The State of Civics Ed. in Rhode Island, July 2022

Today I put on my "President of the Rhode Island Council of the Social Studies" hat and went to a Zoom meeting hosted by RI Civic Learning Coalition.

Today's meeting included members of the RI Department of Education (RIDE), who shared some updates on the upcoming "Civics Task Force" announced back in June that was the result of a lawsuit against the State of Rhode Island by students, parents and other advocates that schools weren’t providing the civics education young people needed to be engaged citizens. Apparently an application form is being created and then once that is finished it will be sent out to those of us who are interested in serving on it and the general public, most of whom are probably not that interested. 

The Civics Task Force's first meeting is September 1, 2022, or sometime around then. RIDE is also in the process of processing all the comments they have received about the new graduation standards and the draft History and Social Studies standards. 

It was also good to hear that everything so far is just a draft, and the goal is get a lot more feedback before anything is formalized. I do have some concerns about those, but having been a member of the writing team and before the RIHSSAC committee, I agreed not to share anything publicly until the proposed standards are released by RIDE. More on all that in a future post...

Finally, Geralyn Ducady, formerly the education director at the Rhode Island Historical Society, took the position of History/Social Studies/Humanities person at RIDE. She just started two days ago, so she wasn't brought in on this meeting, as according to the RIDE folks she has a lot of info to process through to get up to speed. I don't envy her that. Before she left RIHS I had been working with her on several initiatives -- feedback on the EnCompass digital textbook, serving on the RIHS Teacher Advisory Group, and getting her feedback her on the draft of my RI History course. She is a solid addition to the RIDE team and just in time, just as the new standards, civics education task force, and civics requirements are rolling out this next year.

The other interesting part of the meeting came from the RICLC's student civics survey, which I am citing now as the source for the slide images below. The Civics Learning Coalition is in the process of compiling the data from their survey and will be releasing a formal report in August. So I am not going to be discussing everything they shared at today's meeting and I will share their final report on this blog when it comes out. 

But some of the feedback they received is very interesting, and it relates to ideas I've advocated for or for things I've suspected for some time.

A lack of professional development....

When the state eliminated coursework an PD hours as a requirement for renewing certification, it had a chilling effect on professional development offerings. The school I work at (and I suspect at other schools around the state), PD has been tailored to whatever the new district initiative is, and to whatever PD the staff is willing to provide for each other though the "unconference" model. At today's meeting the representatives from RIDE blamed the General Assembly for creating "unfunded mandates" in education legislation -- that legislators talk about funding an initiative when first developing a bill but when it comes to the final draft and passage, funding to support it is no longer in there or is so small its negligible. This is true as far as it goes, but far more destructive to the state of PD for RI educators was RIDE tying certification entirely to evaluations back 10-15 years ago while eliminating PD completely from the certification process. But I didn't say anything, because it would have derailed the conversation about civics.

But there too -- the opportunity to require a mandatory civics course for graduation is knocking on the door, but it does not look like the state is going to open that door and let it in. I was on the curriculum revision team in my district, back in 2007, I had proposed such a course. While the assistant super, who was the admin chair of the revision committee, agreed such a course would be a great idea, he said that forcing all students to take another required course would seriously impact all elective courses and especially those offered by the history department. And that was the end of that conversation. 

So I am fully aware why RIDE might not want to mandate a civics course for every LEA in the state. Requiring a course in one subject means that an elective has fewer students. But given the current political climate mandating some understanding of how government, democracy and civic virtue works may be more important to the fundamental health of our state than another STEM course.

All great questions. There was more information about survey design they discussed during the meeting; I think they did a great job on the design of the questions.

However, someone is sure to point out that while almost 1000 respondents sounds like a lot, there were 139,184 K-12 students enrolled in public schools in 2020, the most recent year for which there is data available. [1] That is less than 1% of the total number of RI students that took part in the survey (0.689 per cent, to be precise), but as it turns out, it is close to the basic sample size of 1000.  

A good maximum sample size is usually 10% as long as it does not exceed 1000

A good maximum sample size is usually around 10% of the population, as long as this does not exceed 1000. For example, in a population of 5000, 10% would be 500. In a population of 200,000, 10% would be 20,000. This exceeds 1000, so in this case the maximum would be 1000.

Even in a population of 200,000, sampling 1000 people will normally give a fairly accurate result. Sampling more than 1000 people won’t add much to the accuracy given the extra time and money it would cost. [2]

It would be nice though if RIDE added some civics questions to the SurveyWorks questionnaire they send out every year and keep them on there for a few years to check for consistency in responses... 

More data is always good! 

Finally, it is not surprising that over thirty percent of students doubt they could accurately compare how local, state or national government functions. Less than half of students have an actual civics course available for them to take at their school. And while I am not opposed to the recent (unfunded) mandate from the General Assembly that 

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[1] "Public school enrollment in Rhode Island" Kids Count Data Center, © 2022 The Annie E. Casey Foundation. https://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/tables/5664-public-school-enrollment#detailed/2/any/false/574,1729,37,871,870/any/12268

[2] "How to choose a sample size (for the statistically challenged)" tools 4 dev © 2022 https://tools4dev.org/resources/how-to-choose-a-sample-size