Susan Pendergrass speaks with Brian Kisida, associate professor in the Truman School of Government and Public Affairs and director of Mizzou’s Open Minds Initiative, about what’s missing from civics education in America. They discuss why current civics assessments test trivia rather than real understanding, why comparing the U.S. to authoritarian regimes could improve civic knowledge, whether teachers are to blame for declining faith in America among young people, and how Missouri could build better civics assessments and reporting.
Episode Transcript
Susan Pendergrass (00:00): Thanks so much for joining us on the podcast. Brian Kisida, you are the associate professor in the Truman School of Government and Public Affairs at Mizzou, and also director of Mizzou’s Open Minds Initiative. We just talked briefly before we started recording that we’d like to have you come back and just talk about the Open Minds Initiative, because civic discourse on higher ed is certainly another thing that we’re very interested in. So thanks for coming on.
Brian Kisida (00:23): Yeah, and when we get to that topic, I’ll be a huge critic of the civic discourse movement in higher ed, and I’ll tell you how we’re doing it better.
Susan Pendergrass (00:31): Great, that’s even better. I love that. Meanwhile, this is part of a sort of an ongoing series of podcasts we’ve had, because prompted by a couple months ago, Pew and Gallup was putting out some survey data, and Cato, that shows, with the election of some primary elections of some folks from the DSA party, that there’s a rising opinion of socialism and a falling opinion of capitalism. And in the conversations we’ve had at the Show-Me Institute about this, and about how kind of surprising that is, we’ve been trying to pinpoint, is it because people don’t know what socialism and capitalism are, or is it really that they do like it better? And trying to understand, what do people know. I spoke to somebody on the podcast from Cato, and part of their survey was, how many branches of the federal government are there, and only, I think, forty percent got that right. So we know that people don’t really know a lot of stuff. But then I started looking into Missouri K-12 education, if I could kind of get a feel for how Missouri students are doing on history, government, civics, whatever is tested, social studies. And in the NAEP, at the national level, they have some test score data, but not at the state level. And I was trying to find some state-level information about maybe trends on what Missouri kids know, and I really couldn’t find much at all. And so I really want to talk to you today about this idea of what could states be doing in K-12 education to do a better job of teaching these subjects, and what to do about the fact that we don’t even really have test score data to know how we’re doing. So a long lead into that, but thank you very much, because I know you’ve written about this, and I would just love to get your thoughts on that.
Brian Kisida (02:21): Yeah, there is a lot to unpack there. I want to start by just saying that
Brian Kisida (02:26): I think we are missing the plot here. I think that a lot of these types of things that you’re citing, I think, are focused on the wrong things. So you mentioned some of these things, we see these sort of alarmist reports all the time. Students don’t know the branches of government. I remember there was a headline a couple years ago, one of these alarmist headlines, it reads: “A new national poll finds that most Americans don’t know that the Constitution was written in 1787. Nearly two-thirds of Americans named 1776,”
Brian Kisida (03:08): when the Declaration of Independence was signed, and to that I say, I do not care. I think you’ve
Brian Kisida (03:17): already centered on one of the things, which is, what we actually measure tends to be trivia. So let’s look at the broader landscape. Roughly half of states in the United States actually have some sort of civics exam. Fewer than those have it as a course, as a graduation requirement. For a lot of them, it’s just, like, complete it. Missouri, it’s complete it. You can take it as many times as you want until you pass. It won’t bar you from graduation. But even among those, outside of a few outliers, like Florida, who’s developed a really strong, I think, civics knowledge test, even among the ones that do have exams, it tends to be trivia. So the majority of states that are testing this stuff are borrowing questions from the U.S. citizenship exam. And the U.S. citizenship exam has questions like, what is the name of the national anthem, name one of the two longest rivers in the United States,
Brian Kisida (04:16): where is the Statue of Liberty. These are not questions, if I look at the world and I look at the sort of breakdown in civic attitudes and dispositions that we have been witnessing from the right and the left, on the extremes, I don’t see how knowing these things is going to help us. So focusing merely on how bad we’re doing on these performance measures, kind of, I believe, misses the point of what actually should we be measuring, and what actually do we want students to come away learning.
