CRITIQUE OF PAROCHIAL FEDERALISM, V

 

This blogger’s book, Toward a Federated Nation,[1] argues for an instructional approach he calls historical dialogue to action (HD-to-A).  Basically, that approach calls upon students to investigate historical documents and other historical sources (including the work of historians) to gather information relevant to some contemporary problem area.  While grounded in historical material, it is not exclusively so.

These problem areas are so designated because they, to some degree, offend federalist values.  And the aim is for students to develop their individual positions regarding these issues and be prepared to defend their positions in discussions, arguments, and debates.  Teachers are to employ a process that has students develop the knowledge and skills by which they can perform these various steps including taking some action at a local site in which the problem is being manifested.

While this whole process is very much dependent on historical material, this blogger finds the application of the parochial/traditional construct as an approach too reliant on historical materials to the exclusion of other sources.  This bias goes contrary to a great deal of both psychological and pedagogic theory that advocates diversity of instructional methods for different types of learners and for different types of substantive materials.

Here is what a current academic group has to contribute:

 

Teaching methods are the broader techniques used to help students achieve learning outcomes, while activities are the different ways of implementing these methods.  Teaching methods help students:

·      master the content of the course [and]

·      learn how to apply the content in particular contexts

Instructors should identify which teaching methods will properly support a particular learning outcome.  Its effectiveness depends on this alignment.  To make the most appropriate choice, an instructor should consider learning outcomes, student needs and the learning environment.

Consider the following example:

·      Learning outcome:  Solve a complex math equation.

·      Learning environment:  An in person, upper-level math course with 20 students.

·      Teaching method:  Guided instruction.  First, the instructor facilitates learning by modeling and scaffolding.[2]  Students take time to ask questions and receive clarifications.  Next, students practice applying these skills together and then independently.  The instructor uses formative assessment to check for understanding.

This example demonstrates alignment of what the instructor wants students to do, and how they are supported in these tasks.  If the instructor chooses a different teaching method, such as a traditional lecture, students would need to process the lecture’s content and apply principles simultaneously.  This is very difficult to do and would lead to less successful outcomes.

Choosing the appropriate teaching method brings instruction to life while encouraging students to actively engage with content and develop their knowledge and skills.[3]

 

HD-to-A was thought of with these sorts of concerns in mind.  It calls for, where appropriate, employing social scientific processes and findings, natural science processes and findings, journalistic sources, literature and other artistic sources, and any other reputable source that is relevant to the issue under study.

          This approach – a diverse and interactive one – to educational challenges has a rich history and includes the work of such scholars as Thomas L. Good and Jere Brophy,[4] Robert Slavin,[5] and Robert Solso.[6]  And when one considers what the above cite advocates, it verges on the obvious in that it respects the notion, “different strokes for different folks.” 

In addition, when social studies curriculum employs a more current, problem-solving, and relevant approach, it would be useful in encouraging lower achievers to interrelate with the substance of the material and bring it more to life.  In addition, relying on both experimental designs and then narrative based material can avoid falling into a routinized experience for students.

Parochial federalism is too committed to analyzing those historical materials, i.e., historical documents.  Yes, they contain, for example, the values and beliefs of the founding generation – useful information – but in adopting a strategy that reflects the above citation, analysis of these documents to the exclusion of other sources and modes of investigation is short-sighted.  Instead, and this would be promoted by some other construct, there should be a give-and-take between and among various sources and/or activities.

And with that call for diverse methods, this critique is set to address its final point of contention.  That would be how parochial federalism defines community.  That view, being a product of the nation’s early history with its limited technology, thought of community only in geographic terms.  Today, given online technologies (hence this blog) and transportation advancements, community can transcend physical localities. 

These broader capacities call for a broader view and that view should be incorporated into a definition of community.  Parochial/traditional federalism – as its name suggests – has an excessively local view of social/political concerns.  Yet to meet what ails the nation, any view of governance and politics needs to be proactively ensconced in what is currently the relevant setting, that being a global reality.

And with that, this blog comes to its end of how it substantively presents and critiques the parochial/traditional construct – a construct by which Americans mostly saw governance and politics from colonial days to the end of World War II.  In those years, it took on various versions of itself – the first being a covenantal view, one believed to be witnessed by God.

