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.

I like to mix the usual fare of “civic engagement” and current events that dominate this blog with a smattering of culture. But I don’t think there will be much of that this month. I’m just 240 pages into the recent translation of War and Peace by Pevear and Volokhnosky. If I have anything to say about Tolstoy, it will probably be after I’m done. For now, I’m having enough trouble keeping the characters straight. Is Nikolushka the same as Nikolenka, and is he also Count Nikolai Ilyich? (Yes.) Is Count Nikolai the same as Prince Nikolai? (Nope.) Who is the brother of Princess Elizaveta Karlovna (a.k.a. Liza, Lizaveta, or Lise), and is he also the brother of Princess Elena Vassilievna (a.k.a. Lelya, Helene)? (Absolutely not.) Sometimes I’m tempted to just let it all wash over me, but I’ve found that’s almost always a mistake when you read sprawling 19th-century novels. Sooner or later, there will be some crucial connection that makes everything suspenseful and significant, if only you noticed it. So was that Pyotr Kirillovich (Pierre) or Pyotr Ilyich (Petya) whom Natalya (Natasha, Natalie) met in Moscow?

This year is the centennial of Saul Alinsky’s birth. Also in 2009, another Chicago community organizer was elected president of the United States–the first person with such a background to reach the White House. Meanwhile, one group with at least peripheral connections to both Alinksy and Obama–ACORN–has become a political hot-button. Yet we know from last year’s Civic Health Index (for the National Conference on Citizenship) that the vast majority of Americans have no idea what “community organizing” is. In an open-ended question, most people either cited local philanthropic behavior (like raising money for the PTA) or said they didn’t know what the phrase meant.

I know much less about community organizing than many others (including some who read this blog). But for newbies, the most important point I’d want to convey is the vast diversity of forms of community organizing. It is a contested term for a field full of controversy. At the risk of oversimplification, here are some types:

Strategic organizing starts with some kind of policy agenda, such as saving civilization by reducing carbon emissions or saving unborn children by ending abortion. Strategic organizers need to recruit and motivate strong supporters, find non-supporters who might be persuadable, and mobilize people who have special assets to contribute to the cause (e.g., money, skills, serious commitment, network ties, or fame).

Strategic organizing has a family resemblance to ideological organizing and partisan organizing. Indeed, parties and campaigns use community organizing techniques. I would nevertheless make distinctions here. Causes, ideologies, parties, and candidates are different things, and sometimes there are intense conflicts among them.

Relational organizing doesn’t start with a cause, but rather with a set of people–for instance, all the residents of a neighborhood or all members of a congregation. There is usually a long initial process of listening and discussing to decide what the common cause should be. Because the commitment is to relationships, not to predetermined outcomes, organizers do not select which individuals to mobilize because of what they can contribute to the cause. There is an ethical commitment to the relationship itself that can survive differences of opinion or failure to contribute effectively to the cause.

Relational organizing can occur within a homogeneous group, but it’s related to broad-based organizing, in which there is a commitment to connect and listen to all sectors or perspectives within a geographical community. A broad-based organizer will want to make sure that liberals, conservatives, industries, environmentalists, religious and secular people are all “at the table.” In deliberative organizing, as practiced by Everyday Democracy and a few other groups, diverse conversations become the central objective. In other broad-based organizing efforts, advocacy takes more time than discussion, but one purpose of the advocacy is to build ties among diverse groups.

Yet another distinction is confrontational organizing (in which conflicts and flash-points are used to build momentum) and more collaborative approaches.

Roughly speaking, groups like ACORN are strategic, confrontational, and ideological. Groups like PICO, Gamaliel, and much of IAF are relational and broad-based. There are also many internal debates and compromises.