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In September of 1992, Lynne V. Cheney, Chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities, published Telling the Truth, a report in which she declared that “higher education, especially in the humanities, has become politicized” (5). To make her case, Cheney packed the report with references to the Modern Language Association, its conference, members, and publications (9, 11, 23, 33, 45, 46, n7, n15, n42, n43, n68). According to Cheney, “our colleges and universities are in trouble” (5) and to see it one need look no further than the MLA’s conference program, which included presentations “on such topics as ‘Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl’ and ‘Is Alice Still in Phallus Land?’” (9). If, as Cheney feared, “higher education has lost its way,” then it seemed to her that the MLA had led it astray (5). When, a few years later, Cheney expanded the report into a book by the same title, she was no less critical of the association. Summing up her assessment of the MLA, Cheney wrote that its “policy statements, publications, and conventions had epitomized the politicization of teaching and learning” (60). . .

The Inquiry Design Model (IDM) is a lesson-planning framework designed to implement inquiry for social studies educators as conceived in the C3 Framework. For this study, we drew on scholarly literature to assess 311 IDMs published online for their functionality. Functional IDMs were (a) framed by a compelling question that avoided potentially harming students by ensuring their question is both open and ethical for classroom discussion; (b) constructed cohesively by providing students a balance of sources in response to the compelling question, aligning their internal components, and avoiding false binaries that unnecessarily limited students’ answers; and (c) included a compelling question that is both debatable and social to facilitate what we term civic inquiry. Using these criteria, we determined that slightly less than half of IDMs exhibited at least one design flaw with one-tenth IDMs being potentially harmful, one-fifth misconstructed, and almost three in ten not meeting either the debatable or social criteria for civic inquiry. While we recognize that personalized inquiries and question-based seminars can constitute quality lesson design, they do not meet these refined criteria. This theoretical clarity should support both scholars and practitioners as they determine which lessons are most appropriate for diverse educational contexts.

To appear in: Used, Abused, and Sidelined: Debating the Declaration, ed. by Mary Stuckey.

Since the publication of the A Nation at Risk report in 1983, the discussion of education reform in the United States has been inundated with a flood of national reports about the condition of the nation’s schools. Among other areas of reform, a portion of these reports have called repeatedly for an overhaul of US civic education. This chapter traces the ways in which reports on civic education have invoked the Declaration of Independence. In doing so, it finds discussions of the Declaration at the center of a rhetorical transformation. While reports from the 1990s and 2000s used the Declaration as part of a jeremiad about how the nation’s schools had lost their way, reports from the late 2010s to the present have instead put the Declaration at the center of a philippic, or speech of condemnation, about who has ruined the schools. Aside from an ominous change in tone and an accelerating pessimism about the nation’s schools, the rhetorical shift in these reports reflects a broader change in the meaning of the Declaration in US American politics. Once a reliable basis for calls to national unity, the Declaration is increasing a pretext for exacerbating division.

Media coverage shapes perceptions of public schools by pushing a pervasive message of crisis. A more nuanced and multifaceted conversation can help.

Over the years, the PDK Poll regularly asked schools. And for the past few decades, roughly two-thirds of respondents have indicated low levels of satisfaction. Using the A-F letter grades so often given in schools, they land somewhere around a C or a C-. At the same time, however, the poll reveals higher rates of satisfaction among parents with children actually in the public schools. Although the numbers fluctuate from year to year, roughly 70% of parents give their children’s schools an A or B. If the nation’s public education system is as bad as people think, the parents of school-age children haven’t gotten the news. . .

In 1921, white residents of Tulsa destroyed the Black neighborhood of Greenwood and murdered hundreds of Black Tulsans. Viola Fletcher was seven years old and survived the attacks. On the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre, at 107 years old, Fletcher testified before the House Judiciary Committee. She not only called on all U.S. citizens to remember this event but also called for reparations for those whose wealth was destroyed by the mob. . . 

The public discussion of education consistently emphasizes school failure. To better understand this rhetoric, we tracked its appearance in ve prominent print outlets from 1984 to 2016. By distinguishing between arguments about local schools and the nation’s schools, we found that discussions of“failing schools” surged first as a claim about the nation’s schools and then as a claim about local schools. But, whereas the discussion of national failure featured a narrowed set of arguments, the subsequent discussion of local failure was composed more broadly. Thus, we describe a rhetorical echo, wherein the discussion of local failure acquired the shape and intensity of the preceding national discussion, while taking on the particulars of community context. A national narrative frame shaped the telling of local stories.

Scholars of citizenship education have long regarded deliberation as the default framework for democratic discussion in the classroom and beyond. Turning to the history and theory of rhetoric, we question why the deliberative model of the Athenian assembly has been developed for social studies pedagogy without including the litigative discourse of the Athenian courts. In response, we offer civic litigation, a discursive framework that recasts public controversies from a pro vs. con to an accusation vs. defense format. By examining the role of civic litigation in a historical case study from the 1960s Black civil rights movement, along with three inquiry-based lessons concerning contemporary controversies, we argue that civic litigation plays a crucial role in the effort to make inquiry-based instruction critical when it addresses issues of injustice.

The secretary of education has a responsibility to lead an inclusive national discussion of our schools.

