April 2021
“Action Civics” will crush American education.
Stanley Kurtz, senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, describes it as “the greatest education battle of our lifetimes.” This is no exaggeration as more details are coming out about proposed federal legislation that seeks to bring “Action Civics” to a school near you. If these bills pass, the next generations of students will be lost to “woke” politics and leftist activism. In fact, our children and grandchildren will receive course credit for taking to the streets.
Feds propose to give course credit for anti-American organizing.
The “Civics Learning Act 2021” is a federal bill that was introduced by Congressman Alcee Hastings (FL-D) before he died in April. It provides for $30 million in grant funds for grassroots activism involving “innovative and evidence-based” civics learning and teaching programs. These programs will include hands-on civic engagement activities (lobbying and protesting), online and video game-based learning, service learning (in partnership with radical activist organizations), and participation in student governance. While most civics courses begin in middle and high school, the Civics Learning Act will introduce political activism to elementary school students.
The “Civics Secures Democracy Act” is more dangerous, according to Kurtz, because it weaves the divisive Critical Race Theory and Action Civics into all course syllabi. The ultimate goal is to create a national civics curriculum, complete with state standards by which schools will be judged. Particularly troubling is that the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which provides annual score cards for how America’s students are learning in various subject areas, is in line to help establish the standards and tie all student assessments to those standards. Students will have no choice but to get on board with the new community organizing goals of their civics classes.
Republicans are too naïve to notice.
Unfortunately, many Republicans are on board and are even co-sponsoring this legislation because the titles sound innocent and civics is assumed to be bipartisan. Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) and Congressman Tom Cole (R-OK) are two of the Republican co-sponsors. Because most Republicans seem to have no idea that stealth education takeovers are right under their noses, it will be up to parents and other concerned citizens to educate them.
It is Common Core for civics.
Those who fought Common Core will remember that history and civics were omitted in the first rounds because they were too controversial for a federal takeover. Those days are gone. With the Biden administration’s working at break-neck speed to dismantle any semblance of what remains of American ideals, this stealth attempt to develop national civics standards will complete the effort to institutionalize such radical ideological concepts as America is systemically racist, gender is simply a subjective construct, and being a good citizen entails joining Black Lives Matter protests to receive a good grade in the class.
The Common Core strategies and code words are the same.
As with the Obama administration’s “Race to the Top” grants that served to strong-arm state governments into accepting new Common Core standards, the “Civics Secures Democracy Act” proposes to set aside $1 billion in grants annually for six years for K-12 schools, universities, state governments, and non-profits to develop curriculum content and train teachers.
Among the requirements for teachers will be that they must discuss controversial social and political issues in their classes, assign “innovative and evidence-based” out-of-class projects (political protests and lobbying) for course credit, and support student internships (“service learning” activities) with leftist advocacy groups. Teachers will also be required to teach “media literacy” where students will learn to snub conservative media outlets (“fake news’) and listen only to “trusted” sources such as CNN, the New York Times, and the Washington Post.
Read and study the proponents’ plans for yourself.
- iCIVICS – The leader of this movement. Describes itself as a trans-partisan coalition.
- Educating for American Democracy (EAD)
- CivXNow/ICivics – a project of iCIVICS
- IllinoisCivics.org – a leading resource for information on the required implementation of civics classes in Illinois. Illinois #CivicsInTheMiddle is the model state for Action Civics, and it “is connected to the entire universe of leftist civics,” according to Stanley Kurtz.
- History Coalition
Follow the money.
Marc Bauerlein, an education scholar and emeritus professor at Emory University, fears that money will go to university education schools and departments that are “dedicated to filling the heads of aspiring teachers with identity politics and progressive dogma.” He identified one nonprofit organization, IllinoisCivics.org, as a likely recipient of federal funds. It has strong ties to public education and universities in that state. It also supports one program, Bauerlein said in a piece for the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, that promotes the view that “by the time they start kindergarten, children begin to show many of the same implicit racial attitudes that adults in our culture hold.”
Courage is contagious.
Parents and even some school administrators are beginning to see the dangers of the new evangelizing of Critical Race Theory. Some are speaking up and are even taking their money elsewhere, as we saw in New York recently.
The Dalton School headmaster, Jim Best, announced his resignation because of the school’s “ambitious” diversity and equity goals, according to the New York Post.
