“We, the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

The preamble to the U.S. Constitution should be familiar to any student who has studied America’s origins in a history or civics classroom. It is short, easy to memorize, and was even good fodder for the musical stylings of School House Rock! in the 1970s.

Beyond the rah-rah patriotism and powdered-wig imagery evoked by those 52 words, the preamble is, in essence, the mission statement of the United States. Its six aspirations articulate the philosophical underpinnings for the structural legal document that follows. If the Constitution lays out the “what” of the United States government, the preamble explains the “why.”

The preamble was somewhat of an afterthought during the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. Only when the Convention’s Committee of Detail began preparing a draft of the Constitution did Virginia delegate Edmund Randolph propose prefatory text, though “[n]ot for the purpose of designating the ends of government and human polities.”

In Randolph’s view, a theory of government had already been appropriately expressed in the establishment of states. A central government could ensure nothing if it did not yet exist (and forming such a government was the purpose of the Convention in the first place). Instead, he argued that any natural rights identified at the federal level should be “interwoven with what we call the rights of states. . . . [T]he object of our preamble ought to be briefly to declare, that the present foederal [sic] government is insufficient to the general happiness.”

Indeed, Randolph’s version of the preamble dryly roll-called all 13 extant states, banding together to establish the Constitution for the governance of themselves and those who would come after—a pure statement of fact.

However, the Convention’s Committee of Style, led by Pennsylvania delegate Gouverneur Morris, must have held a different view on the purpose of the preamble. After leaving the Committee of Detail, the preamble was taken up by the Committee of Style, and within a month, Morris had wordsmithed it to its present form. No notes survive of the committee’s deliberations about the revisions, but neither were there any objections raised when the preamble was presented to the whole Convention. (Those would come later during ratification by the states.)

Why does this matter? The preamble’s shift in focus from a declaration by a confederation of 13 states to a list of goals by one United States of America underscores not only the tension that has always existed around governance within a federal system but, more important, the aspirational nature of a nation that the framers themselves knew was not being delivered to the world fully formed and mature.

The first stated goal of the preamble, that the people of the United States should constantly strive to achieve “a more perfect union,” should be at the forefront of every U.S. history curriculum in every state in the land. The brilliance at the center of that phrasing is an acknowledgment that that work was incomplete at the time the Constitution was written and remains so to this day. Inherent in the goal of a more perfect union is an assurance that, yes, we can be better, along with an admission that, no, our experiment will never be perfect.

A national reckoning with both the achievements and shortcomings of the American promise, past and present, is essential for us citizens to rise above the divisive culture wars that have so recently defined our character and have crept into the classrooms of our children. The resultant tug-of-war that is being waged for hearts and minds can only be undertaken as a zero-sum game.

Meanwhile, American children are caught in the middle, used as political footballs in the ensuing rhetorical clashes. They have no vote, yet they must absorb the legislative fallout of their elders’ pet causes. They may be well protected from uncomfortable topics in their school curricula but not from the bumbling attempts of adults to help them recover from pandemic learning losses.

With hyper-partisanship as the most proximate model for students of what it means to be a citizen, it is small wonder that earlier this year, the Nation’s Report Card revealed that 8th grade scores on the NAEP civics test declined for the first time, matching those achieved on the inaugural test of 1998. The news was even worse for the NAEP U.S. history assessment: a five-point drop since 2018, when it was last administered.

The national conversation about our history needs to change, but we cannot expect this transformation to be initiated by those with such entrenched cultural positions. Instead, we return to the preamble. And the classroom.

Imagine a U.S. history class where the preamble is prominently displayed for all to see—not as a mark of patriotism but as a didactic referent for students to read and internalize the aspirational promises of the United States as identified by the founding generation. Imagine a teacher asking her students, “What does ‘a more perfect union’ look like? What did it look like in 1787? What wasn’t perfect about the United States then? What about today?”

Imagine a conversation in which students are made to feel neither proud nor guilty about the past but instead have an honest confrontation with how their country has been a force for good and how it has perpetuated wretched evils. And imagine students identifying the same characteristics in modern America and being asked, “What can you do to form a more perfect union today?”