In his classic work of political theory, Jeffrey K. Tulis is “rhetorical leadership” (1987, p. 4). Unlike the presidents of the 18th and 19th centuries, who relied on Congress to bring the will of the people into government, modern presidents, starting with Theodore Roosevelt, have sought to be the voice of the people, using the bully pulpit and the tools of mass communication. Now that every person, place, and thing in the executive branch has a Twitter handle, Tulis’ theory applies more broadly than ever, not just to the president, but also to the secretary of education. . .

Appears in: Recovering Argument ed. by Randall Lake.

Highly Active Debate Coaches, Their Participation in Civic Outreach Activities, and Reward Perceptions

From the beginning, contest debating was accused of losing its civic value. William Keith (2007) identified this as one of the founding controversies of the speech discipline newly emerging from English. Founders including O'Neill (1917), Wels (1917, 1918), and Davis (1916) addressed a perceived tension between debate as sport and debate as democratizing force, and even Theodore Roosevelt argued that debating "was debasing the character of participants" (Keith, 2007, p. 67). According to Keith (2007), the anxiety congealed in four questions: How much help should a coach give? How much of a debate should be written and delivered as a speech? . . .

We explore how the opt-out movement has responded to the combination of a stringent federal policy with weak and often variable implementation among the states. Gaps between federal expectations and states’ understandings of just how to make NCLB’s demands a reality have created policy ambiguity. Parents who opposes standardized  testing have recognized the resulting tensions and oversights in state education systems as a policy vacuum rife with opportunities for resistance. We examine how parents have exploited policy ambiguity through creating contested spaces—places of agency in stringent policy environments in which grassroots can question policy authority and take action. We conclude by considering whether these contested spaces are sustainable and whether the policy outcomes generated in contested spaces are reasonably equitable.

In 2015, prominent figures from the debate community gathered at Penn State for a Conference on Speech and Debate as Civic Education. Convened in response to a perceived decline in debate’s contributions to civic education, the conference also aimed to start a conversation about the future of debate education. Although a great deal can be learned from anecdotal evidence about trends in debate education, surprisingly little is known about the actual activity of college debate teams across the country. For example, there are no real data about how many tournaments the average college debate team attends each year. In this essay, we present results from the first national survey of college debate coaches concerning the shape and scope of the activity. With a focus on debate’s role in civic education, we present our findings to help ground the emerging conversation about the future of debate.

This essay continues the ongoing discussion Robert Terrill began and Joshua Reeves and Matthew May joined regarding the moral, philosophical, and rhetorical choices made in Barack Obama’s 2009 Nobel lecture. We argue that Obama’s address is best understood as an articulation of Reinhold Niebuhr’s rhetoric of Christian Realism—Obama wrote the lecture himself and prepared for it by studying the influential theologian’s works. Importantly, Obama is not the fırst rhetor to use the moral and political thought of Niebuhr to situate his or her public address; the list includes Martin Luther King Jr., Saul Alinsky, Jimmy Carter, John McCain, and Hillary Clinton. Yet Niebuhr’s vocabulary remains largely unstudied by public address scholars and rhetorical theorists. We argue that criticizing the moral and political judgments made in Obama’s address by the Niebuhrian standards the president sets for it provides an alternative method by which to evaluate the speech’s successes and failures. In so doing, we also provide the fıeld of public address with its fırst account of the rhetorical possibilities and limitations of Reinhold Niebuhr’s work, specifıcally his vision of a “spiritualized-technician”—a rhetor who speaks the language of realism, idealism, and irony, to expand an audience’s moral imagination.

This essay considers the challenges of responding to the Sandusky child sex-abuse scandal while in the midst of said crisis. It discusses how the authors chose to respond as scholars and teachers of rhetoric concerned with deliberation.

In late January 2012, as we were completing this article, the helicopters came back. The skies over campus had not seen this much traffic since early November, 2011, in the week following the release of a grand jury report resulting in the arrest of former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky on charges of sexually abusing young boys. That week also saw the arrests of two university officials on charges of perjury and failure to report child abuse as well as the firing of the University’s president and its football coach. The resulting unrest on campus called for heightened security, hence the helicopters. In January the helicopters were once again circling campus, this time because that football coach, beloved by so many, had died, his legacy besmirched by his self-admitted failure to “do more.” Also back were arguments about culpability, about football, about leadership, about memory, and yes, about victimage. They aren’t exactly the same arguments, of course, but the vitriol and moral high ground are back—if indeed they had a chance to go away—but they have shifted. . . 

This essay recovers the emergence of teachers’ union rhetoric through an analysis of Margaret Haley’s address to the National Education Association convention of 1904. Entitled “Why Teachers Should Organize,” Haley’s speech was the fırst call for a national effort to unionize U.S. classroom teachers. Promising not just material, but also professional advancement, Haley broke new rhetorical ground in St. Louis by advocating unionism as a professional duty. Through a close reading of her argumentation, I contend that Haley positioned democracy at the center of teachers’ union rhetoric. To make unionism appealing for her audience of schoolteachers and administrators, Haley paired the democratic goals of progressivism with the democratic potential of labor. Appealing to the commitment to democracy shared by educators, progressives, and labor activists, Haley’s speech was the fırst to outline the union rhetoric that would transform public education over the course of the twentieth century.