As I’ve discussed before, the White House Office of Public Engagement has organized an elaborate online discussion to provide guidance on how to enhance transparency, participation, and collaboration in the federal government. More than 2,000 ideas were submitted and discussed in the first round. Of these, the Office has selected a few for further discussion online.

One cluster of ideas that they have selected involves civic education, which is the topic of the day today. It would be helpful if people who care about civic education weighed in, especially since some previous discussions have gone off on tangents. Here’s where you go to comment.

This is the original announcement from the White House (issued yesterday):

On Thursday, June 11th, we’ll turn from talking about how government can create better opportunities for participation to address how to promote the civic literacy needed to participate effectively in government. On Promoting Civic Education, you said:

• Provide a toolkit, including neutral discussion guides, to facilitate community discussions and a website for groups to share conclusions.
• Invest in educating Americans (e.g. through town halls) to analyze complex information.
• Train neighborhood facilitators to use proven dialogue methods that engage a group in 3 hours or less.
• Establish listening and personal story sharing skills workshops in homes & schools.
• Create and sponsor teen model governments to seek solutions.
• Combine deliberation and service on Martin Luther King Day and other holidays.

I like these ideas–in fact, I originally proposed at least one of them–but there’s a need to think bigger and to focus more on schools (which is where the kids are!). Furthermore, the actual White House post highlights civic education less than yesterday’s announcement suggested it would. That’s not a big deal, but I would like to see the discussion shift toward school-based civic education. To that end, I have posted the following; other perspectives would be welcome as well:

Young people can learn to be very effective and helpful participants in public dialogs. Moderated discussions of current events in school, high-quality community service projects with a dimension of research and planning, youth production of news media, and youth service on boards and committees have all been shown to teach relevant skills, knowledge, and values.

Unfortunately, such opportunities are distributed very unequally. Poor children, children in stressed schools, and children who are academically “at risk” rarely receive civic opportunities that are common in high-performing suburban schools. Unless we address this problem, we will miss the voice of low-income kids in any public process.

The federal government invests very modestly in civic education. We estimate that federal spending on all the relevant programs (in the Department of Education, Corporation for National and Community Service, HUD, and the National Endowment for the Humanities) totals about $2 per student per year. But that small investment could be much more valuable:

1. It should be an investment in innovation. Money should be allocated in open competitions, and grantees should have to evaluate impact rigorously so that the field can learn.

2. It should be coordinated. There should be more integration, especially between the civic education programs of the Department of Education and NEH and the service-learning programs of the Corporation for National and Community Service and HUD.

3. It should be connected to the kind of work that the White House Office of Public Engagement is doing. When the government seeks public involvement in policymaking, students should be included, and they should have opportunities to learn civic and deliberative skills.