See below for another new measure in Congress to allow local districts to apply for federal funds for the teaching of civics each September. As commendable as this measure may be, one wonders if the money could better be used to hold the states accountable for how well they are actually doing this. For the want of a mere $8 million when the government is spending trillions, Congress has failed to enact such legislation for the last three Congresses! The NAEP assessment scheduled for this coming January will represent yet another failed opportunity to give 'equity' to our important discipline with respect to comparing states to one another in student achievement in Civics and United States History. Without state accountability Governors will likely continue to ignore the crisis the nation currently faces with regard to all the disciplines in the social studies area. Helping individual school districts through grants such as that being proposed below -- while ignoring the states as a whole -- is NOT the solution. (Editorial comment, JB)
* * *
Constitution and Citizenship Day Act of 2009 (Introduced in House)
HR 3591 IH
111th CONGRESS
1st Session
H. R. 3591
To establish a grant program to enhance existing secondary education programs for the purpose of teaching high school students about the Constitution of the United States and the constitutions of the individual States.
IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
September 17, 2009
Mr. CUMMINGS (for himself, Ms. NORTON, Mr. CONYERS, Ms. WATSON, Mr. RANGEL, Mr. MEEK of Florida, Ms. WATERS, Mr. PAYNE, Mr. CARSON of Indiana, and Mr. WATT) introduced the following bill; which was referred to the Committee on Education and Labor
________________________________________
A BILL
To establish a grant program to enhance existing secondary education programs for the purpose of teaching high school students about the Constitution of the United States and the constitutions of the individual States.
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,
SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.
This Act may be cited as the `Constitution and Citizenship Day Act of 2009'.
SEC. 2. CONSTITUTION DAY AND CIVIC RESPONSIBILITY SYSTEM FOR STUDENTS.
Part C of title II of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (20 U.S.C. 6601 et seq.) is amended by adding at the end the following new subpart:
`Subpart 6--Teaching of the Constitution
`SEC. 2371. ESTABLISHMENT AND OPERATION OF CONSTITUTION DAY GRANT PROGRAM.
`(a) Grant Program Authorized- The Secretary shall establish and implement a grant program, to be known as the `Constitution Day Grant Program', under which the Secretary shall award grants on a competitive basis to local educational agencies and charter schools for the purposes of enhancing educational programs to teach students about the United States Constitution and the constitution of the State in which the grant recipient is located.
`(b) Grantee Eligibility Requirements- Grants under this section may only be awarded to a local educational agency or charter school with established secondary educational programs to teach students about the United States Constitution and the constitution of the State in which the grant recipient is located.
`(c) Operation of Educational Programs- An educational program funded by a grant under this section shall--
`(1) occur on Constitution Day, September 17, of each calender year (or on the Monday immediately following Constitution Day, if Constitution Day falls on a Saturday or a Sunday);
`(2) include assemblies, discussions, presentations, or events commemorating the Constitution of the United States and the constitution of the State in which the grant recipient is located;
`(3) include efforts to reinforce existing Constitutional curricula conducted by the grant recipient; and
`(4) make available to eligible students participating in such program the ability to register to vote.
`(d) Voter Registration Laws- A grant recipient under this section shall abide by all applicable State and Federal voter registration laws.
`SEC. 2372. GRANT APPLICATION PROCESS.
`(a) Secretary Created Process- The Secretary shall develop an application process for the grant program under this subpart, consistent with the requirements of this section.
`(b) Grant Application Requirements- An application for a grant under this subpart shall--
`(1) describe the educational activities to be funded by the grant; and
`(2) provide assurances that the requirements of section 2371(c) will be met, and any additional assurances that the Secretary determines to be necessary to ensure compliance with the requirements of this subpart.
`SEC. 2373. AUTHORIZATION OF APPROPRIATIONS.
`There is authorized to be appropriated to the Secretary $4,000,000 for each of fiscal years 2010 through 2014 to carry out this subpart.'.
________________________________________
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Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Friday, September 18, 2009
LAWMAKER PUSHING FOR MANDATORY CIVICS CLASS
Immediate, Continual Updates at
www.newsserviceflorida.com
By KATHLEEN HAUGHNEY
THE NEWS SERVICE OF FLORIDA
THE CAPITAL, TALLAHASSEE, Sept. 16, 2009
A Jacksonville Republican is renewing his push to require all Florida students to take civics.
