No Citizen Left Behind by Meira Levinson (review)

Meira Levinson's book is grounded in an apparently simple analogy: just as the U.S. educational system provides vastly unequal opportunities for individual academic achievement, so too, it provides vastly unequal opportunities for students to develop their capacities for civic engagement. Levinson uses the phrase "civic empowerment gap" to reference a variety of disparities in civic behavior and attitudes between ethno-racial majority and minority communities, including: knowledge of political institutions and affairs; rates of voting, contacting public officials, and engaging in political protest; and expressions of political trust, identification, and perceived efficacy. But, while the evidence of a civic empowerment gap is unmistakable (as Levinson demonstrates in chapter 1), it has received nowhere near as much public attention as has the disparity in standardized test scores as addressed by the No Child Left Behind Law of 2001. No Citizen Left Behind addresses this gap by drawing on political theory, social scientific research, and Levinson's eight years of experience teaching in the Boston and Atlanta public school systems to argue that de facto segregated schools in impoverished urban communities must prepare their students to engage in modes of collaborative citizenship that address the structural conditions generative of their disempowerment.

Of course, in recent years many educators have called for a renewed commitment to civic education; Levinson is not alone in this regard. What makes her book unique, and uniquely productive for scholars interested in rhetoric and public affairs, is the way that she imagines citizenship and civic education. Citizenship is, for Levinson, not a universal category but a set of variable and situated practices; accordingly, civic education must be a fundamentally rhetorical endeavor. She rejects explicitly the notion "that citizenship is an equalizing status and experience" (95). Citizens of marginalized communities cannot draw on the same rhetorical resources, or appeal to the same sites of power, or relate to political authorities in the same way as do citizens of majority communities. Students in de facto segregated urban schools are well aware of this before they enter the classroom; therefore, they cannot be empowered by the traditional model of civic education that focuses on triumphalist historical narratives, distant political institutions, and atomized acts of political participation.

While Levinson does not use the terminology of rhetoric, her proposals for a mode of education that highlights adaptation, practice, emulation, and contextual analysis amount to a call for returning rhetoric to its classical, prominent role in the mentorship of young citizens. She argues that students in minority communities must be familiarized with the cultural references (prologue) and language styles (chapter 2) of majority communities, so that they can adapt their discourse to the audiences that typically occupy sites of political power, when addressing those audiences. At the same time, she notes that minority communities cannot rely solely on deliberative politics to subvert existing power dynamics; therefore students must also be introduced to historical narratives (chapter 3) and role models (chapter 4) that provide examples of consciousness raising, group solidarity, and direct action. Levinson's book has great potential to generate avenues for productive conversation between educational administrators and experts, political theorists and scientists, and rhetorical scholars.

In chapter 1, Levinson outlines the civic empowerment gap and its consequences for U.S. democratic practice. She rejects the notion that the gap may be narrowed merely by offering more civics classes based on the traditional model. Chapter 2 begins by defending the simple, if occasionally disavowed, proposition that race matters—and that race especially matters within the heavily segregated U.S. educational system. Levinson draws upon W. E. B. Du Bois's notion of "double consciousness" (84) to propose a model of civic education that teaches students to "codeswitch"—to adapt their vocabulary, rhetorical style, dress, and behavior to accommodate different audiences (87).

Chapter 3 argues that students in de facto segregated urban schools cannot be empowered by "moderately triumphalist" historical narratives that stress our nation's inevitable progress toward the embodiment of universal ideals (111); rather, students...