The Census has released its 2008 voting data, which is the basis of a fairly detailed new fact sheet by CIRCLE. We find that the turnout of under-30s rose to 51.1 percent. For under-25s, the turnout was 48.5 percent. These rates are considerably above the levels we saw around 1996-2000.

I’m an optimist, so I’ll say that the glass is half full. (In fact, we beat the half-full mark by 1.1 percentage points.) We no longer see a steady decline since the 1970s: now the graph seems to suggest that roughly 50% turnout is the norm for American youth, and the late 90’s were an exception on the low side.

But the gaps in turnout were large in 2008. About 36 percent of young people with no college experience voted, compared to a 62 percent rate for young people who have attended college. Only about half of young adults go to college.

There was also a partisan gap, although that cannot be directly measured using Census data. Since 66 percent of young voters chose Obama/Biden, it’s likely that conservative youth tended to stay home. That would account for why turnout didn’t rise more in ’08.

There’s much more in the fact sheet.

If you Google terms like “Obama” and “community service,” you will find a very large number of conservative blogs and opinion pieces claiming that this is Obama’s “brown shirt” corps. They fear that young people will be indoctrinated by “ACORN types” to spread socialism (even though I thought the original Nazi brown shirts beat up socialists). They also assert that Obama is taking a step toward mandatory service. Right now, if you Google “brown shirts” to find out about that Nazi organization, one of the top results is an attack on Americorps.

In reality, AmeriCorps is not a youth organization at all. It provides grants to a very wide range of nonprofits. Such a decentralized approach would be a poor strategy for building an authoritarian political movement, if anyone wanted to do that. There are also very strict restrictions on political activity by AmeriCorps volunteers. They cannot, for example, do nonpartisan voter registration or lobbying. And Obama’s nominee to head the agency that overseas AmeriCorps, Maria Eitel, worked for George H.W. Bush before she entered the corporate world as a Nike executive. Hardly a socialist.

So basically the right-wing fear of AmeriCorps is paranoia. A more troubling critique, in my view, comes from the left. Some left-liberals argue that by recruiting hundreds of thousands of young idealists to do community service that is formally insulated from politics, we will frustrate progressive politics for a generation.

I hear that argument, yet I think we need to be careful when we use federal funds for programs that influence young people’s thinking about social issues. That’s an appropriate goal if it’s about authentic learning and deliberation, but it could be distorted by political agendas. AmeriCorps will never become a brown shirt organization, but it could provide patronage or teach members to think narrowly about issues. Out of an abundance of caution, I would favor the existing limits on political action by AmeriCorps volunteers, I would bend over backward to make grants to religious and conservative groups, and I would constantly emphasize that this is not the first step toward mandatory civilian service. (There are philosophical arguments in favor of universal service. The crucial argument against it, in my view, is that it would be extremely costly and difficult to provide millions of high-quality service opportunities; and we could spend those billions better for other purposes.)

Our main message at CIRCLE is that young people benefit from opportunities to do civic work, but those opportunities (such as discussions of controversial issues, service-learning projects, student governments, youth organizing, youth media, community-based research) are very poorly distributed, so that those youth who need them least–our successful students–are most likely to get them, whereas those who struggle in school (or who attend struggling schools) are very unlikely to receive them.

I’ve got a piece entitled “The Civic Opportunity Gap” in the current issue of Educational Leadership, a magazine aimed mainly at administrators in k-12 schools. Northwest Education published an interview with me under the heading, “Civic Engagement for All.” Finally, several of my closest collaborators and I addressed civic equity in a panel at the American Education Research Association conference last week, and Education Week (the main trade journal) chose to cover our discussion. The Ed Week article begins, “The good news, according to researchers presenting findings here last week, is that after waning for years, civic participation among young people appears to be on the rise. The bad news is that students who are members of racial or ethnic minorities, who live in poor neighborhoods, or who are tracked into low-achieving classes get fewer opportunities to exercise their civic muscles than their better-off peers.”

Our new study of youth volunteering rates is getting a lot of coverage. Martha Irvine’s Associated Press story has apparently been picked up by 1,300 outlets, and I did a national CBS radio news interview early this morning. Irvine puts the story well:

Volunteering has helped define a generation of young Americans who are known for their do-gooder ways. Many high schools require community service before graduation. And these days, donating time to a charitable organization is all but expected on a young person’s college or job application.

Even so, an analysis of federal data has found that the percentage of teens who volunteer dipped in recent years, ending an upward trend that began after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

“They’re still volunteering at higher rates than their parents did,” says Peter Levine, director of Tufts University’s Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning & Engagement, also known as CIRCLE.

But, he adds, there’s been “a loss of momentum,” which he hopes recent passage of the federal Serve America Act will help address.

I ended my AERA presentation last week by saying that the best thing about good youth civic programs is not their impact on the kids whom they engage, nor the chance that they may increase political equality. The best thing about them is that they embody an alternative kind of politics. Excellent classroom discussions of controversial issues, service-learning projects, and youth media-production or youth-led research create examples that help to move the whole society …

• From the prevailing “deficit model,” in which students (and adult populations, too) are treated as problems or victims, toward a model of people as contributors.
• From a specialist understanding of education (in which professional teachers educate and kids are measured on tests) to an understanding of education as a community’s task (in which schools play one important role).
• From a sense that all investments are mobile and contingent to an attitude of commitment.
• From a government-centered view of politics–in which the main controversy is what the government should and shouldn’t do–to a citizen-centered view, in which the question is how we define and address our problems.
• From an understanding of politics as zero-sum distribution to an understanding of politics as creativity and the making of meaning.
• From manipulative or strategic politics to politics as open-ended deliberation about what ought to be done.

My colleagues and I have made these points before, but I was expressly asked to list them on my blog–and here they are.