Susan Pendergrass (04:50): And what should we be measuring? I mean, and what should we be measuring, especially for high school students. It feels to me like if they don’t even know the trivia, how are they going to know the underlying concept?
Brian Kisida (05:01): Yeah, so I’ve been working on this. I’m in the middle of a two-year project, I got a nice
Susan Pendergrass (05:01): Okay.
Brian Kisida (05:01): fellowship to pursue this stuff from the Carnegie Foundation. And my thesis is that we need to focus more on measuring civic values and dispositions. But let’s hold that thought for a minute. First let me dispense with
Susan Pendergrass (05:23): Okay.
Brian Kisida (05:23): sort of, I think, the three ways that we can try to improve civic capacities in this country, or in school systems, or in districts. One, I think, is just a no-brainer: quantity. So what are most states requiring? One semester. One semester of government studies. That’s just simply not enough. So we can talk about quality all we want, but there’s only so much quality you can put into one semester. So quantity has to be addressed. We need more of it. It should be integrated from K to 12. You can integrate lessons about government and politics in literature classes, starting in elementary school. So quantity, I think, is issue number one. The second way that people tend to want to approach this is they think that if we write stronger standards and requirements in state departments of education, that that is going to trickle down into the classroom. One, I don’t believe that that’s how reform works, and lots of research has found that it doesn’t. You might help give teachers a better guiding framework, but we know that people respond to incentives, and if there’s not some assessment framework tied to the standards that people write in state departments of education, we can’t expect it to be done. The common adage to think about this is, what gets measured gets done. So I think it’s great to get together and talk about and write down into laws whatever it is that we think students should be learning, but I do not think that we should expect that to translate into classroom practice. So I end up at the third thing, which is, I think we need stronger assessments.
So within that framework, okay,
Susan Pendergrass (07:09): Okay.
Brian Kisida (07:09): what should assessments look like? Again, there are variations and types of trivia that we might ask. Knowing where the Statue of Liberty is located, I don’t think adds to our sense of civic values and dispositions. I think we need to reform it in two basic ways, in the ways that we measure these things. One is, there are certain things that you just kind of need to know to have an informed attitude and disposition. So you mentioned communism and socialism. Why don’t we have civic knowledge exams and items that ask students, how do these countries differ from the United States? What happened? I ask my students all the time, have they ever heard of the Cultural Revolution in China? None have. And this is really one of, I think, the most
Brian Kisida (08:03): important ways that we could improve our civic knowledge database, is to actually put the United States in a comparative perspective. Because it’s not just that students today are perhaps having very uninformed opinions about bad ideas, but
they don’t actually, we have no sense that they have the knowledge to form those opinions better. So think about what it is when a student has an idea that you and I might think is completely uninformed, and we can actually measure that. We can say, how does the United States differ in the ways that it protects constitutional rights and liberties compared to country X, Y, and Z? What did happen under Soviet rule, under communism? What does free speech look like in China? And then you actually have, so I think that’s a way to embed knowledge questions within a framework that still leads to,
can we expect students to have informed values and dispositions when it comes to democracy? And one of the things that we’ve seen, not just the general sense of students’ beliefs, but what we’ve seen is a real decline in faith in America. Poll after poll of young people finds that they
Susan Pendergrass (09:27): Right. Yeah. Wanted to bring that up.
Brian Kisida (09:29): are not necessarily committed to democracy, they’re not necessarily proud to be an American, and if you don’t know much about how America differs from the rest of the world, it might be understandable that you would think that. And I think that Americans are admirably self-critical.
I did a recent look at the NAEP civic items, in terms
Brian Kisida (09:56): of which ones are critical. And the number of NAEP civic items that are critical of America versus items that are critical of other countries is like 10 to 1. Good, good for us, like we’re critical of ourselves. We should be self-critical, but we should
Susan Pendergrass (10:08): Wow. Yeah, yeah.