Rep. Charles McBurney, R-Jacksonville, has filed legislation that has failed for the past two years that would require middle school students to take a civics class and be tested on their knowledge. A testing system would be phased in, so that eventually, students would have to pass a civics assessment exam to be promoted to the next grade.
"We have a real crisis in our institutions when more than 40 percent of Floridians can't correctly identify the three branches of American government," McBurney said. "Or they can't define the concept of checks and balances."
McBurney's bill was not given a hearing in the House's education budget committee this past spring, but he was able to amend it onto three bills that were passed by the entire House. The amendments did not survive the Senate; however, McBurney says he feels more confident about the bill's chances for the upcoming year than ever before.
"I think to do this is just vitally important," McBurney said.
The legislation did get some buzz toward the end of the 2009 legislative session, largely because former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor spoke to a joint session of the Legislature promoting civics education. Former U.S. Senator and Florida Gov. Bob Graham has also been promoting a new book he wrote about civics and touting the benefits of improved civics education.
But it wasn't enough to get McBurney's bill approved by the entire Legislature. In the Senate, a fight ensued over the bill's requirement of an end-of-the-year civics exam and how much it would cost and ultimately affect schools. Given that the bill has gotten a little more attention each year he has proposed it, McBurney said he feels the chances of its passage are getting pretty good.
"Unless children of our state...understand the basics of our democracy, we may not be able to preserve that," McBurney said.
The bill would ultimately phase in the testing component of the bill. At first, the exam grade would simply be part of the final grade, but eventually would become a requirement to move on to the next grade in 2015.
According to the legislation, in the 2012-2013 school year, students entering sixth grade would be required to take a minimum of one semester of civics education that includes "the roles and responsibilities of federal, state, and local governments; the structures and functions of the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government; and the meaning and significance of historic documents, such as the Articles of Confederation, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution of the United States."
The bill is HB 105.
-END- 9/16/09
Independent and Indispensable
http://www.newsserviceflorida.com
www.newsserviceflorida.com
By KATHLEEN HAUGHNEY
THE NEWS SERVICE OF FLORIDA
THE CAPITAL, TALLAHASSEE, Sept. 16, 2009
A Jacksonville Republican is renewing his push to require all Florida students to take civics.
Rep. Charles McBurney, R-Jacksonville, has filed legislation that has failed for the past two years that would require middle school students to take a civics class and be tested on their knowledge. A testing system would be phased in, so that eventually, students would have to pass a civics assessment exam to be promoted to the next grade.
"We have a real crisis in our institutions when more than 40 percent of Floridians can't correctly identify the three branches of American government," McBurney said. "Or they can't define the concept of checks and balances."
McBurney's bill was not given a hearing in the House's education budget committee this past spring, but he was able to amend it onto three bills that were passed by the entire House. The amendments did not survive the Senate; however, McBurney says he feels more confident about the bill's chances for the upcoming year than ever before.
"I think to do this is just vitally important," McBurney said.
The legislation did get some buzz toward the end of the 2009 legislative session, largely because former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor spoke to a joint session of the Legislature promoting civics education. Former U.S. Senator and Florida Gov. Bob Graham has also been promoting a new book he wrote about civics and touting the benefits of improved civics education.
But it wasn't enough to get McBurney's bill approved by the entire Legislature. In the Senate, a fight ensued over the bill's requirement of an end-of-the-year civics exam and how much it would cost and ultimately affect schools. Given that the bill has gotten a little more attention each year he has proposed it, McBurney said he feels the chances of its passage are getting pretty good.
"Unless children of our state...understand the basics of our democracy, we may not be able to preserve that," McBurney said.
The bill would ultimately phase in the testing component of the bill. At first, the exam grade would simply be part of the final grade, but eventually would become a requirement to move on to the next grade in 2015.
According to the legislation, in the 2012-2013 school year, students entering sixth grade would be required to take a minimum of one semester of civics education that includes "the roles and responsibilities of federal, state, and local governments; the structures and functions of the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government; and the meaning and significance of historic documents, such as the Articles of Confederation, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution of the United States."
The bill is HB 105.
