Winning control of both houses of Congress and the White House had Democrats pondering ways to secure national dominance, whether that be by pushing to add Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico as states or abolishing the Electoral College. But one tactic hasn’t received nearly as much attention as it deserves: the manipulation of civics education.
Required adventures in “action civics,” student protest and lobbying for course credit, will eventually be paired with a push to lower the voting age to 16 or 17, an idea Democrats have already broached at the national level but that can be done more easily, at least for certain elections, by state legislatures.
Massachusetts is ground zero for the effort to foist leftist “action civics” onto the rest of the country. That effort is led by a Cambridge-based nonprofit organization called iCivics, assisted by influential academic centers for newfangled “civics” at Harvard and Tufts. Generation Citizen, an action-civics nonprofit group with a long-standing presence in Massachusetts, is another key player.
In 2018, this coalition managed to gut the highly regarded Massachusetts K-12 standards on the history of America, the West, and the world while putting oppression-obsessed curriculum standards in their place. The coalition’s crowning achievement, however, was to introduce an “action civics project” into the Bay State’s K-12 standards at two points, eighth grade and high school. In practice, the supersized Massachusetts action-civics requirement was a way of turning leftist political protest into homework.
The Massachusetts action-civics coalition is about to go national under the name “Educating for American Democracy.” Once Joe Biden’s Department of Education dangles carrots in the form of federal dollars, while brandishing regulatory sticks, red states will be alternately seduced and pressured into requiring the supposedly bipartisan and respectable practice of “action civics,” a term few people have even heard of.
The adoption of statewide requirements in action civics will invite America’s overwhelmingly leftist teacher corps to import its politics into the classroom. A wave of federal funding for “civics” will spread the leftist curricula backed by centers such as Harvard and Tufts to red states and will establish required teacher certification programs in leftist action civics at the same schools of education now churning out woke radicalism. Under the guise of restoring traditional civics, the red states will have been hoodwinked into subsidizing, and even requiring, the political hijacking of their own children.
Let us have a look, then, at what is about to be touted nationally as the Massachusetts civics miracle. It is, in reality, the Massachusetts civics fiasco.
Over the decade from 1993 to 2003, Massachusetts developed what was widely acknowledged to be a first-rate curriculum framework in history and social science, the product of a bipartisan “grand bargain” between Republican Gov. William Weld and a Democratic legislature. The Massachusetts history standards were held up by many as a national model, yet they were not without controversy. Sandra Stotsky, the administrator responsible for developing the 2003 Massachusetts history framework, proudly owned that it was “not a politically correct document,” by which she meant that it avoided a double standard in which only the West could be criticized.
The 2003 Massachusetts history framework conveyed the core story of Western civilization through a narrative that highlighted themes of individual worth, personal responsibility, and the origins of democratic institutions and principles. The links between European and British history and America’s own story were duly stressed. The founding was well explored.
The framework squarely faced the reality of slavery and of limited political rights for many yet placed these facts in context. It’s common nowadays to find students who think of slavery as a uniquely American invention. That sort of miseducation would have been impossible under the 2003 Massachusetts history framework, which covered slave trading by African kings, Middle Eastern ties to the trans-African slave trade, Aztec slavery, and more. When it came to the franchise, the 2003 framework asked students to compare who could vote in early America with who was allowed to vote in England, France, and Russia at the same time. So, instead of falsely painting America and the West as the globe’s great sinners, the innovative nature of our democratic and republican traditions was stressed.
A claque of multiculturalist critics attacked the Massachusetts history standards from the start, of course. Yet teacher support for the emphasis on Western and U.S. history remained strong as the standards were refined through the 1990s, and especially after 9/11. As the terror attacks faded and the culture moved left, however, the assault on the 2003 Massachusetts history standards was renewed. Its success would have to wait, though, for the arrival of “action civics,” a movement that took off nationally, and especially in Massachusetts, during the Obama years.
Barack Obama’s election produced a surge of interest in action civics in Democratic circles, culminating in the release by a White House task force in 2012 of A Crucible Moment: College Learning and Democracy’s Future. That report lent the imprimatur of the White House to action civics, and Obama soon promulgated regulations designed to spread the practice through America’s universities.
Shortly after A Crucible Moment appeared in 2012, a commission created by the Massachusetts Legislature issued Renewing the Social Compact: A Report of the Special Commission on Civic Engagement and Learning. That report urged the incorporation of action civics into K-12 and higher education, and touted the exemplary work in Massachusetts of iCivics, Generation Citizen, and the “civic engagement” program run by Professor Peter Levine at Tufts University. It cited A Crucible Moment repeatedly.
Levine came in for special attention in an op-ed appended to the report. That opinion piece was by a couple of Lowell, Massachusetts, students who described their civics project: a call for the voting age to be lowered to 17. The students cited arguments by Levine.
Peter Levine has been pushing to lower the voting age to 16 or 17 for a decade. If you say that 16- or 17-year-olds are neither mature nor knowledgeable enough to vote, Levine replies that required civics classes can fix all that. Once social studies teachers discuss current events with their high schoolers, Levine assures us, the children will be ready. The students who penned that op-ed echoed this point.
By 2015, pressure from leftist social studies teachers and nonprofit organizations finally pushed the state’s Democratic administration to commit to a revision of the 2003 framework. It took the 2016 presidential election, however, to kick that process into high gear.
Although groups such as Generation Citizen and Levine’s civics center at Tufts had pushed for years for a statewide requirement in action civics, legislators were reluctant to impose a uniform system on localities, particularly when it came to the charged practice of school-sponsored political protests. The political winds shifted after the election of Donald Trump, which enraged Democrats and turned mandatory action civics into a strategy of “resistance.”