Andrew Gutmann, a parent whose daughter attended a private school in New York, chose to pull his daughter out of prestigious Brearley (K-12) for similar reasons, sending a letter to all families in the school citing the school’s adoption of Critical Race ideology as the impetus for his decision. In a letter to the approximately 600 families in the school, Guttman stated, “Brearley’s antiracism policies are misguided, divisive, counterproductive and cancerous. Many believe, as I do, that these policies will ultimately destroy what was, until recently, a wonderful educational institution.”
WHAT YOU CAN DO:
The importance of defeating this civics takeover cannot be overstated. Even though Action Civics and Critical Race Theory are already making their way into school curricula, schools still have a choice. The pending federal bills must be defeated, however, because their passage will lead our students to be taught to resist American ideals for the bulk of their educational lives. We cannot let this happen.
Action steps:
- Join Eagle Forum at the national and state level (EagleForum.org) and become a part of an effective grassroots movement working to stand against Action Civics.
- Call your Senators and Congressmen/Congresswomen and urge them to vote against these bills. Stopping the federal bills must be the number one priority.
- Galvanize former Common Core activists to form a new grassroots movement against Action Civics.
- Meet with the staff of your elected representatives and provide them with critical talking points about the bills.
- Influence and educate your School Board members.
- Educate the public through op-eds in local and state newspapers.
- Utilize social media to educate and encourage activism against Action Civics.
- Work with state legislators on legislation that can provide immunity for the state if the federal bills pass.
- Recruit national leaders, including Governors and Lt. Governors, to be spokesmen against radical civics education.
- Read and share everything education expert Stanley Kurtz writes on this subject including his recommendations about “How to Take Back American History.”
REFERENCES:
- Stanley Kurtz’s articles on the Threat of Action Civics:
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- Biden plans to push Critical Race Theory via Civics programs.
- The Worst Ideas in Education Are Bipartisan
- Civics vs. Citizenship?
- Explanation of Cornyn/Cole Federal Bill
- Conservatives are being bamboozled by the national civics movemen
- Far-left plan in Illinois – to be replicated in other states
- The leaders of the movement are hiding their agenda.
- Federal Democrat bill is more honest about wanting to train leftists.
- Rhode Island bill to indoctrinate civics students.
- National Association of Scholars fight back.
- How to Take Back American History.
- What Parents Should Know about Biden’s agenda.
- Supreme Court Justices Gorsuch and Sotomayor Call for Civics Ed.
- Democracy Act – Marc Bauerlein.
- Dalton Headmaster resigns.
- Parent pushes back – takes money elsewhere, encouraging other parents to do the same.
- Families are voting with their feet and taking their money elsewhere.
- Practical Advice for Parents from a School Board member.
- Real Clear Policy – American Civics.
- DailyWire focus on K-12.
- Texas White Paper on Civics.
- National Assn of Scholars Report – How American Universities Teach Civics.
- American Achievement Testing – Taking Back American History.
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a Texas Public Policy White Paper
Key Points
- This study examines the origins, nature, and educational effects of a movement in civic education that goes by a number of names—”New Civics,” “Action Civics,” “Civic Engagement,” and “Project-Based Civics.”
- Action Civics’ defenders point to what they deem to be the failure of the “dominant, book-learning approach to civics education.”
- Critics contest Action Civics’ claim that content-based civic education should be replaced by “doing civics.”
- Critics further contend that Action Civics is simply a pseudonym for “teaching kids how to protest.”
- If Texas adopts a “doing civics” approach, it should clarify in legislation that “doing civics” is secondary to, and derives its value only from, a Founding-documents-based approach to civic education
This history of Western Civilization seeks to rectify the excesses of four decades of “Hxrstory” and “Cultures, Ideas, and Values.” The report’s author, Stanley Kurtz of the Ethics and Public Policy, excavates the history of thought from Jerusalem and Athens, through Rome, to the modern West. In doing so, Kurtz provides a detailed refutation of “Western Civ the Myth” and explains the need for Western Civilization courses from Stanford to Yale.
The irony of Jesse Jackson and some 500 protestors chanting, “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go,” while surrounded by the Romanesque architecture of Stanford University isn’t lost on the speakers and panelists of this conference. NAS intends to bring professors and scholars together in order to discuss the need and means of returning Western civilization to a place of encouraged scholarship as the cultural foundation of our self-governance and national ideals.
Speaker: Stanley Kurtz, Senior Fellow of the Ethics & Public Policy Center