A Crucial Element of Democracy

This is a blog by Robert Gutierrez ...
While often taken for granted, civics education plays a crucial role in a democracy like ours. This Blog is dedicated to enticing its readers into taking an active role in the formulation of the civics curriculum found in their local schools. In order to do this, the Blog is offering a newer way to look at civics education, a newer construct - liberated federalism or federation theory. Daniel Elazar defines federalism as "the mode of political organization that unites separate polities within an overarching political system by distributing power among general and constituent governments in a manner designed to protect the existence and authority of both." It depends on its citizens acting in certain ways which Elazar calls federalism's processes. Federation theory, as applied to civics curriculum, has a set of aims. They are:
*Teach a view of government as a supra federated institution of society in which collective interests of the commonwealth are protected and advanced.
*Teach the philosophical basis of government's role as guardian of the grand partnership of citizens at both levels of individuals and associations of political and social intercourse.
*Convey the need of government to engender levels of support promoting a general sense of obligation and duty toward agreed upon goals and processes aimed at advancing the common betterment.
*Establish and justify a political morality which includes a process to assess whether that morality meets the needs of changing times while holding true to federalist values.
*Emphasize the integrity of the individual both in terms of liberty and equity in which each citizen is a member of a compacted arrangement and whose role is legally, politically, and socially congruent with the spirit of the Bill of Rights.
*Find a balance between a respect for national expertise and an encouragement of local, unsophisticated participation in policy decision-making and implementation.
Your input, as to the content of this Blog, is encouraged through this Blog directly or the Blog's email address: gravitascivics@gmail.com .
NOTE: This blog has led to the publication of a book. The title of that book is TOWARD A FEDERATED NATION: IMPLEMENTING NATIONAL CIVICS STANDARDS and it is available through Amazon in both ebook and paperback versions.

Friday, October 28, 2022

JUDGING THE NATURAL RIGHTS VIEW, XXVI

 

An advocate of natural rights continues his/her presentation[1] …

As this blog makes its way through the natural rights view, currently reporting on its influence on civics education, the blog turns to the next aspect, schools’ sociological-economic bases.  This aspect is part of the commonplace of curriculum development, the milieu of school settings.  The notion of commonplaces is the product of Joseph Schwab.[2]

          If one keeps in mind that the main benefits of following a natural rights perspective in the teaching of American government and civics is that one, students are made aware of their rights and, two, they are presented with a realistic view of the nation’s political system, certain advantages can be realized.  Such educating leads students to viably, as adults, compete in the political fray.  As such, its use can be a positive force in the nation’s quest for equity.

          But the reality is that there are hitches with this quest.  Here is how a financial writer sees the state of variance among the various state systems in the US:

 

For the majority of U.S. families, public education is the only option.  But the quality of public school systems varies widely from state to state and is often a question of funding.  Public elementary and secondary education money usually flows from three sources:  the federal, state and local government.  According to the U.S. Department of Education, states contribute nearly as much as local governments, while the federal government supplies the smallest share.  Some researchers have found that more resources – or taxes paid by residents – typically result in better school-system performance.[3]

 

And this concern is not new.  Here is what David Berliner and Bruce Biddle reported in 1995:

Some Americans like to pretend that public education in this country is of one piece and that it provides equal opportunities for all … And yet, huge differences persist in the levels of support given to public schools in this country – differences that are far greater than those found in other advanced countries.  Funding levels are also closely tied to community affluence, which means that America’s wealthy suburbs have some of the world’s best schools, while appallingly bad schools appear in our urban ghettos.  Thus, instead of funding an educational system that provides equal opportunity[,] America operates a system of public education that discriminates against poor students because the schools they attend are badly underfunded.[4]

 

With the instruction of these realities to American students, which would be derived from an honest implementation of the natural rights perspective, certain results are possible.  That is, students who are from lower income environments can come to understand the politics that lead to their schools losing the “public education funding race.”

          The conditions of poorer schools are deteriorating and even an equalization of funding, at this time, will not lead to equal conditions.  While well-funded schools enjoy attractive and well-apportioned physical facilities with well trained teachers, small classes, and students who are being brought up in supportive environments, schools in the poorer areas of the nation exhibit quite different circumstances.  These latter schools are often squalid, crowded, and riddled with crime and violence.

          Teachers in these schools are continually looking to find a way out of them as they have to deal with inordinate numbers of students who are impoverished and “at risk.”[5]  Equal funding would only stop the gap from further widening.  For true equality, huge investments in these poorer areas need to be spent in order for these schools to catch up.  And central to this problem area has been the reliance on property taxes to fund schools.

          An American University online site addresses this source of inequality.  It reports the following:

 

The financing systems of public schools in the US ensure that community wealth disparities carry over into education. By relying largely on property taxes to fund schools, which can vary widely between wealthy and poor areas, districts create funding gaps from the word go. Affluent areas end up with well-funded schools and low-income areas end up with poorly funded schools. District sizes also distort funding levels. Predominantly white districts are typically smaller, yet still receive 23 billion more than districts that are predominantly  students of color, according to a recent EdBuild study. This results from the tendency to draw district lines around small affluent islands of well-funded schools within larger poorer areas that serve mostly students of color.[6]

 

          While teaching the natural rights perspective will not in itself do much to ameliorate the depressing conditions of the poorer schools, its message, if responsibly conveyed and heeded, is a positive one that can at least provide the information that could lead to understanding and, hopefully, to viable political effort by those so afflicted by the inequitable realities of poverty in America.

          In conjunction with other efforts, the use of the natural rights perspective could have a large positive impact on the conditions facing the nation’s poorer schools.  And this one factor – the economic inequality one finds among America’s school populations – proves to be a structurally imbedded factor that hinders those school systems in attaining their full potential.  And with that note, this blog will turn next to youth culture as the last topic this “judgment” of the natural rights influence on American education addresses.

[Note:  As regular and ongoing readers of this blog might know, this blogger takes a break every four hundred postings.  He did so after 400, 800, and now will do so after 1200 postings.  As of his counting, this posting is number 1199.  That leaves one more posting before the next break.  He anticipates the break will last at least two months, maybe three.  He has other projects, e.g., finishing his preparation of the re-edited collection of the blog’s second hundred postings.  He looks forward to the break and of getting back from it to resume producing this blog’s postings.]



[1] This presentation continues with this posting.  The reader is informed that the claims made in this posting do not necessarily reflect the beliefs or knowledge of this blogger.  Instead, the posting is a representation of what an advocate of the natural rights view might present.  This is done to present a dialectic position of that construct.  This series of postings begins with “Judging Natural Rights View, I,” August 2, 2022.

[2] Joseph Schwab presents his conception of the commonplaces of curriculum development – they are subject matter, students, teachers, and milieu.  See William H. Schubert, Curriculum:  Perspective, Paradigm, and Possibility (New York, NY:  MacMillan Publishing Company, 1986).

[3] Adam McCann, “States with the Best & Worst School Systems,” WalletHub (July 25, 2022), accessed October 26, 2022, https://wallethub.com/edu/e/states-with-the-best-schools/5335.

[4] David C. Berliner and Bruce J. Biddle, The Manufactured Crisis:  Myths, Fraud, and the Attack on America’s Public Schools (Reading, MA:  Addison-Wesley Company, Inc., 1995), 264.

[5] Ibid.

[6] “Inequality in Public School Funding:  Key Issues & Solutions for Closing the Gap,” American University/School of Education (September 10, 2020), accessed October 26, 2022, https://soeonline.american.edu/blog/inequality-in-public-school-funding.

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