In a piece posted here at the Corner, Danielle Allen, Harvard political theorist and former Democratic candidate for governor of Massachusetts, claims that I mischaracterize her work on action civics. In particular, she says that, in contrast to the previously dominant model of action civics, her model “does not require an entire class to do the same project and does not direct students to particular issues.” Instead, she says, her model “supports individual choice of action project, viewpoint diversity in the classroom, and students learning to have productive conversations across lines of difference.”
Let’s have a look, then, at the Civics Project Guidebook published in 2019 as a teacher’s guide to leading action-civics projects. The guide is directed to teachers in Massachusetts in the wake of the state’s 2018 civics law, which established action civics in Massachusetts schools. Allen is listed as a member of the guidebook design team, and Harvard’s Democratic Knowledge Project, which Allen directs, is one of the guidebook’s sponsoring organizations.
The final case study in the guidebook (Case Study F: Police Accountability) bears directly on Allen’s claims in her response to me. The case is a teacher’s account of an action-civics project that had an entire class advocate for the expansion of a civilian police-review board. Read this case and you will see how profoundly the teacher influences the choice of project, despite ostensible student control.
Most disturbingly, the teacher acknowledges that “it was just as likely that a student in my class was the child of a police officer as it was that they knew someone who had experienced a racially biased law enforcement encounter.” Yet, by the teacher’s own admission, the entire class was forced into the same advocacy project, a topic that “not everyone was passionate about.”
By this teacher’s own account, we might have expected some students to do a “back the blue” project. Instead, all students were drafted into a project critical of police — a project the gist of which was effectively chosen by the teacher. If the entire class had to do a joint project, why not “back the blue,” with lagging enthusiasm by students more critical of police? We know why it never works out that way. You only need to read this case study to see the underlying bias that shapes the teacher’s direction of the entire project. Ostensibly, the teacher makes efforts to accommodate students who are pro-police. In reality, the teacher is looking for a project that will make it workable to draft even children of police into what is obviously a project critical of police.
Remember, this case is in a published guidebook designed to be presentable to a wide audience. The reality of teacher bias and collective pressure in action-civics projects is undoubtedly much rawer and more disturbing in the real world. Even so, this case is disturbing enough.
This guidebook is a Danielle Allen project. It is still up on the Internet. Allen says that her model does not “require” whole-class projects, but does it still allow for them? Are group projects now forbidden? Allen doesn’t say so. Think how tough it would be for a student to insist on an individual project when the teacher and at least a large part of the rest of the class are doing a group project. Teacher influence and peer pressure can easily push students into political actions they don’t truly understand or agree with. The teacher who wrote this case study claims to be catering to student diversity of opinion. To my eye, matters seem quite the opposite.
I believe that my characterization of Allen’s work on action civics is accurate. The Civics Project Guidebook she helped to design and sponsor — and that remains available to guide Massachusetts teachers — bears me out.
Note: Danielle Allen points out that the case study I cite in this piece was supplied by the action-civics group Generation Citizen, not by Allen’s Democratic Knowledge Project. As she notes, the Guidebook published by the Massachusetts Department of Education “fused” models from both groups. That is true. The case study I cite was not a direct product of Danielle Allen’s work, and I am happy to acknowledge that. Allen’s partnership with Generation Citizen is very much at stake in this dispute, however.
My original piece on Georgia — the piece to which Allen’s post was a reply — warned that, as governor, Stacey Abrams would “throw open Georgia’s doors to national action civics advocates such as iCivics, and to Danielle Allen’s other leftist allies in Massachusetts.” Generation Citizen, which joined with Allen’s Institute to help design the Massachusetts guide, is closely allied with Allen in other contexts as well. Allen’s Democratic Knowledge Project is part of the CivXNow coalition, of which Generation Citizen is another leading member. Moreover, Allen is a leading figure in the Educating for American Democracy (EAD) project, on whose Advisory Council sits Andrew Wilkes, senior director of policy and advocacy for Generation Citizen.
These formal ties are not mere tokens. On the contrary, I mentioned Allen in the first place because she has a prominent leadership role in EAD. Her work on EAD does much to advance the cause of action civics generally, and is deeply beneficial to the members of the various coalitions with which she is associated. Allen may have her personal twist on action civics, but that doesn’t prevent her from regularly advancing the interests of allies like Generation Citizen. Rather than restrict herself to one approach, Allen leads a coalition that includes the most radical action-civics advocates in the country. In fact, Allen’s leadership is useful precisely because she gives this leftist coalition a relatively moderate face. Don’t be fooled. My original warning was about Daniel Allen as a conduit to her “leftist allies” in the action-civics community. That warning very much stands.