Author Archives: Peter Levine

why does the quality of journalism matter?

I have an article in the Fall 2004 National Civic Review entitled “Journalism and Democracy: Does it Matter How Well the Press Covers Iraq?” It’s not online yet, but I’ve posted a .pdf of the final draft that I submitted to NCR. The same issue of the Review also contains articles by my friends Cole Campbell, Rich Harwood, and Lew Friedland on various aspects of journalism and public life. Many similar themes are evident in all three pieces.

My article mostly appeared first in this blog, in short segments. I submitted it many months ago, so it describes the 2004 election as a future event and Andrew Sullivan as a pro-war blogger (no longer true). I think I pose a fairly difficult question about why the quality of press coverage matters. I am not persuaded that we merely need good reporting to help us decide whom to support in the next presidential election; so I consider some alternative rationales. Unfortunately, my piece does a better job of raising questions than answering them.

youth research as civic education

Today, I?ll be working with two groups of young people who are involved in community research: my undergraduate ?Leaders for Tomorrow? (who are still in the planning stages of their project), and high school students who are taping interviews with community residents for a radio show. In general, I?m enthusiastic about community research and ?youth-led research? as forms of civic education. In community research, students study their social environment, collecting and analyzing data under the leadership of a teacher or other adult. In youth-led research, students choose their own issues and questions and design their methodology, with appropriate guidance from adults.

Such projects are reasonably common in schools and youth organizations such as 4H. However, I don?t know many curricula or teachers? guides for community research or youth-led research. Instead, each project is unique and requires heavy investment by a talented teacher or a very well organized and prepared group of kids. To make community research easier, I can imagine a guide and an interactive website that helped classes and youth groups to conduct assignments like the following:

  • Survey local associations to find out which ones collaborate with which other ones. Once the data were entered into a database, software could spit out a diagram showing all the connections among groups in the community. Students could then examine the diagram to determine where there were gaps in the local social network. If a teacher repeated this assignment each year, students could begin to analyze the development of networks over time. And if students assigned each association a unique identifier (for instance, its phone number, including then area code), then a national website could begin to generate combined network maps using the data from multiple schools. Groups from different schools might find that their communities were linked and could discuss those links online.
  • Students could interview owners of local businesses and nonprofits, take photographs, and then enter the information into a GIS database. Software could automatically generate maps of the assets in the neighborhood, which could be posted on a public website. People would be able to click on a spot on a map and find out about each ?asset.? (See our effort for an example that could be much improved.)
  • Students could conduct interviews with people who had lived through a problem or conflict in the community?s past, put the interviews on a website, analyze the historical issue to identify two or three reasonable but conflicting positions, and then host a moderated online discussion of the issue. This is what we did with the issue of desegregation in Prince George?s County, MD. Segregation is a continuing problem, but we chose to focus on the period from 1950-1970 because we wanted to experiment with a novel approach to historical education. However, a strictly contemporary issue could also be studied.

    • student research and service-learning

    Although student research needn?t be an alternative or competitor to service-learning, it?s worth considering the relative advantages of each. Service-learning means a combination of community service with reflection, writing, and sometimes research on the same social issue. It is very common today (present in as many as 40% of schools), and it can be a great civic pedagogy. Indeed, it can be a transformative experience for students and teachers alike, developing their skills and confidence, challenging them intellectually, and committing them to serious civic work later in life. However, service-learning often degenerates into cleaning up a park (or even stapling papers in the principal?s office) and then briefly discussing the experience. This happens because it is hard to organize challenging service-learning?as I know from my own, often unsuccessful efforts in the high school. Service-learning also degenerates because it implies and requires strong values, particular ideas of justice and virtue. These values are hard to sustain in pluralistic public schools that have not been formally charged with promoting ideals other than very vague and anodyne ones. Finally, service-learning sometimes degenerates because it is seen as a way to ?engage? students who are not doing well in standard classrooms. Given this goal, some teachers avoid assigning intellectually challenging exercises in connection to service.

