The Project

The "Our Courts" Project was created to help those seeking to address the evident crisis in civics education. In doing so, we hope to pioneer a new pedagogic approach designed to respond to the particular learning styles of the "digital" generation. Accordingly, over the next 24 months, we will create an online, interactive, problem-based civics learning environment, entitled "Our Courts," at www.ourcourts.org. This web-based environment will be available, free of charge, to students and teachers nationwide for use in classes, enrichment programs, or extracurricular activities. The environment will be content-driven, but will also be media-rich, visually exciting and highly interactive. It will be designed to captivate and engage students, while empowering and supporting their teachers. Our target audience, at least as an initial matter, includes students in the seventh through ninth grades, and the technology, visuals and media used will be appropriate to that age group.

Read a Fox News interview with Sandra Day O'Connor about the Our Courts project

The Problem

The evidence is clear–and should be profoundly disturbing: we are failing to impart to today's students the information and skills they need to be responsible citizens. A recent national survey conducted by the National Constitution Center (NCC), for example, demonstrated that more American teenagers

• could name three of the Three Stooges than can name the three branches of government (59% to 41%);
• know the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air than know the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court (94.7% to 2.2%);
• know which city has the zip code "90210" than the city in which the U.S. Constitution was written (75% to 25%); and
• know the star of the motion picture "Titanic" than know the Vice President of the United States (90% to 74%).

The Project Starts

In September, 2006, retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and Justice Stephen Breyer chaired "Fair and Independent Courts: A Conference on the State of the Judiciary" at Georgetown Law. This conference brought together leading judges, lawyers, governmental officials, and representatives from the business and media communities to talk about the increasing threat to the independence of the judiciary posed by those who, purportedly in reaction to "judicial activism," have attacked the institution of the judiciary by, among other things, advocating impeachment of judges and jurisdiction-stripping legislation. During the conference, there was a striking degree of consensus regarding a root cause of the judiciary's present difficulties: the lack of effective civics training in schools across the country. One of the results of the conference was a determination to address this deficiency.

The Personnel

There is no pedagogic "silver bullet" that will cure all that ails civics education. The Sandra Day O'Connor Law School at Arizona State University (ASU) and the Sandra Day O'Connor Project on the State of the Judiciary at Georgetown Law, working with ASU's College of Teacher Education and Leadership, have come together to craft what we hope will be one part of the solution. Our curriculum development team will be chaired by Drs. Nancy Haas and Elizabeth Hinde, from the College of Teacher Education and Leadership, and Prof. Charles Calleros, from the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law. The curriculum team will work in close collaboration with the Applied Learning Technologies Institute (ALTI) specialists at ASU, led by Dr. Samuel DiGangi, who is both an Associate Vice President for University Technology at ASU and a professor at ASU's College of Education, and Dr. Angel Jannasch-Pennell, Assistant Vice President for the University Technology Office and Executive Director of Community Outreach and Research for ALTI.

A steering committee will guide the project through its start-up phase, and we anticipate that a distinguished group of advisors will oversee the project on an ongoing basis. Presently, those who have agreed to serve on the steering committee are its chair, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor; its director, Professor Julie R. O'Sullivan of Georgetown Law; Deputy Chancellor of the New York City School System Christopher Cerf; Director of the Sandra Day O'Connor Project on the State of the Judiciary at Georgetown Law, Meryl Chertoff; Professor Diana Donahoe of Georgetown Law; the First Lady of Virginia, Anne Holton; Arizona Supreme Court Chief Justice Ruth McGregor; and Dean Patricia White of the Justice Sandra Day O'Connor Law School at ASU.

Projected Roll-Out

Roll-out for Our Courts is expected to be mid-2009.