The notes of the Constitutional Convention’s Committee of Style are lost to history, but one can infer how the committee arrived at a preamble that has become a national creed. Gouverneur Morris was the most outspoken opponent of slavery among the delegation. According to notes by James Madison, Morris “never would concur in upholding domestic slavery. It was a nefarious institution. It was the curse of heaven on the states where it prevailed.”

But Morris was also a pragmatist. He knew that almost half of the delegates (including Edmund Randolph) owned or had owned slaves. He did not have any hope of forcing the Convention to resolve the matter statutorily, but he recognized a back door when he saw one. The word “slavery” does not appear in the U.S. Constitution, but the preamble reveals Gouverneur Morris’s faith that one day it would be eradicated.

We do a disservice to American students when we catastrophize or mythologize our past instead of guiding them through the complicated, contradictory, and incomplete story of the world’s oldest democracy. A better approach to teaching U.S. history recognizes the country’s challenges, past and present, and exhorts students to think deeply about the role they can play in achieving a more perfect union.

Michael Poor is the interim managing editor of Education Next.

Aaargh. Here we go again. The new National Assessment of Educational Progress civics and history results are as deplorable as they were predictable. Whether they’ll also serve as the action-forcer that we need is far from certain. Is this to be a “Sputnik moment” on the civics front or another yawner?

NAEP has been testing U.S. history since 1994, civics since 1998, and the results have always been bleak. At its peak in 2014, the “Nations Report Card” showed a meager 18 percent of eighth graders to be “proficient” in history while 22 percent reached that threshold in civics. Year after year, assessment after assessment, those two key subjects have reaped the lowest scores of anything tested by NAEP.

Declines in both set in after 2014—well before Covid hit—and it was inevitable that post-pandemic scores would be even worse. Now we’re essentially back to the starting line, i.e. around the same levels as when these subjects were first reported by NAEP. And (as we’ve recently seen in reading and math) the declines are worst among low-scoring students, which is to say those who possess the least knowledge and skills in history and civics have experienced the most severe losses.

What’s doubly troubling—but perhaps doubly attention-getting—is that this has happened just as many in the education and policy worlds are striving to launch a renaissance in civics, citizenship and the historical understandings that must undergird them.

Any number of organizations and projects are working at this. (I’ve been engaged with several, including the estimable Educating for American Democracy venture and its “roadmap for excellence in history and civics.”) They’re responding not just to test scores but also—even more so—to the troubled state of the polity, the erosion of good citizenship, the travails of civil society, and loss of faith in the fundamental institutions and processes of our constitutional democracy.

Educating schoolkids in civics and history is in no way the whole solution to these deep-seated problems but it has to be part of any solution—and evidence abounds that we’re doing a lousy job of it. The new NAEP results just underscore the blunt fact that the vast majority of U.S. 8th graders don’t know squat about U.S. history or civics.

But why? I’m seeing five big contributing factors:

First, most states have lousy standards for these core subjects, meaning that their expectations for what K-12 students should learn are low, vague or otherwise lacking. My Fordham colleagues demonstrated this in a voluminous 2021 report that found just five jurisdictions (four states plus DC) with “exemplary” standards in both subjects. It’s true that standards alone don’t teach anybody anything, but it’s also true that if you don’t have a clear destination for your journey you could wander forever and get nowhere.

Second, weak standards are part of a larger “infrastructure” problem in social studies education, admirably documented in a recent RAND study. Although focused on the elementary grades, the failings itemized in that analysis—which include incoherent curricula, lack of teacher support, meager instructional time, ill-prepared teachers, an absence of accountability—apply pretty much across the entire span of K-12 schooling.

Third, curricular materials in this field—with history and civics often submerged in a “social studies” muddle that may be as much about pop-sociology and psychology as essential information and analytic skills—are mostly mediocre, the good ones are little used, and some popular texts are pretty awful. Check out EdReports and the What Works Clearinghouse and you’ll find the curricular cupboards barren for history and civics, this despite the fact that excellent tools exist by which to evaluate such curricula. And the culture wars and political posturings that have recently engulfed curricular deliberations are nowhere livelier than in the realm of social studies, although I’ve also called attention to a latent consensus across much of the land regarding what schools should teach in this realm.