-END- 9/16/09
Independent and Indispensable
http://www.newsserviceflorida.com
Friday, September 11, 2009
Is America Coming Apart?
by Patrick J. Buchanan
09/11/2009 http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=33517#c1
Flying home from London, where the subject of formal debate on the 70th anniversary of World War II had been whether Winston Churchill was a liability or asset to the Free World, one arrives in the middle of a far more acrimonious national debate right here in the United States.
At issue: Should Barack Obama be allowed to address tens of millions of American children, inside their classrooms, during school hours?
Conservative talk-show hosts saw a White House scheme to turn public schools into indoctrination centers where the socialist ideology of Obama would be spoon-fed to captive audiences of children forced to listen to Big Brother -- and then do assignments on his sermon.
Yet Byron York of The Washington Examiner dug back to 1991 to discover that, when George H.W. Bush went to Alice Deal Junior High to speak to America's school kids, the left lost it. "The White House turned a Northwest Washington junior high classroom into a television studio and its students into props," railed The Washington Post. Education Secretary Lamar Alexander was called before a House committee. The National Education Association denounced Bush. And Congress ordered the General Accounting Office to investigate.
Obama's actual speech proved about as controversial as a Nancy Reagan appeal to eighth-graders to "Just say no!" to drugs. Yet, the episode reveals the poisoned character of our politics.
We saw it earlier on display in August, when the crowds that came out for town hall meetings to oppose Obama's health care plans were called "thugs," "fascists," "racists" and "evil-mongers" by national Democrats. We see it as Rep. Joe Wilson shouts, "You lie!" at the president during his address to a joint session of Congress.
We seem not only to disagree with each other more than ever, but to have come almost to detest one another. Politically, culturally, racially, we seem ever ready to go for each others' throats.
One half of America sees abortion as the annual slaughter of a million unborn. The other half regards the right-to-life movement as tyrannical and sexist.
Proponents of gay marriage see its adversaries as homophobic bigots. Opponents see its champions as seeking to elevate unnatural and immoral relationships to the sacred state of traditional marriage.
The question invites itself. In what sense are we one nation and one people anymore? For what is a nation if not a people of a common ancestry, faith, culture and language, who worship the same God, revere the same heroes, cherish the same history, celebrate the same holidays, and share the same music, poetry, art and literature?
Yet, today, Mexican-Americans celebrate Cinco de Mayo, a skirmish in a French-Mexican war about which most Americans know nothing, which took place the same year as two of the bloodiest battles of our own Civil War: Antietam and Fredericksburg.
Christmas and Easter, the great holidays of Christendom, once united Americans in joy. Now we fight over whether they should even be mentioned, let alone celebrated, in our public schools.
Where we used to have classical, pop, country & Western and jazz music, now we have varieties tailored to specific generations, races and ethnic groups. Even our music seems designed to subdivide us.
One part of America loves her history, another reviles it as racist, imperialist and genocidal. Old heroes like Columbus, Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee are replaced by Dr. King and Cesar Chavez.
But the old holidays, heroes and icons endure, as the new have yet to put down roots in a recalcitrant Middle America.
We are not only more divided than ever on politics, faith and morality, but along the lines of class and ethnicity. Those who opposed Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court and stood by Sgt. Crowley in the face-off with Harvard's Henry Louis Gates were called racists. But this time they did not back down. They threw the same vile word right back in the face of their accusers, and Barack Obama.
Consider but a few issues on which Americans have lately been bitterly divided: school prayer, the Ten Commandments, evolution, the death penalty, abortion, homosexuality, assisted suicide, affirmative action, busing, the Confederate battle flag, the Duke rape case, Terri Schiavo, Iraq, amnesty, torture.
Now it is death panels, global warming, "birthers" and socialism. If a married couple disagreed as broadly and deeply as Americans do on such basic issues, they would have divorced and gone their separate ways long ago. What is it that still holds us together?
The European-Christian core of the country that once defined us is shrinking, as Christianity fades, the birth rate falls and Third World immigration surges. Globalism dissolves the economic bonds, while the cacophony of multiculturalism displaces the old American culture.
"E pluribus unum" -- out of many, one -- was the national motto the men of '76 settled upon. One sees the pluribus. But where is the unum? One sees the diversity. But where is the unity?
Is America, too, breaking up?
________________________________________
Mr. Buchanan is a nationally syndicated columnist and author of Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World, "The Death of the West,", "The Great Betrayal," "A Republic, Not an Empire" and "Where the Right Went Wrong."
