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The civic empowerment gap is a phenomenon identified by scholars and backed by empirical research. Civics education scholar Meira Levinson (2010) identifies our nation’s “current and intentional lack of educating our youth with the skills and the knowledge to be a part of democracy [as] the ‘civic empowerment gap’” (Love, 2019, p. 71). A synthesis of research findings shows that effective civic engagement programs are most often found in middle and high income neighborhoods, adding nuance to the empowerment gap (Lin, 2015). Lower-income students are underserved by schools and are enabled less access than upper-income students to quality civics education (Jamieson, 2013). These intersectional opportunity gaps are clear in the analyses presented by the Brookings Institute in The 2018 Brown Center Report on American Education, which reveal disparities in performance on the civics NAEP exam along racial, ethnic, and class lines (Hansen, Levesque, Valant, & Quintero, 2018). In most cases, the students who are excluded from the classroom are the students from communities historically excluded from fully participating in U.S. democracy through disenfranchisement and marginalization (Hansen, Levesque, Valant, & Quintero, 2018). The experience of exclusion perpetuates the marginalization of disenfranchised students as members of the classroom and as citizens in society (Freire, 1970).
The 2018 Brown Center Report on American Education report of scores on the NAEP Civics Exam found that over the last two decades, the gap in civics education has grown along class and racial lines. The 2018 data shows that only 9% of Black students assessed were proficient in NAEP civics, while 31% of white students demonstrated proficiency. Furthermore, only 13% of “Hispanic” and “American Indian/Alaska Native” students scored as proficient (Hansen, Levesque, Valant, & Quintero, 2018). The persistent disparities in access to quality civics education are troubling, especially considering the democratic importance of civics education in the United States. The quality of civics education is correlated with lower performance on the NAEP exam for African-American and Latinx students; both communities reported spending less time discussing current events, participating in service learning and engaging in political simulations (Hansen, Levesque, Valant, & Quintero, 2018). The denial of participatory and empowering civics education for students from marginalized communities serves to perpetuate the social disenfranchisement of the communities those students represent.
When civics education is taught within the structures of an education system and democratic government that disenfranchises marginalized populations, Black, Native American, and Latinx students are excluded from the standardized civics curriculum. These racial demographics of disenfranchised students are those most lacking in “civics proficiency” as defined by the NAEP (Hansen, Levesque, Valant, & Quintero, 2018). These are the communities that most need civic leaders to advocate for full participatory representation in the United States democracy, yet these are the students who are not receiving quality civics education. Lack of civics education should not be the barrier to full civic participation in society, nor should it exclude any student from learning how to engage in social change. It should be the top priority of our nation’s civics education to empower all students as active citizens who will use their civic knowledge to advocate for social change and work towards equitable representation in a participatory democracy.
Students who are not from privileged backgrounds are arguably in the most need of civic education that will help them advocate for their communities. Students with marginalized identities are at cultural odds with their schooling environment and are most likely and most often excluded from education (Delpit, 1995; Hemphill & Blakely, 2015; hooks, 1994; Love, 2019). This exclusion can be reified through explicit systemic oppression such as the school-to-prison pipeline that is established through educational practices of discipline such as zero-tolerance policies, suspensions, and expulsions, which disproportionately impact students of color (Love, 2019). The denial of inclusivity and validation of diversity is also established through the enforcement of harmful social, cultural, and linguistic norms, such as requiring the dominant discourse of “proper” English to be spoken at all times, thereby erasing the language, culture, and identity of others from the classroom through subtractive schooling meant to assimilate students into the hegemony and power dynamics of society (Delpit, 1988, Anzaldúa, 1987; Valenzuela, 2005). The opportunity gap is a studied and accepted phenomenon of the U.S. education system; previously understood as the “achievement” gap, scholars reframed the data to suggest that schools do not serve underprivileged students as well as they serve privileged students (Love, 2019). The opportunity gap extends to civics education as many students are left out of the idea of citizenship when only dominant identities and traditional forms of participatory citizenship are represented in the curriculum.