Fourth, many teachers don’t know much about these subjects themselves. Typical certification requirements for social studies teachers include a smattering of “content” courses in any of the half-dozen disciplines that fall under this heading, but persons obtaining such certificates are then deemed qualified to teach any of those subjects. Which is to say a history teacher may have studied very little history and a civics teacher (who may also be the gym teacher) could have majored in anthropology.

Fifth, little time is devoted to history and civics over thirteen years of schooling and few schools or students are held to account for how well these subjects are learned. Though we routinely term them part of the “core curriculum” along with ELA, math and science, we don’t give them nearly as much attention as the other three and we’re far less likely to insist on any evidence of learning beyond, say, a passing grade in high school history and civics. It’s no help that few colleges pay attention to whether their applicants know anything about history or civics and almost none requires its own students to study these subjects. (Stanford is requiring freshman year civics as of next year.)

Is there hope? The bleak NAEP results could serve as a firebell in the night, the alarm we need to catalyze purposeful action, overcome our divisions and quell, at least for a moment, the curricular culture wars.

It’s not beyond imagining. Legislative action can already be glimpsed in many places and innumerable groups are actively promoting civics and history reforms of one kind or another. Advice abounds as to how to strengthen these elements of K-12 schooling.

My own advice is implicit in the five causes of decline that are spelled out above, as each implies its own remedy: Solid standards, robust infrastructure, quality curricula, well-prepared teachers, time-on-task, results-driven accountability. It’s really not rocket science.

But one more thing more is also crucial: we must improve our diagnostics, starting with NAEP itself. Why do we have history and civics results for 8th grade but not for 4th or (especially) 12th? It’s the end of K-12 when we most need solid data on what students have and have not learned. And why do we have only national data, not the state-level results that might drive serious action at the level that matters most? NAEPsters will offer all manner of explanations, starting with budget, but the fact remains that—here as everywhere—the problems likeliest to go unsolved are those that are poorly diagnosed in the first place. What we got from NAEP this week is necessary but in no way sufficient for a thorough diagnosis, the kind that points toward better targeted treatments.

That all this matters to the nation’s future is self-evident. That we will go beyond garment-rending and teeth-gnashing is less so.

Chester E. Finn, Jr., is a distinguished senior fellow and president emeritus at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. He is also a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and a former chair of the National Assessment Governing Board.

The former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, Preet Bharara, is out with a new children’s picture book, Justice Is…A guide for young truth seekers.

If the initial reception is any indication, the book looks to be headed for America’s classrooms and school libraries. “If you believe in civic education, Preet Bharara has written a great children’s book to get the kids you care about started,” tweeted a professor at the University of Alabama School of Law, Joyce Alene, who is a legal analyst for NBC News. “Every School Library needs this!” The jacket copy notes, perhaps anachronistically, that justice is “a word said aloud in classrooms every day during the Pledge of Allegiance.”

I had a look at the book myself. While I certainly wouldn’t advocate banning it, I can tell you that the volume sure could have benefited from a more skeptical edit. It’s the sort of thing that has been getting parents riled up—a book billed as “a guide for young truth seekers” that winds up providing a portrayal of American reality that is, in significant ways, false. It offers the same grim view of a structurally racist America that can be found in critical race theory.

What’s particularly disappointing, or at least paradoxical, is that the opening lines of the book pay lip service to heterodoxy. Justice takes “an open mind,” the book says. “Justice needs to hear every side of the story.”

Alas, some sides of the story are missing from this book. The side of the police, for one, is absent. Brightly colored illustrations in the book portray Black Lives Matter protesters as peaceful justice advocates. The police, on the other hand, are seen exclusively as an all-white force about to beat up Civil Rights leader John Lewis. What about the side of the story in which police, including officers and chiefs of color, arrest violent criminals or protect people and property? It is nowhere to be found in this book.

