent example of a reactionary document.

There’s a reason so many actual conservatives are “never-Trumpers.”

Trump himself is neither conservative nor reactionary–he’s the useful fool being used by the reactionary forces behind Project 2025. JD Vance is right about one thing: universities are enemies to ignorance and reaction.

The attack on them has absolutely nothing to do with anti-Semitism.

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NO NO NO

The Trump Administration may be the pre-eminent example of lunacy in government, but the current super-majority in Indiana’s legislature–aided and abetted by our MAGA Governor and his merry band of White Christian Nationalists–are no less impervious to logic, evidence and sound policy. 

A report from Indiana Public Media focuses on one example. It begins:

A measure meant to better align education in Indiana to the state’s workforce needs is headed to the governor’s desk. It received wide support from Senate lawmakers despite lingering concerns about its effect on colleges, universities and employers.

SB 448 requires the Commission for Higher Education to approve all degrees and programs offered by public colleges and universities every 10 years. It also says those schools must assess and consider their staffing needs when reviewing tenured professors.

Sen. Greg Taylor (D-Indianapolis) said he is concerned programs could be cut if they aren’t considered valuable to the state’s employment needs. Additionally, he expressed concern that requiring faculty tenure reviews to take specific staffing needs for approved degrees or programs into account could be detrimental to other areas of study.

“It can get really dangerous for us to start providing this type of, I don’t know, nose under the tent ideology,” he said.

Taylor has identified the two major flaws in this state over-reach. I’ve repeatedly posted about the first– lawmakers’ refusal to understand what education is, and why it is not job training. Our public schools and universities have two vitally important tasks:  giving the nation’s children and youth the intellectual tools and skills they will need, not just to negotiate the economic world they will inhabit, but the tools to lead richer, more fulfilled and considered lives; and equipping them with what I have termed “civic literacy”–enabling them to discharge the responsibilities of citizenship.

Education includes things like art, music, literature and philosophy. Presumably, those studies are unnecessary “frills” when the job of the schools is simply to produce worker bees. 

But SB 448 not only confuses education with job training, it mimics Trump’s efforts to dictate what can and cannot be taught in the nation’s universities, to control and micro-manage institutions of higher education and to “purge” those institutions of ideas with which our overlords disagree.

The American Association of Colleges and Universities has issued a response to these efforts. It began:

As leaders of America’s colleges, universities, and scholarly societies, we speak with one voice against the unprecedented government overreach and political interference now endangering American higher education. We are open to constructive reform and do not oppose legitimate government oversight. However, we must oppose undue government intrusion in the lives of those who learn, live, and work on our campuses.

The statement notes that the nation’s colleges and universities are diverse. There are “research universities and community colleges; comprehensive universities and liberal arts colleges; public institutions and private ones; freestanding and multi-site campuses.”  Different schools are designed for different students. In order for these institutions to function properly, they must have the

freedom to determine, on academic grounds, whom to admit and what is taught, how, and by whom. Our colleges and universities share a commitment to serve as centers of open inquiry where, in their pursuit of truth, faculty, students, and staff are free to exchange ideas and opinions across a full range of viewpoints without fear of retribution, censorship, or deportation.

I encourage you to click through and read the entire statement, which was signed by dozens of university presidents. I doubt it will move the culture warriors in Washington or the Indiana Statehouse, who shrink from “open inquiry” and want to turn our educational institutions into factories spitting out those obedient worker bees. These are limited individuals who view genuine intellectual engagement and inquiry with fear and disdain. 

During this session, Indiana’s terrible legislature has doubled down on its war on education. It has stolen even more critical funding from our public schools in order to increase a voucher program that all evidence shows does not improve educational outcomes, and is in reality a First Amendment “work-around” allowing public money to flow to religious schools. In a prior session, it passed a highly intrusive bill misleadingly described as an effort to protect “intellectual diversity” on state campuses–in reality, an effort to purge those campuses of perspectives of which our radical legislators disapprove.