Civics education curricula are forms of representation that communicate explicit and implicit norms about citizenship and the American identity (Pinar, 1993). The experience for most students with non-dominant cultural and social identities, especially Black and Indigenous people of color and immigrants, is to be left out of learning, and implicitly left out of being a full citizen (Love, 2019). The lived reality of the opportunity gap and exclusion from education is named as the reality of educational survival: “the perpetual suffering dark families endure in yearning for an education for their children” (Love, 2019, p. 15). When education is a form of suffering and not of freedom, civics education cannot reach students who are suffering within the system. Furthermore, civics education will be ineffective for students who feel excluded within the learning community, especially those who are watching their families suffer as a result of providing them with that opportunity to be in the classroom. The students who feel excluded are the ones who matter most when considering effective civics education. Because education is inseparable from society, mattering in the classroom leads directly to mattering within democracy.
To approach an education that includes all students in the learning community, Love (2019) advocates for “an abolitionist approach to educational freedom, not reform, built on criticality civics, joy, theory, love, refusal, creativity, community, and ultimately, mattering” (p. 15). This approach to education connects directly to the goals of an inclusive democracy and the exclusivity of full citizenship in societal communities and full membership in educational communities. Love connects her educational manifesto to the larger goals of radical social change, explaining, “present goals and ideals reveal that what we who are dark want is to matter to this country and thrive as full-fledged Americans, with all the rights of White American citizens” (p. 15). Quality civics education should be a right for all students, especially students who have disenfranchised social identities and could be advocates for their communities. Inclusive civics education would involve students in the learning community as participatory members of the classroom to best learn how to engage as a participatory member of civic society.
Schools are directly linked with society, each informing the other in a cyclical dialogue. The economic and political conditions of society will inform the institution of education, which can both reproduce the conditions of society or serve to educate the new generation to transform those conditions (Freire, 1970; hooks, 1994). If education can be a site of learning how to creatively criticize, resist, and transgress, it can be the means by which society is transformed (Shaull, 1970). Essentially, schools reproduce the conditions of society unless they are designed as liberatory spaces of transgression, meant to disrupt the conditions of society. The former situation is named as the hidden curriculum, or the social status quo that is reinforced by inequitable educational systems and structures and often enacted without conscious awareness (Anyon, 1980; Jerald, 2006). Many educators do not realize the hidden social and political interests in the curriculum or the practice of “schooling” as means of assimilation (Freire, 1970). The U.S. education system is generally structured around maintaining the status quo of socioeconomic classes, as well as reinforcing the foundational structures of domination: white supremacy, neocolonialism, and patriarchy (Love, 2019).
When education is experienced as an instrument of cultural assimilation and social integration, students are limited in their opportunities to become citizens in the fullest participatory form. Lave (1996) conceptualizes learning as situated participation in a classroom community and Murrell (2007) explains how debilitating it can be for marginalized students to try to learn in a classroom community they are excluded from. This conceptualization of education stems from the perspective of psychologist Lev Vygotsky (1978), who asserted that learning was deeply intertwined with social practices. Lave’s (1996) theory of learning considers students as members of classroom “communities of practice” who develop “identities of mastery” through the process of participation in the community of learning (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Lave, 1996). Lave reveals how participation in the classroom allows students to practice and expand on what they’ve learned by collaboration with peers as part of the community. The participatory relationship to learning in the classroom is necessary for students to develop identities of “mastery” or identities of “achievement” (Murrell, 2007). If civics education is conceptualized through the theories of Vygotsky, Lave, and Murrell, students may be unable to fully learn how to be citizens of society when they do not feel like they are members of the classroom community.
Many students and citizens have negative experiences with the hidden intention of the U.S. education system to integrate students into the logic of a racist, sexist, and xenophobic social system. Carter G. Woodson (1933) first exposed the concept of “miseducation” in the U.S. education system with the idea that U.S. public schools primarily served to culturally indoctrinate Black Americans, rather than educate them for their own liberation. Pinar (1993) urges us to understand curriculum as a “racial text” and King (1991) explains how “dysconscious racism” plays out in the classroom and through educators themselves. For educators, it is difficult to understand that being part of this system doesn’t mean they are racist, bad teachers, or harmful educators, but without understanding the system, educators may act as a vessel for racism and harm by perpetuating a racist social system and communicating racialized misinformation to students.