Brian Kisida (10:11): not be so self-critical to the point that we undermine the things that we do that are good. So that’s one way that I think we can use knowledge-based civic assessment. And this requires states to take on this task, build task forces, start working groups, and figure out how to reform this. The other thing that I believe in is that we actually should directly measure attitudes and dispositions. So these aren’t knowledge tests, maybe there’s not a right or wrong answer, but as a way to have a good check on what students are coming out of schools believing, I think that we should ask students questions that measure
their sense of tolerance for difference. We should ask students their respect for the rule of law. If we’re upset when we see too many students, too many young people on social media celebrating the assassination of Charlie Kirk, or something like that,
I don’t know how to understand that. What I would like to know is, I would like to be able to look at school systems and say, okay, of your graduates, how many actually are committed to the views of tolerance and pluralism and the rule of law and individual rights. And those are a little bit difficult, because we kind of have an aversion in this country to asking students about their opinions, but I think that there’s ways that we can get there.
Susan Pendergrass (11:40): Yeah. What do you think about going upstream a little bit to the colleges of education, and what teachers are now being prepped for when they go out into their careers, ’cause it seems to me that some of this could be due to, I want to say this carefully, but this idea that the teachers in charge of their classroom, and they can teach facts and opinions and culture in whichever way they choose to do so, and I think that has contributed to this idea that a lot fewer young people are proud to be Americans. They’re proud of this country, because I feel like they must be getting something from the classroom that suggests that. What do you think?
Brian Kisida (12:23): I’m not convinced of that.
Susan Pendergrass (12:26): You’re not. Great.
Brian Kisida (12:28): But I don’t want to say it’s not a problem. So let’s take colleges of education first and then take teachers second. Colleges of education, absolutely, I think, tend to be some of the most leftward-leaning, echo-chamber sort of spots on college campuses. Of course that varies. If we’re talking about Columbia or Harvard, it’s going to be different than if we’re talking about the University of Missouri. But I don’t really believe that they have the power to brainwash teachers into a particular way. I do believe that there’s a missed opportunity to give teachers more good preparation. But I gave a talk at the most recent Missouri Social Studies Conference, a statewide conference of social studies educators, and I didn’t know what I was going in to expect. I thought, is this going to be a super woke, whatever the media narrative might lead me
Susan Pendergrass (13:36): Sure, sure.
Brian Kisida (13:36): to expect. It was excellent. I met social studies teacher after social studies teacher that was committed to American values and pluralism and democracy. It was a breath of fresh air. And I’ve also done my own research,
Susan Pendergrass (13:54): That’s great.
Brian Kisida (13:56): a study that we published in Education Next recently, where we actually pulled a representative sample of teachers in the United States, a representative sample of parents, and a representative sample of the general public. And we asked them very basic questions. One of the questions that was just very straightforward was, should schools teach that America is fundamentally good. And teachers scored higher on that than parents and the general public.
Brian Kisida (14:26): You have these pockets of San Francisco or Seattle or Massachusetts,
Susan Pendergrass (14:35): Sure, sure.
Brian Kisida (14:36): where teachers, and teachers unions and the like, are engaging in politics in a way that most of the public does not want them to. But I think they are outliers. That is what countless numbers of research, Jay Greene at the Heritage Foundation did a similar study, where they polled teachers and they came to the same conclusion. Teachers mostly look like Americans, because they are. You have teachers in rural places all over this country who are trying to do their best. So I do think that placing the blame on teachers is misguided. I think we really need to focus on the places where we can actually make change.
