Politics and Public Policy in the United States

Rationale

Since I began teaching at William Penn, one of my teaching assignments has been our ninth grade social studies course, comprised of Civics for one semester and Geography for one semester. This is traditionally the course assigned to the newest teachers in the department, who are then given opportunities to “move up” to a different grade-level as they become effective teachers and get worn down from the demands of teaching freshmen. As a result, when I joined the ninth grade social studies team, I found myself teaching a course that was lacking in cohesion, depth of content knowledge and activities that would engage students in the content.

As I’ve become more familiar with teaching government, I have also spent a considerable amount of time familiarizing myself with Delaware’s Civics standards. A deep dive into the documents that have been created to clarify what is being asked of students in these standards, paired with a close examination of how they are taught at my school, revealed that our Civics course was lacking. Our ninth grade team has been unknowingly reteaching many of the concepts our students are learning in middle school, while running out of time to get the most academically rigorous concept in each standard. This is especially true of our unit that addresses Delaware’s Constitution-centered Civics standard. While teaching this standard, we often spend time on the three branches and checks and balances so that students have foundational knowledge to help them understand the disjointed lessons about executive orders and the elastic clause that are included in the unit. However, at the conclusion, students are rarely able to answer the overall question of “How do the structures and processes of government in the Constitution allow for and limit change?”.

The unit I am going to write as a result of participation in the Politics and Public Policy in the United States seminar with Ian Shapiro will enhance the current unit on the Constitution that is taught in my in my ninth grade Civics course. One of the concepts students should understand as we progress towards the end of this unit, is that features written into the Constitution both allow for and constrain political change, yet I have struggled to teach this in a way that is comprehensible and meaningful for the past five years. In order to accomplish the above curricular goal, this unit will guide students in developing an understanding of how the Judicial branch’s interpretations of the Constitution determine the extent of political change.

Prior to starting this unit, students will need to have developed foundational knowledge of the legislative, executive, and judicial branches, as well as the ways in which these branches work to check one another. As they work through this unit, students will develop an understanding of the fact that the decisions of the Supreme Court are unlikely to be too far out of alignment with to current public sentiment and generally reflect the ideologies of the presidents that appoint them. Therefore, in times that the country tends to behave more Conservatively, the Supreme Court will do the same, and vice versa. This background information will enable students to make comparisons across time. The unit will lead students through an investigation of how the Supreme Court reacted to and enforced the Civil Rights amendments that were passed following the conclusion of the Civil War. From this, they will be able to determine that a more Conservative judicial branch can lead to degressive implementation of progressive legislation. The Conservative leanings of this era were foreshadowed by rulings such as that made in Scott v. Stanford, which upheld the practice of slavery and determined that former African Americans would never be able to gain citizenship. Although Congress had the responsibility of developing public policy that was in accordance with the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth Amendments, it was the judicial branch that had the responsibility of interpreting them. Rulings were made by these Conservative-leaning Supreme Court justices on over one hundred and fifty cases relating to the Reconstruction Amendments in the last twenty five years of the century, which shaped how Americans interpreted the recently-passed Amendments.¹

The rulings of the Supreme Court during the post-Civil War era will be contrasted with those made following Eisenhower’s appointment of Justice Warren to the Supreme Court in the 1950’s. The Warren Court that followed is markedly different from the first Judicial era students will be studying, due to the liberal leanings of justices at this time. Even though many of the landmark cases from this era related to Civil Rights, as those following the end of the Civil War, a Judicial branch that interpreted the Constitution more liberally allowed for this time period to be remembered for setting progressive precedent. These cases, such as Brown v. Board of Education and Gideon v. Wainwright, will demonstrate that the Judicial branch used its role to interpret the Constitution in a way that led to the expansion of America’s federal government.

The content of this unit and its’ the comparisons it makes across time make a discussion of the Supreme Court today a natural fit as the conclusion. The nation has once again reached a time where Civil Rights have come to the forefront and cases related to the topic are making their way to this level of the judiciary. The Judicial branch is currently made up of four justices that were appointed by democratic Presidents and five that were appointed by Republicans, giving it a fairly even split between liberals and conservatives, and the rulings they have delivered in June 2020 alone have had a significant impact on Civil Rights in America. Therefore, it would be beneficial for students to conclude this unit by understanding that the Supreme Court having the ability to allow for and constrain change is not something that was restricted to the Reconstruction era or mid-twentieth century, but evaluating the impact the most recent Supreme Court decisions are having on the government’s ability to change.