This kind of miseducation is a common experience for many in the U.S. education system who have been positioned as “others.” Education has been used as a means to enact assimilation and genocide. For example, the children of Native American tribes indigenous to U.S. lands were forced to attend boarding schools as means of assimilation and colonization. Additionally, for the majority of this nation’s history, all women were purposefully given less educational opportunities than men, and the education they were afforded was targeted towards gender-specific professions such as secretaries and school teachers. Furthermore, English-only laws persisted in education policy as means of continuing linguistic and cultural domination over immigrant students in U.S. schools. These are only a few examples of how the educational realm has been a site of harm, oppression, and forced assimilation that serves to reinforce a politically charged social status quo. These hidden curriculum impact students in intersectional ways, such that one student could have a unique experience of miseducation within multiple interlocking systems of oppression and exclusion (Crenshaw, 1989; The Combahee River Collective, 1978).
The intersections of many systems of oppression create unique experiences of marginalization in and out of the classroom. Social structures of oppression reinforce each other and in many cases serve to maintain the same status quo (The Combahee River Collective, 1978). For example, race and socioeconomic class are interlocking systems of oppression (Crenshaw, 1989). Race is a socially constructed means of categorizing people based on appearance and of structuring systemic forms of oppression and disenfranchisement. With racist oppression as an ideology behind the structuring of society, most social structures are designed to reinforce white supremacy and marginalize othered racial identities (Love, 2019). In the words of Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “capitalism requires inequality and racism enshrines it” (Melamed, 2015). Those interlocking power structures are experienced as a form of social education whereby marginalized social identities are conditioned to relate to society from the margins and to conform to the norms and status quo of society.
A key part of the hidden curriculum is the hidden classism in learning environments that implicitly teaches all students in the U.S. how to relate to the economy, authority, and work. “Our political economy is structured to create poverty and inequality” (Kucinich, 2017) and our schools reflect the political economy as well as the social world. In the U.S., zip codes are significant predictors of educational achievement because schools are funded by local property taxes. That structure of funding in tandem with the No Child Left Behind accountability policies has led to persistent inequity in education. By linking educational funding to local property taxes, schools in poorer districts are unable to provide quality education to their students and thus unable to meet accountability standards that would secure federal funding. Schools that are underfunded or struggling to meet federal requirements are typically located within neighborhoods populated predominantly by people of color and operate with the goal of survival, thus restricting those students’ access to educational resources through the limitations of funding (Love, 2019). “This system renders schools ineffective in providing poor students any type of real social mobility” (Love, 2019, p. 17). Schools reproduce the conditions of society and reinforce the stratification of social, political, and economic power.
A body of educational scholarship reveals that learning environments and methods of education vary greatly depending on what social class of students schools serve. In “A Distinctly Un-American Idea,” Finn (1999) references a qualitative educational study conducted by Jean Anyon in 1981 that describes the ways in which students receive extremely different education experiences depending on their socioeconomic status. Finn corroborates Anyon’s findings with those of other scholars and institutions to reveal how caste-like disenfranchisement is embedded into U.S. educational structures (Kozol, 1992). Anyon (1981) found that working-class students are educated entirely with the banking method, while students in upper-class and affluent schools get to learn through experiential and creative means. This means that students born into lower socioeconomic classes are limited in opportunity to develop as citizens with agency, creativity, and self-determination. Withholding the opportunity to fully participate in civic society based on citizens’ socioeconomic status is an un-American idea because this nation is founded and structured on principles of social possibility and participatory democracy.
These structural barriers determine how accessible and effective civics education can be and must be taken into account when considering best practices in civic education. The modern structure of inequitable educational quality resonates with the findings from the 20th century (Love, 2019). Journell (2011) found that the quality of civics education coincides with perceptions of students’ future societal roles; students who are expected to attend college are privy to more civic education.Those who don’t have plans to attend college have demographically similar characteristics to those who are less likely to be civically engaged (Journell, 2011). These demographic measures include being part of a minority group, having parents with lower levels of education, and living in a lower-income neighborhood. Those social characteristics are all indicators of “social capital,” which is a concept to explain how some citizens inherently have more social opportunities due to the social status of the family and community they come from. The influence of social status and social capital on access to quality education excludes many students from being able to engage in effective civics education.
References
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