Susan Pendergrass (15:16): Yeah, I say that because I’m not really trying to bash teachers, but I have pushed back a little bit on this reforming how we teach civics and social studies, because in Missouri anyway, we have not yet nailed how to teach kids to read. We are really falling short, especially with our little kids, and we have some forty percent who are scoring below basic on NAEP, which means they’re functionally illiterate by third and fourth grade, and that does not bode well for their lives. And so I tend to want to just go back, and we’re going to start talking about math more and more, because now we know about the UCSD problem and all of that. We’re going to start talking about math more, and I don’t think we’re really getting the basics right, and civics feels like sort of down the road from those two. And with the reading in Missouri, there are some disproven methods of teaching reading, like three-cueing, where teachers unions and rural teachers have pushed back and said, nope, you can’t tell us what we cannot teach, what method we cannot use, if we want to use that method and we deem it necessary in our classroom on that day, then we will use it, you can’t ban it. And that pushback is surprising to me, because I did a podcast with Chad Aldeman, who said it’s been proven to be harmful, it’s a harmful teaching method. And yet teachers in Missouri have pushed back and said, you can’t tell us how we’re not going to teach. So that’s where that’s coming from for me. You certainly know the civics and social studies part of that much better than I do, but I’m like, if they won’t accept a ban on that, then how do we get to this next
Brian Kisida (16:51): I think
Susan Pendergrass (16:51): level?
Brian Kisida (16:51): the only thing I would add, and I’m sure you saw the Wall Street Journal piece a couple of days ago, where it was correlating union strength with reading scores.
Susan Pendergrass (17:01): Sure did. Wasn’t good. Yeah.
Brian Kisida (17:05): I think the only thing I would add to that is, I just don’t think teachers, in the way you phrased it, it made it sound like teachers’ unions represent and speak for teachers, and I don’t think they do. I think that we accept
Brian Kisida (17:15): that narrative, but you talk to a teacher, my wife is one, they’re in the union
Susan Pendergrass (17:20): Right, right.
Brian Kisida (17:22): because they want legal protection if somebody, if some parent tries to sue them wrongly, or if their principal tries to fire them or retaliate against them wrongly. And this is the problem with teachers’ unions, is that they’ve become political beasts instead of just advocating for employees and
Susan Pendergrass (17:37): Yes.
Brian Kisida (17:38): employees’ rights. And that’s a huge problem, especially in states where union dues are required, but also in states where union dues are voluntary, but it’s still the only way teachers feel that they’re protected, just in terms of normal workplace
Susan Pendergrass (17:52): Right.
Brian Kisida (17:53): things. Yeah, that’s a problem. In terms of the reading thing, I’m with you in a sense, but I wouldn’t put civics so far downstream, maybe, as you. I do think that
Brian Kisida (18:07): preserving what we have here is the most important thing that we have going on in public education. That’s me. But I think there’s a compromise here.
Brian Kisida (18:16): If students need to learn to read better, can we have them read the Constitution and Animal Farm,
Susan Pendergrass (18:24): Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Brian Kisida (18:24): and other things that we think can serve double duty. That sounds like a perfect scenario for me. In fact, I talked to a teacher
Brian Kisida (18:31): at that social studies conference, and I was actually curious, I was like, so do kids still read Animal Farm? And he said, yes, my students read it every year.
Susan Pendergrass (18:41): Yeah, yeah. That’s one of my favorites. Yeah, absolutely. I hope kids are still reading books. Yeah,
Brian Kisida (18:46): Not as much as we need them to, for sure.
Susan Pendergrass (18:48): So yeah, I was looking at the Missouri standards on social studies, and I know, going back to the original survey data we talked about, the standards on economics are very thin. Economic systems, very thin. So if I understand, we would have to sort of beef up, not put an emphasis on those, but those need to be good, but then we need better assessments, and then we need those assessments to count. Right?
Brian Kisida (19:15): Yeah.
Susan Pendergrass (19:17): So how do we make that happen? That feels like a long game in Missouri.
Brian Kisida (19:20): I think that it’s a long game generally. The process of building assessments is years, it’ll take years. But what are we waiting for? We can do this.
