Miguel Cardona’s Cynical Civics Lesson
To some, civics is about knowledge – knowledge of our system of government, its philosophy, origins, and operations. To others, civics is about action – getting involved in local issues or advocating for a policy agenda. But to an, unfortunately, growing number of people, civics seems to begin and end with angrily announcing how any given event flatters your partisan priors and proves the perfidy of your political opponents. Last week, Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona put himself in the last camp.
The newly released National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) results in history and civics were terrible. History scores fell by five points, continuing a steady decline since 2014. Civics scores dropped by about two points, a first-ever recorded decline. The truth is that no one can ever quite say why NAEP scores move in one way or another. We can only make more or less educated guesses.
But Cardona proffered a particularly uneducated guess, declaring that “Banning history books and censoring educators from teaching these important subjects does our students a disservice and will move America in the wrong direction.”
This was such a baseless and partisan statement that Cardona’s defenders on Twitter did backflips to insist that he didn’t really, actually, directly blame the test-score decline on laws prohibiting critical race theory or on so-called book bans. But of course, he did, and the media dutifully went along. Chalkbeat, for instance, wrote: “US Education Secretary Miguel Cardona drew a connection between the history and civics score drops and the legislative efforts in many Republican-led states to restrict classroom conversations.”
This was an absurd accusation. Aside from the fact that we only have national, not state-level, data, it’s worth revisiting what the laws that “restrict classroom conversations” actually prohibit. They prohibit compelling or promoting arguments that “one race or sex is inherently inferior or superior to another race or sex,” that “moral character is necessarily determined by race or sex,” or “that an individual, on account of his race or sex, is inherently racist or sexist.” How exactly these morally common-sense prohibitions would harm teaching about slavery, much less about federalism or the Constitution’s separation of powers, is never articulated by those who decry “restrict[ing] classroom conversations.”
Even more absurd was the invocation of “banning” books. There is no movement to ban history or civics textbooks. To my knowledge, there is not even a single instance of a history or civics textbook being “banned.” There is, however, a movement to remove pornographic books like “Gender Queer” from school libraries. Why? Well, because the book contains pornographic images that I blush to describe in print. It’s clear that Democrats believe that fighting “book bans” is a political winner. And maybe it is. After all, it’s unpleasant – and sometimes, due to broadcast rules, outright illegal – to describe or depict the pornographic content that parents are objecting to. But at any rate, this phenomenon has absolutely nothing to do with civics or history instruction.
The suggestion that it does is pure partisan hackery. And the Secretary of Education is not supposed to be a partisan hack. Cardona could have used his bully pulpit to champion any number of either bipartisan or progressive ideas. He could have encouraged school districts to adopt a more knowledge-rich curriculum. He could have urged states to adopt more rigorous social studies standards. He could have called on Congress to pass the Civics Secures Democracy Act.
Instead, he decided to spin an ongoing academic tragedy for transient news-cycle advantage. The only silver lining here is that the kids probably aren’t paying any attention.