Through such developments as the Enlightenment, Western expansion, industrialization, the Hollywood effect, and the New Deal, that construct was not a stagnant view but evolved with the major events of the nation and with the various forms of its main challenge, the natural rights view.  But with the experiences of World War II and how profound they were, that form of federalism gave way.  This blog, with the next posting, will begin reviewing its replacement, the natural rights view.

The next posting will be short and will summarize what this blog has offered in terms of the parochial federalism construct.  It will offer some introductory commentary on what constitutes the natural rights construct and that will be in the form of an overview in the context of how it was historically situated in the late 1940s.

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[1] Available through Amazon.  The book dedicates three chapters to the development of three units of study a teacher can employ in a civics or American government, secondary course.

[2] Scaffolding is merely an instructional strategy of breaking up what is to be learned into manageable segments and either giving students the tools by which to handle the segments or giving them various structures of the materials that possibly render them in a more manageable and/or understandable form.

[3] “Curriculum, Assessment and Teaching Transformation/Teaching Methods,” University of Buffalo (n.d.), accessed July 20, 2022, https://www.buffalo.edu/catt/develop/design/teaching-methods.html .

[4] Thomas L. Good and Jere Brophy, Educational Psychology:  A Realistic Approach (New York, NY:  Longman, 1990).

[5] Robert Slavin, Educational Psychology:  Theory and Practice (Boston, MA:  Allyn and Bacon, 1994).

[6] Robert Solso, Cognitive Psychology (Boston, MA:  Allyn and Bacon, 1995).

CRITIQUE OF PAROCHIAL FEDERALISM, IV

 

The last posting ended with the following,

 

By addressing these concerns [lack of viable local governance] … one gets at a very fundamental aspect of a parochial view of federalism as that term suggests one should have.  That would be a parochialism based on local partnerships across the nation in which a partner comes face-to-face with other partners.

 

This is not so much a call for the central, federal government not to address national concerns, but to encourage local citizens to make their local governance and governments proactive entities ready, willing, and able to address the array of challenges citizens face.  That goes from truly local concerns to such global worries as climate change.  Each level of government has not only a relevant role, but a vital one as well.

          And before leaving this local concern, one related problem should be mentioned.  Local communities are evermore becoming single-political units of advocacy.  That is, like minded people are to greater levels living near each other.  Liberals live in liberal neighborhoods or sections of towns, and conservatives also live close to like minded people.  This has political consequences. 

For example, when it comes to districting – or redistricting – Congressional or legislative districts, gerrymandered map-drawings (maps that show how the districts are designated) insure that one party dominates in each of the districts.  This makes general elections near meaningless as the choosing of representatives shifts over to primary contests.[1] 

Add to that the fact that primary elections draw the attention of only the more partisan voters and one can see that many elections do not fulfill their intended purpose.  Ideally, elections should be the time when regular citizens meaningfully involve themselves with others to determine who should represent them in developing governmental policy, yet that is, to ever increasing frequency, not happening.  By this development becoming common, it discards how democracy in a republic is supposed to work.

At the heart of this concern is how unfederated these monocultural arrangements – which they usually turn out to be – are.  Not only that, but these states of affairs are further institutionalized by the practice of gerrymandering those representative districts.  Here’s an idea:  what if a constitutional amendment was proposed and ratified in which it stated the following:

·      One, since monopolistically determined representative districts undermine the federation of a citizenry, and,

·      Two, the US Constitution is a federalist arrangement,

·      Therefore, redistricting shall honor, as much as possible, the principle of diversity as expressed by the allocation of voters within representative districts as closely as possible to the diversity of the state’s electorate as expressed in the last election.  For example, if the state’s election returns indicate 51% voted for Party X and 49% for Party Y, and then based on information garnered from voter registration distribution, each district will reflect this distribution as closely as possible.  Independent registered voters would be considered neutral in this allocation and randomly assigned according to residential addresses.

·      Claims that this mandate is not being met shall be subject to civil suits in which the courts will determine if a proposed districting plan shall be enforced.

·      This provision should not be considered an obstacle to any third-entity solutions, such as generated by commissions to set up to design districting maps, but instead serve as a standard such solutions need to meet.

 

As is probably obvious, this blogger is not a constitutional lawyer or scholar, but he feels his intent is communicated by the above bulleted list.