Brian Kisida (19:33): And when you say those assessments should count,
I know that you can run into political opposition, especially from the unions, if you make tests high stakes. But I think another thing that we’ve seen
Brian Kisida (19:47): is that a test doesn’t have to be high stakes in a particular accountability system with carrots and sticks to be effective. Stigma and shame does a lot. We’ve seen this through research all over the place. David Figlio, right? So Missouri’s about to do
school grades, letter grades, and
Susan Pendergrass (20:09): Yes.
Brian Kisida (20:10): when they implemented this in Florida, I’m pretty sure this was David Figlio’s research, they found that there were some real repercussions if your school got an F, or maybe a D or whatever. But they found that schools improved
Brian Kisida (20:28): even if they were given a C instead of a B, if they were there on the threshold. So I’m not, because I also believe in school choice and not too much government coercion, because I think government can get it wrong so often. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t make this information publicly available. I would like every school’s report card
Brian Kisida (20:51): to not just include some sort of amorphous letter grade or test score averages, or whatever proficiency means, that most people don’t really understand. I would also like it to say,
Susan Pendergrass (21:02): Right.
Brian Kisida (21:02): here’s how they performed on the civics, here’s how they performed on the civic values and dispositions test, survey, we can call it. We don’t even have to call it a test.
Brian Kisida (21:14): Because those things give parents and the public and policymakers information that they can use to figure out what’s going wrong in places, to figure out what’s going right in other places. The bottom line is, we need data, because you can’t solve a problem unless you can identify it. But I don’t know if I’d be super
Brian Kisida (21:33): draconian about assessments.
Susan Pendergrass (21:40): So do you see any appetite for this in Missouri? For starting to focus on social studies and civics?
Brian Kisida (21:47): Not as much as I would like to see. Other states have made this a real priority. Florida, Texas,
Susan Pendergrass (21:54): You mentioned Florida.
Brian Kisida (21:55): Iowa, Utah. There’s kind of a growing list.
Susan Pendergrass (22:00): All choice states. Yeah.
Brian Kisida (22:01): of states that have really made this a key feature of what they’re doing. I would like to see this be something that would move forward
more squarely on Missouri’s agenda, at the state level. I’m part of a group called the Missouri Coalition for Civic Learning. We’re doing what we can as volunteers, members of our organization go down to Jefferson City and they’ll testify and meet with legislators. We’ve held several meetings with legislators to try to get this on the agenda. Missouri’s legislature doesn’t
typically work super smoothly, and things don’t happen quickly, but by all means, if you’re a listener out there and you want to be involved, let’s make this happen.
Susan Pendergrass (22:47): So let’s just talk for a minute about NAEP. We’ve been throwing that term around, can you tell me a little bit about what that is, or tell listeners what that is? And I’m curious to know, is there consideration for changing the social studies exams?
Brian Kisida (23:01): Yes, so NAEP is the National Assessment for Education Progress. It is typically referred to in shorthand as the nation’s report card. And NAEP is the way that we see and track how students are learning. NAEP civics has always been the redheaded stepchild.
We need to reform NAEP civics, we need to fund NAEP civics, we need to be serious about this. Back to my pushback
on what I think is the most important function of publicly funded education. And I am happy to say that I know that the National Assessment Governing Board that informs how NAEP works, I know that they’re building a task force right now to revamp NAEP and reassess what we’re measuring, and I’m excited to see where that goes.
Susan Pendergrass (23:52): That’s great. All right, great. Well, thank you so much again. We’re going to keep talking about this, because I do believe math, reading, and civics are all important at the state level. We’re going to keep talking about it all the time. But I really hope that with this push toward more accountability in the state from the governor, that we can include social studies in the conversation, at least, so that number one, I’d just like to know how the kids are doing.
Brian Kisida (24:18): Yeah, yeah, no, let’s make it happen. Listeners, let’s do it. Thank you.
Susan Pendergrass (24:22): I appreciate it. Thanks so much, Brian.
Produced by Show-Me Opportunity