At this point, iCivics joined the fray. Founded by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor to teach civics via video games, iCivics had a centrist reputation. Under the leadership of Louise Dube, however, the group now turned sharply to the left. Dube joined with Generation Citizen and the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation to form the Massachusetts Civic Learning Coalition, the alliance that would lead the fight for a new civics law, and for a radically redesigned history framework as well. Dube met frequently with legislators to pressure them on controversial matters like action civics. Her special focus, though, was running administrative coordination and input on replacement of the 2003 history framework. The history curriculum that emerged under Dube’s influence in 2018 was a leftist professor’s dream.
In the new Massachusetts curriculum, the story of the West was whittled away, picked apart, and scattered into “optional” modules that effectively killed it off. Positive points about the West and unflattering facts about non-Western societies were removed or reduced to insignificance. The abuses of the Chinese Cultural Revolution highlighted by the 2003 framework, for example, now went unmentioned. The story of the Puritans and their New England descendants was drowned out by an extraordinary amount of required detail on the depredations suffered by Native Americans. The central thread of American history was lost.
In 2018, Boston’s conservative-leaning think tank the Pioneer Institute published “No Longer a City on a Hill: Massachusetts Degrades Its K-12 History Standards,” a scathing and perceptive critique of the History and Social Science Curriculum Framework approved earlier that year under the influence of Dube and her coalition. The Pioneer report’s central complaint was that the new curriculum standards’ incoherence would leave students “ignorant of the chronological and conceptual links that unite Western Civilization.”
That was the goal. The revised curriculum bears a striking similarity to academic “deconstructionism,” which denies that any particular culture can or should be studied as a unified whole. Ironically, for all its attention to the West, the 2003 Massachusetts history framework provided more complete accounts of Islamic, Chinese, and African history than its 2018 replacement, precisely because the 2003 framework told the stories of these cultures in coherent narrative form. The 2018 framework comes off as sketchy and confusing because it is less about telling the stories of various cultures than about dissolving a sense of membership in any larger nation or group. From the perspective of the 2018 framework, nations, cultures, religions, and civilizations are out. The categories that matter instead are oppressor and oppressed.
The battle continued in the Massachusetts Legislature, where the requirement for an action civics project, first in grade eight and then in high school, remained the sticking point in the fight for a civics bill. Despite bipartisan support for some sort of civics measure, the requirement for school-sponsored protests continued to spark disagreement. Controversy broke into the open when Republican Gov. Charlie Baker objected to the mandatory civics “action” project on the grounds that it might become partisan, or force outnumbered student dissenters to join class protests they did not truly support.
In response, Dube’s coalition backed an amendment requiring that projects be “nonpartisan,” meaning a ban on political-party favoritism. Ideological partisanship, the very stuff of action civics, remained untouched. The coalition drew the line, however, at the governor’s insistence that the projects be made optional. Baker blinked, political protests became required coursework, and the Massachusetts model for “action civics” was born.
Leftist groups such as Generation Citizen now had a mandate to expand their operations in the schools. Generation Citizen energetically rejects the charge that action civics is little more than leftist politics disguised as education. A recent study by Tom Lindsay and Lucy Meckler of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, though, reviewed Generation Citizen’s projects and statements and found them to be overwhelmingly tilted toward the political Left.
Since passage of the Massachusetts action civics bill in 2018, Harvard University’s Democratic Knowledge Project, directed by Professor Danielle Allen, has offered action civics curricula to schools throughout the state. Allen served as a regional field organizer for the 2008 Obama campaign and is exploring a possible 2022 run for governor of Massachusetts.
Allen’s fame within the action civics community rests on the “10 questions” she poses to student “change-makers.” Her questions are designed to help student activists handle public criticism and deal with the pressures of potential celebrity. Curiously, however, none of the questions ask students to consider arguments on the other side. On the contrary, Allen praises the rising and decidedly left-leaning generation for its superior sense of what America’s political agenda ought to be.
Meanwhile, since the demonstrations and riots of 2020, the 2018 Massachusetts History and Social Science Framework has been supplemented by some decidedly woke curricular materials. Teachers are now urged to highlight identity politics, intersectionality, and oppression at every turn. They are also warned against “curricular violence,” meaning, roughly, any material that causes discomfort for “marginalized” students, whether because it has been included in the curriculum or because it has not.
iCivics and the civics centers at Tufts and Harvard are leading sponsors of the about-to-be-released Educating for American Democracy report. Allen and Levine are lead authors of that report, and Dube of iCivics is de facto leader of the coalition. The goal is to get requirements for action civics projects, classroom discussions of current political controversies, and student internships with political advocacy organizations written into the laws of every state, very likely with help from the Biden administration.
Meanwhile, the civics center at Tufts publishes an index of congressional races and other elections where a higher youth turnout would likely swing control from one party to another (in practice, from R to D). Tufts portrays this as nonpartisan research, yet it bears a remarkable resemblance to a Democratic Party “get out the vote” operation. Like the folks at Tufts, Nancy Pelosi has supported lowering the voting age to 16. She even works with Generation Citizen on the issue. H.R. 1, introduced in the House on Jan. 4, proposes to “offer grants to states for activities to encourage involvement of minors in election activities.” To win a grant, a state must submit a plan that includes preregistration of minor voters and “modification to the curriculum of secondary schools in the State to promote civic engagement” (i.e., action civics).
Expect more school-sponsored student demonstrations pushing for a lower voting age if action civics spreads, and Democrats see a path to national dominance.
Stanley Kurtz is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