          In many states, given the popularity of one party over another, this “reform” would have no practical effect, but in those areas or states in which there is sufficient diversity, it could have an enormous effect.  Here is what Eilperin reported earlier in this century:

 

Political scientists and good government advocates have fretted for years about House incumbents’ reelection advantage.  Redistricting has only exacerbated an already disturbing trend.  In [recent] … congressional elections, only thirteen seats switched party control, and seven incumbents lost in the general election …  As University of Pennsylvania Law School Professor Nathaniel Persily wrote, “current rates of House turnover may equal historic rates of turnover in the Politburo [the policy making body of the old Soviet Union].[2]

 

The above listed provisions – or some such constitutional change – would encourage people of different ethnic and political standing to start talking to each other, start depending on each other, and perhaps begin interacting more often with each other. 

There is evidence that, in general, this is not so popular,[3] but it is a central attribute of federalist thought that citizens should strive to become federated with each other.  To achieve the necessary relationships so that they do so, people need to interact, especially politically.  With the above amendment or some such provision, the belief here is that a stage would be set for such interactions.

So much for that concern; now back to critiquing the parochial/traditional federalist view.  And what follows is the next element of this critique.  This element, it turns out, is somewhat related to what has just been stated.  That is, another shortcoming in the use of traditional federalism, particularly given the heterogeneity of modern societies and especially in the US, is that it takes no account of ethnic diversity; at best, it tolerates it. 

While this nation has a history of diverse European populations, with the addition of mostly the African slave population in its early days, most communities were segregated, and in the ensuing years this included whole states being established by religious/national groupings.[4]  But as time went by, communities began to intersperse, and that trend has grown extensively to the present day, particularly in urban centers.

The nation’s larger urban areas, especially, are cauldrons of diversity.  There, one finds zones of intermingling peoples.  Here is how a recent review of diversity states the situation:

 

Nearly all of the nation’s largest cities have at least one neighborhood that meets our definition as being both racially and ethnically diverse and mixed income.  Three large cities – New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco [–] account for nearly half such neighborhoods, but some smaller cities also rank high in the fraction of their population living in these diverse, mixed income neighborhoods.[5]

 

This runs counter to what this posting reports above – the prevalence of segregated areas.  That means these cities run counter to what seems to be occurring in the rest of the country.

          And in these “unusual” areas – the urban areas – there are schools with high levels of diversity.  The concern here is to merely state that such a distinguishing and influential factor should be accounted for when districting and other policies are being considered.  Surely a construct that would set the priorities of what governmental elements should be studied – as parochial/traditional federalism potentially sets out to do – and what issues will be analyzed should have a component that addresses diversity within the population. 

Not only does parochial/federalism tend to ignore these factors, but it also tends to minimize diversity, and, by its sense of priority, somehow attributes an insufficient degree of legitimacy to it and fails to entertain the sort of solutions that this posting offers – be they amateurish. So, as with the state of the nation’s politics running in two opposing directions – known as polarization – one gets a sense of how that has come about. 

On the one hand, there is segregated, representative districting and on the other hand, the higher levels of desegregated urban centers.  Parochial federalism provides Americans with little to no guidance about how they should address this current day political landscape other than claim that they should federate with each other.  Unfortunately, the times call for more guidance.

          This critique, it turns out, needs at least one more posting before it is completed.  Two more issues should be addressed.  They are related to the use of historical documents and a definitional issue – that being the definition of community.  And last, a summary statement should be added.  The next posting, hopefully, will touch all of these bases.[6]

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[1] Juliet Eilperin, Fight Club Politics:  How Partisanship Is Poisoning the House of Representatives (Lanham, MD:  Rowman and Littlefield, 2007).  While a bit dated, nothing in ensuing reports in the news seems to suggest this situation has been rectified; as a matter of fact, things have gotten worse.

[2] Ibid., 112,

[3] Ibid.  This lack of popularity seemingly due to people, as conditions now stand, finding this form of interaction unattractive – it strikes many as having to deal with “them” – the other.

[4] See, for example, Tom Gjelten, “White Supremacist Ideas Have Historical Roots in U.S. Christianity.” NPR (July 1, 2020), accessed July 17, 2022, https://www.npr.org/2020/07/01/883115867/white-supremacist-ideas-have-historical-roots-in-u-s-christianity AND Mark Carnes and John A. Garraty, The American Nation:  A History of the United States (Boston, MA:  Pearson, 2015).

[5] Joe Cortright, “America’s Most Diverse Mixed Income Neighborhoods,” City Reports (June 18, 2018), accessed July 17, 2022, https://cityobservatory.org/admin/ .

[6] Afterall, tonight is MLB’s All-Star Game.