Also absent is the side of landlords. A two-page spread with the words “Sometimes people worry that there is no Justice in the world” features “The Holocaust,” “The Trail of Tears,” “Slavery” and “Tenement Slums.” One of those things is not like the other three. Yes, some landlords are and were abusive or negligent. But as a general matter, providing temporary low-cost housing to poor, rent-paying immigrants in a voluntary, mutually agreed-upon commercial relationship is not the same thing as genocide or as race-based involuntary servitude. Outlawing single-room-occupancy buildings or other “tenement slums” can have the unintended consequence of rendering affordable housing scarce-to-nonexistent, spawning the urban homeless encampments that even Democratic progressive mayors have been bulldozing.

The presentation of World War II is similarly one-sided. A two page spread shows “Japanese American Internees” as an example of how justice “can even be denied—for a time.” The Holocaust image shows the gates of a concentration camp. Absent are the American troops, including Japanese American soldiers, who risked their lives to liberate Europe. The book describes Japanese American internees as among those who “stood for justice” but fails to name Fred Korematsu, whose attempt to challenge President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s internment policy ultimately failed at the Supreme Court.

A jarring note is present in the cast of characters at the end of the book. Under the heading “They Stood for Justice,” at the end of a long list that includes Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Malala Yousafzai, Nelson Mandela, Harvey Milk, Black Lives Matter, Mohandas Ghandhi, and John Lewis comes, of all people, “Richard Nixon.” The book explains that Nixon “became the first and only president of the United States to resign, to avoid being impeached and removed from office for his role in the Watergate scandal. Brave investigative journalists and their newspapers risked their careers to expose his corruption, believing that no American is above the law.” It’s not clear whether Bharara wants to somehow rehabilitate Nixon by giving him credit for resigning (in contrast to, say, Donald Trump), or whether this is just clumsiness or poor execution, and instead of Nixon on the list it should have been Bob Woodward, Ben Bradlee, Sam Ervin, or Leon Jaworski. Perhaps the inclusion of Nixon, a Republican, is meant to demonstrate that the book is nonpartisan, though that goal is also accomplished by including Lincoln.

As the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan, Bharara’s insider trading and public corruption cases were frequently reversed or rejected by judges. Bharara also subjected defendants to “perp walks” that other jurisdictions avoid because they risk threatening the presumption of innocence and effectively interfering with an accused’s right to a fair trial. Now he’s spending his time writing a children’s book about justice?

One children’s book I would like to read would be about how Jagdish Bharara, the first in his family to attend college, immigrated to New Jersey from India and saw his immigrant son Preet become a celebrity federal prosecutor and his other, American-born son, Vinit, build Diapers.com and sell it to Amazon for $545 million. America isn’t all tenement slums and Trail of Tears and Japanese internment camps and the police beating up John Lewis. If Preet Bharara isn’t up to telling that side of the story, perhaps some other author will. It would make a compelling tale for those “young truth seekers.”

Ira Stoll is managing editor of Education Next.

Before attention turns entirely to President Biden, it is worth pausing to take a quick look back to assess President Trump’s education reform efforts. Perhaps Biden—or any other politician trying to make progress on education-related issues—can learn something from Trump’s missteps.

Trump’s re-election campaign emphasized two education-related themes—school choice and patriotic history.

On the choice front, Trump devoted a substantial portion of his February 2020 State of the Union address to an “opportunity scholarship” for a Pennsylvania 4^th grader named Janiyah Davis. “Pass the Education Freedom Scholarships and Opportunities Act — because no parent should be forced to send their child to a failing government school,” Trump said. In an August 12 news conference, Trump said, “we talk about school choice, which we’d like to see so that parents can take their children to the school of their choice. That’s something we want. We think it’s very important, especially in the minority communities. They want it so badly. African American, Hispanic American, Asian American—they want it so badly.” On September 23, 2020, meeting with Cuban American veterans of the Bay of Pigs invasion, Trump claimed, “We are protecting school choice for over 1 million Hispanic American students—such a big deal. In a second term, I will provide school choice to every family in America.” In videotaped remarks to a Catholic event on October 1, Trump said, “To support the noble mission of Catholic schools, my administration is working to advance school choice. It was my great honor to help the Catholic Church with its schools. They needed hundreds of millions of dollars nationwide, and I got it for them. Nobody else. I got it for them.” On October 10, at the White House: “school choice. You have to have school choice. Charter schools, school choice.”

