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How Well Are Schools Preparing Kids for their Roles as Citizens?

On Tuesday, March 2, 2010 from 12 – 2 pm in the Edith Stone Room of the Albany Library, you’ll have the opportunity to discuss this question, and closely related others, with your fellow Leaguers and any non-members who choose to attend our monthly League Conversation.

Bill Chapman and other members of our Civics Education Action committee will moderate a discussion about how Civics, Government and other social studies are taught; what is found in textbooks and on standardized tests; how the textbook and testing industries go about creating these ever more important items; what relevant knowledge and skills students have when they leave high school; and, perhaps most importantly, what can be done better and what we as a League can do to improve instruction.

If you have the time and desire to complete a bit of "homework" before coming to the conversation, click on one or more of the following links to suggested background readings.

1. Edsource’s 12 page report, The Civic Purposes of Public Schools is available at
   
   http://www.edsource.org/pub_abs_cived.html
    

2. A brief summary of what Harvard researchers found about how teens use news media
   
   http://www.knightfoundation.org/news/press_room/knight_press_releases/detail.dot?id=130362
   
   and, if you want to know what teens (as well as the rest of us) should know about reading news intelligently, look at John McManus' DETECTING BULL (http://detectingbull.com/)
    

3. What research shows about teen knowledge of the first amendment, and how that amendment can be used to teach critical thinking
   
   http://www.ncte.org/magazine/archives/125745
    

4. An insider’s view of the problems in scoring standardized tests.
   
   http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/28/opinion/28farley.html?pagewanted=print
    

5. An insider’s view of how textbooks are written
   
   http://www.edutopia.org/print/1195
    

6. Opposing viewpoints on bias in a High School Government text
   
   http://articles.latimes.com/2008/apr/27/opinion/op-laclair
   
   http://articles.latimes.com/2008/apr/27/opinion/op-wilson27
    

7. How Texas conservatives shape what California students see in their textbooks
   
   http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/29/arts/29TEXT.html?8hpib=&pagewanted=print&position=top
   
   http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jul/22/christianity-religion-texas-history-education/print
    

8. How standardized tests are created
   
   http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/040900edlife-exam-edu.html

You may bring your own lunch, but water is the only beverage allowed by the Albany Library, located at 1247 Marin Avenue (at Masonic). We hope to see you there.

Help us continue moving the trend lines on graphs like these.
 

http://www.civicyouth.org/PopUps/FactSheets/FS07_2006MidtermCPS.pdf

http://www.civicyouth.org/PopUps/FactSheets/FS_youth_Voting_2008_updated_6.22.pdf