Quality civics education creates informed citizens, but there needs to be balance in the classroom. As the Board of Regents proposes a civics requirement for South Dakota universities, education advocates say fair implementation of those standards would be essential.
A spokesperson for the board of regents said the goal of the requirement is to help students be ready to take part in the democratic process.
Shane Nordyke is a professor of political science and the director of the Chiesman Center for Democracy at USD. While she agrees with the idea of more civics requirements, the plan gives her pause.
“On its face increased support for civic education and civic literacy is exciting, but on the other hand we typically also place a lot of value on faculty governance and those within academic institutions who have the training being the ones who are making decisions about curriculum and curriculum requirements,” Nordyke said.
She said she would prefer these efforts to come from the bottom-up.
“The fear for an initiative like this is that the possibility the broad wealth of knowledge we have as a discipline and as experts within this field won’t be brought to the table, and instead it would be something much more politically driven with an entirely different intent than just making better informed citizens about American institutions,” Nordyke said.
Nordyke said despite the narrative current civic education standards are failing students, there isn’t hard data on the subject.
“There’s a general sense based upon anecdote, but I don’t know that we have really any good information about what that looks like," Nordyke said. "Students are all taking these standardized tests in English skills, and reading skills and math skills and we have all of this data. We can see how it looks all across the state, how we compare, and we can look at if we are getting better or getting worse. We don’t have anything like that when it comes to civics.”
Nordyke said civics is a complicated subject to teach, but an effective civic education standard would include basic understanding of the policy-writing process, information literacy, and the importance of civic engagement.
Details about the development of the civics literacy requirement have not been released. The Board of Regents said more information will be available in the coming months.