On the patriotic history front, on September 17, 2020, Trump spoke at a White House Conference on American History. Said Trump, “The left has warped, distorted, and defiled the American story with deceptions, falsehoods, and lies. There is no better example than the New York Times’ totally discredited 1619 Project. This project rewrites American history to teach our children that we were founded on the principle of oppression, not freedom. Nothing could be further from the truth.” The president added, “The only path to national unity is through our shared identity as Americans. That is why it is so urgent that we finally restore patriotic education to our schools.” On November 2, 2020, Trump issued an executive order establishing, with the Department of Education, a 1776 Commission to “advise executive departments and agencies with regard to their efforts to ensure patriotic education.” A White House “fact sheet” about the order was headlined, “President Donald J. Trump Is Protecting America’s Founding Ideals by Promoting Patriotic Education.”

After campaigning hard on these twin themes of school choice and patriotic education, President Trump not only lost his re-election bid, but his Republican Party lost control of the Senate. Have the policy ideas been discredited and defeated, definitively rejected, along with Trump?

No.

Though Trump did spend time on the education issue during the election year, polling and reporting indicate most voters made decisions driven by issues such as Trump’s character and his handling of the pandemic, the economy, and race relations, not education policy questions. Education, unlike, say, the southern border wall or China tariffs, was not really a signature issue for Trump. It was more of an afterthought.

Perhaps relatedly, Trump botched the execution of both the choice and the history issues. On the choice issue, promising it as a second-term priority—”In a second term, I will provide school choice to every family in America”—was a not-so-subtle reminder that Trump had failed to deliver it in his first term. Trump’s 2017 tax law did permit families to use up to $10,000 a year from a 529 college savings account for K-12 education, but, because many 529 plans are state-run, some Democratic governors managed to obstruct even that. Anyway, 529 plans offer only tax-exempt growth, not a federal tax deduction or credit for contributions. The moment, if there was one, to achieve some sort of federal school choice program such as the Education Freedom Scholarships and Opportunities Act was in that 2017 tax legislation. Trump missed the chance. As a consequence, instead of running for re-election on an accomplishment, he was running on a promise. Voters had reason to doubt he would be able to keep it.

On the history issue, the timing tells the story: Trump created the 1776 Commission in November 2020. The commission released its report on January 18, 2021. Whatever anyone might think of the report, it was far too late to influence the election outcome, and also too late to translate into any appreciable changes in schools or classrooms. Maybe even without the rush, the commission, and the brief report it produced, would have emphasized patriotism over accuracy and failed to change anyone’s mind. But because of the late start that is a counterfactual. We won’t know, though perhaps there will be a do-over opportunity if Biden accepts Craig Bruce Smith’s suggestion, in Politico, to create a thorough, nonpartisan 1776 Commission of his own.

Trump’s most consequential education reform move was probably nominating to the Supreme Court justices Kavanaugh and Gorsuch, who joined in the 2020 decision in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue. As Joshua Dunn wrote for Education Next, that opinion, issued June 30, 2020, has the potential to reshape the school choice landscape, but in ways that are yet to be fully appreciated or litigated. What an irony if after years of criticizing Democrats for pursuing policy objectives through the courts rather than through legislation, a Republican administration’s big school choice victory came in court rather than in Congress.

Biden has reportedly already started staffing a commission to consider structural reforms to the Supreme Court, so it’s possible that any Trump-era gains there will be as evanescent as Trump’s 1776 Commission report, which was shunted to a White House archive website just days after its release. That Biden’s Supreme Court review effort is starting immediately rather than waiting until 2024 suggests the newly inaugurated Democrat from Delaware already understands a key political maxim that Trump failed to heed, at least on education policy: don’t wait.