Ironically, those Blue states governed by legislators who understand the difference between job training and education–and who support, rather than undermine, their universities’ missions–also have more robust economies.

Too bad Indiana’s “leaders” can’t connect those dots….

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What Do We Tell Our Grandchildren?

Well, I see that Trump’s effort to remake America into a gulag has claimed another victim: Americorps. 

If you are unfamiliar with Americorps, a recent description from the Brennan Center might be helpful.

The 1994 launch of AmeriCorps—the nation’s premier public service program, a sort of domestic Peace Corps—was one of former President Bill Clinton’s signature achievements. The program aimed to harness the idealism and spirit of service of thousands of Americans eager to contribute time and energy to addressing pressing national and community problems in a hands-on fashion.

That basic vision continues today in the efforts of some 80,000 mostly young AmeriCorps members, who receive minimal living expenses and a modest education stipend (currently $5,815) in exchange for an intense year of work. They perform tasks like tutoring struggling schoolchildren and helping out with after-school activities at under-performing schools; cleaning up parks and other public lands; providing help to veterans and their families; and responding to hurricanes, floods, tornados, and other emergencies. No program, especially one so large and challenging, is perfect. But for most participants, it’s a life-changing experience, one that can help open doors to post-AmeriCorps jobs and careers. The current funding level is $386 million, the same as for fiscal 2016. The agency’s overall allocation is a little more than $1 billion.

I can confirm that reference to “life changing”–my youngest grandson took his gap year as an Americorps volunteer. He was always a good kid–did well in school, didn’t get into trouble, and displayed the sort of empathy currently missing from our federal government–but that year saw enormous maturation. He worked (hard!) with an assortment of young Americans who came from a wide variety of backgrounds, and became newly appreciative of his own privilege. 

That grandson is graduating from college next month. He had initially hoped to work in government, but Trump’s election took that option off the table. He will join an entire cohort of young people graduating into a newly chaotic economic environment, and a threatening political and civic one.

Frank Bruni recently addressed the dilemma of these graduates in a column for the New York Times. I think he spoke for millions of us when he wrote,

It’s a hell of a thing to be surrounded by college seniors a month away from heading out into this new America, a land of malice and madness. My fellow professors and I are supposed to have nuggets of optimism at the ready, gauzy and gooey encomiums about infinite possibilities, the march of progress and that apocryphal arc, the one that bends toward justice. But all I’ve got is the metastasizing pit of fear in my own gut.

In his conversation with students, BruniI recalled the anxiety and uncertainty he’d experienced at their age, what he described as “the gnawing suspense of being on the threshold of adulthood with no clue what it had in store for me.” He confessed an inability to imagine that flux of emotions in a political moment like this one.

College students throughout the country made all sorts of decisions and nurtured all kinds of expectations based on one version of America only to encounter, less than three furious months into Trump’s second presidency, a much, much different one. It’s a situation suffused with bitter ironies: Those students have often been caricatured and vilified for not seeing enough good in America — for focusing on its betrayals rather than its ideals — and now they’re watching its leader betray those ideals daily, hourly, with a shrug or a smirk or, at least metaphorically, a cackle.

Bruni enumerates just a few of Trump’s betrayals: his calculated abandonment of a man consigned to a hellhole in El Salvador because of an administrative error, his “morally perverse assertions that Ukraine is evil and Russia rightly aggrieved, and his pardoning of the savages who smashed their way into the Capitol and bloodied police officers on Jan. 6, 2021.” 

How do we counsel these young people who are encountering, as Bruni says, not merely a change in the rules but the collapse of decency and dignity? What do I tell my own grandchildren, who were raised by a bunch of lawyers and educators and are painfully aware of the severity of the current assault on American values?

What– Bruni asks-is the fallback for a teetering democracy?

The only answer I can muster is to redouble our fidelity to the values exemplified by Americorps and the thousands of other government agencies and nonprofit organizations working to make life better for those who are less fortunate. 

Refuse to submit. Be one of the good Germans.

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