    Research, unlike service, is close to the main academic mission of schools. Yet community research can address public problems and enhance public goods. Thus I think research makes sense, at least as a complement to service-learning.

    Incidentally, CIRCLE has funded young people to organize research projects about youth civic engagement. This is the only form of direct work with kids that we may undertake as an organization, because we are a research center with a specific focus (youth civic engagement). The process of selecting youth groups to conduct these projects has taught us a fair amount about what seems to work. We have learned, for example, that student-run surveys of other students aren?t great. The size and quality of the samples is inadequate, so the kids don?t really obtain meaningful results. On the other hand, students can make excellent documentaries and run good focus groups.

    in transit

    I’m going to be speaking and then travelling today, so I will probably not get a chance to go online. However, Marcus Stanley has contributed some very useful “content” to my blog in the form of a critical comment about Harry Boyte. In my hotel room last night, I replied with a defense of Boyte. The same “comments” page also contains Nick Beaudrot’s remarks on Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas?.

    college students in the ’04 election

    I’m on my way to Madison, Wisconsin, to talk to social studies teachers. Meanwhile, CIRCLE will be releasing a really interesting poll of college students. Visit the CIRCLE homepage around noon to see all the details. Among other things …

  • College students were remarkably likely to discuss the election and to persuade other students to vote. Both forms of engagement were far more common than at any time since the 1960s.
  • Students reported very few problems voting.
  • Students were heavily mobilized by parties, non-partisan groups, peers, and colleges.
  • Students voted differently depending on their majors. Arts and humanities students were the most solidly for Kerry, business students leaned slighly toward the Democrats, and only education students actually gave a majority to Bush.

    • justice in industry standards

    This is a topic that I would write about if I suddenly had three free months and could actually study the facts of the matter. Lacking those months (but having a blog), I hereby offer my untotored thoughts …

    For centuries, companies and entrepreneurs have negotiated voluntary standards that spread throughout industries, so that (for example), you can buy a lightbulb and know that it will fit into your lamp back home: the sizes and shapes are standardized. Traditionally, the precise choice of a standard has been arbitrary–it doesn’t matter how many milimeters wide lightbulbs are, as long as they’re the same. To the extent that traditional standards raise issues of public concern, the main ones are safety (a really dumb standard can be dangerous) and antitrust (incumbent industries can deliberately create standards that are unnecessarily hard for competitors to replicate).

    In the new world of networked computers, antitrust remains a concern, but there are many additional issues of great importance. Since standards are what allow computers to communicate and software to run on multiple “platforms,” they must be very detailed. It is in the standards process that the key design choices are made that shape email, webpages, document formats, and digital movies. Just for example, I once heard Tim Berners-Lee speak in Washington, and he said that he wished he had written the standards for the World Wide Web so that no information could be transmitted from visitors to owners of websites. That choice would have prevented privacy violations, but it also would have blocked many useful functions, including virtually all e-commerce. So I suspect we’re better off with the standards that Berners-Lee actually created. In any case, his choice to allow two-way communications had enormous consequences.

    Market libertarians may view any standards as acceptable, since they result from voluntary negotiations. But even free-marketers should worry when monopoly companies dominate the standards process. Civil libertarians should want standards to protect constitutional values like privacy and free expression. Following Lawrence Lessig, they should view computer “code” as parallel to legal “code”; either one can abridge freedoms. Communitarians may see standards as opportunities to protect community interests, for example, by preventing viruses and terrorists’ messages from being encoded in picture files. Strong democrats may distrust a powerful process that isn’t overseen by elected governments. Advocates of the commons may view voluntary standards (which are “contributed” by hard-working code-writers) as a form of common property, except when standards are designed to protect narrow economic interests. And all observers should be interested that today’s standards often pay explicit attention to two issues–disabilities and privacy–but not to any other normative questions.