09/11/2009 http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=33517#c1
Flying home from London, where the subject of formal debate on the 70th anniversary of World War II had been whether Winston Churchill was a liability or asset to the Free World, one arrives in the middle of a far more acrimonious national debate right here in the United States.
At issue: Should Barack Obama be allowed to address tens of millions of American children, inside their classrooms, during school hours?
Conservative talk-show hosts saw a White House scheme to turn public schools into indoctrination centers where the socialist ideology of Obama would be spoon-fed to captive audiences of children forced to listen to Big Brother -- and then do assignments on his sermon.
Yet Byron York of The Washington Examiner dug back to 1991 to discover that, when George H.W. Bush went to Alice Deal Junior High to speak to America's school kids, the left lost it. "The White House turned a Northwest Washington junior high classroom into a television studio and its students into props," railed The Washington Post. Education Secretary Lamar Alexander was called before a House committee. The National Education Association denounced Bush. And Congress ordered the General Accounting Office to investigate.
Obama's actual speech proved about as controversial as a Nancy Reagan appeal to eighth-graders to "Just say no!" to drugs. Yet, the episode reveals the poisoned character of our politics.
We saw it earlier on display in August, when the crowds that came out for town hall meetings to oppose Obama's health care plans were called "thugs," "fascists," "racists" and "evil-mongers" by national Democrats. We see it as Rep. Joe Wilson shouts, "You lie!" at the president during his address to a joint session of Congress.
We seem not only to disagree with each other more than ever, but to have come almost to detest one another. Politically, culturally, racially, we seem ever ready to go for each others' throats.
One half of America sees abortion as the annual slaughter of a million unborn. The other half regards the right-to-life movement as tyrannical and sexist.
Proponents of gay marriage see its adversaries as homophobic bigots. Opponents see its champions as seeking to elevate unnatural and immoral relationships to the sacred state of traditional marriage.
The question invites itself. In what sense are we one nation and one people anymore? For what is a nation if not a people of a common ancestry, faith, culture and language, who worship the same God, revere the same heroes, cherish the same history, celebrate the same holidays, and share the same music, poetry, art and literature?
Yet, today, Mexican-Americans celebrate Cinco de Mayo, a skirmish in a French-Mexican war about which most Americans know nothing, which took place the same year as two of the bloodiest battles of our own Civil War: Antietam and Fredericksburg.
Christmas and Easter, the great holidays of Christendom, once united Americans in joy. Now we fight over whether they should even be mentioned, let alone celebrated, in our public schools.
Where we used to have classical, pop, country & Western and jazz music, now we have varieties tailored to specific generations, races and ethnic groups. Even our music seems designed to subdivide us.
One part of America loves her history, another reviles it as racist, imperialist and genocidal. Old heroes like Columbus, Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee are replaced by Dr. King and Cesar Chavez.
But the old holidays, heroes and icons endure, as the new have yet to put down roots in a recalcitrant Middle America.
We are not only more divided than ever on politics, faith and morality, but along the lines of class and ethnicity. Those who opposed Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court and stood by Sgt. Crowley in the face-off with Harvard's Henry Louis Gates were called racists. But this time they did not back down. They threw the same vile word right back in the face of their accusers, and Barack Obama.
Consider but a few issues on which Americans have lately been bitterly divided: school prayer, the Ten Commandments, evolution, the death penalty, abortion, homosexuality, assisted suicide, affirmative action, busing, the Confederate battle flag, the Duke rape case, Terri Schiavo, Iraq, amnesty, torture.
Now it is death panels, global warming, "birthers" and socialism. If a married couple disagreed as broadly and deeply as Americans do on such basic issues, they would have divorced and gone their separate ways long ago. What is it that still holds us together?
The European-Christian core of the country that once defined us is shrinking, as Christianity fades, the birth rate falls and Third World immigration surges. Globalism dissolves the economic bonds, while the cacophony of multiculturalism displaces the old American culture.
"E pluribus unum" -- out of many, one -- was the national motto the men of '76 settled upon. One sees the pluribus. But where is the unum? One sees the diversity. But where is the unity?
Is America, too, breaking up?
________________________________________
Mr. Buchanan is a nationally syndicated columnist and author of Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World, "The Death of the West,", "The Great Betrayal," "A Republic, Not an Empire" and "Where the Right Went Wrong."
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