About one in four college students and young college graduates have been voting in the 2008 primary season. But only about half of young Americans attend college. For those with no college experience, the voter turnout rate has been about one in fourteen this year. One important reason is unequal civic education. The activities in school that help people to participate are basically reserved for our more successful students.

These are results of major new CIRCLE studies released today. You can read our fact sheet on primary turnout (pdf), download an important new working paper by Joseph Kahne and Ellen Middaugh (pdf), read the AP article based on our study, or listen to Audie Cornish’s story an “All Things Considered” that quotes me and uses our data–but more importantly, captures the voices of non-college youth.

(On an airplane over Ohio) Let’s assume that you want to increase the quantity, equality, impact, and quality of political participation. Which institutions would give you the most leverage? Put another way, by reforming or enlisting which of the following institutions would you have the most impact?

(Dayton, OH) On my way to a meeting with two of its authors (and others), I read Dewey’s Dream: Universities and Democracies in an Age of Education Reform (Temple, 2007), by Lee Benson, Ira Harkavy, and John Puckett. It’s a manifesto for reform, which I would like to write about on another occasion. It also tells a story about the great progressive thinker/activist John Dewey, as a kind of “near-miss” (my phrase, not the authors’). In their view, Dewey almost opened a path to deep democratic renewal but made fatal errors. This is the outline:

1888 or earlier: John Dewey, a philosophy professor, decides that philosophical problems can only be addressed experientially and collaboratively. He begins to define “democracy” as a culture and a set of institutions optimally designed for learning. Achieving real democracy (in this sense) requires reform.

1888-92: Thinking strategically about reform, Dewey identifies the news media as the best lever of change. He tries to create a democratic newspaper, Thought News, to achieve “socialism of the intelligence and the spirit.” It is a complete practical failure. (Although it fails, this experiment foreshadows modern uses of innovative media for democratic reform.)

1894: Dewey comes to Chicago and, because of agendas within the University, he is recruited to study education. He decides that schools, not communications media, provide the best levers for democratic change. He creates the Chicago Laboratory School. Its curriculum is experiential and collaborative but completely artificial and driven by Dewey, not by the community. It is a flawed conception, although it could have evolved in better directions.

By 1902, Dewey has spent considerable time at Hull-House, Jane Addams’ great community-based institution for learning, culture, and reform. Having learned from this example, Dewey writes the “School as Social Center,” a manifesto for public schools as hubs of learning deeply embedded in, and owned by, communities. The Lab School could have turned into such an institution, but …

1904: Dewey leaves Chicago for New York where he retreats from full engagement. He focuses on reforming philosophy and deprecates schools as venues for learning and reform. He becomes interested again in the news media but has very vague ideas about it.

ca. 1912-ca. 1939: American schools are deeply influenced by Dewey, but his ideals are often watered down and distorted. Experiential learning becomes a means of accommodating kids to existing social institutions, not a spur to social reform. But there are a few excellent examples, such as the rural schools founded by Dewey’s student Elsie Clapp.

1939: Dewey praises Clapp’s schools but claims that they only work because they are located in rural communities that still embody preindustrial values. He has abandoned the idea that community schools might transform mainstream American society.

During the summer of 2008, CIRCLE will move to Tufts University, becoming part of the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service. My family and I will be moving to the Boston area as well. CIRCLE will leave a satellite office in the DC area, but our home will be Tufts. Working with colleagues there and partners at other institutions, CIRCLE will help to build an innovative, ambitious, and rigorous research program that will influence scholarship and practice and thereby help to renew democracy. I have written more about our agenda here (pdf).

This decision was basically an institutional one. If we had a formal board, they would have voted (I am confident) in favor of a move to Tufts. The University of Maryland is a great land-grant state institution. But Tufts, because of its resources, its people, and its tremendous institutional commitment to civic engagement, will give CIRCLE better opportunities to grow and affect the world.

But even if the choice was pretty obvious for CIRCLE, it was a difficult one for my family and for me, personally. I’ve had a terrific time and learned almost everything I know at the University of Maryland since 1993. I had to think seriously about my own identity and trajectory in order to decide which institution to commit to. At Maryland, I wear several hats, including a research scholar in the Institute for Philosophy & Public Policy, which applies philosophical ideas to a range of public issues. That work matters to me; but faced with a choice, I’ve decided it’s not my identity. I would like to say that I’m a scholar with normative concerns who interacts daily with the practical movement to enhance the quality and breadth of civic participation in America.

Already during the summer after my sophomore year in college, I went to the Kettering Foundation in Dayton (of which I am now a Trustee) to study the National Issues Forums. I must have won that internship based on an application essay that indicated some interest in public deliberation. I then became president of the Yale student government on a platform of increasing the quality and quantity of student engagement in New Haven and Yale. Although it wasn’t my idea, I’m proudest of one successful and lasting policy change that we achieved in that era: a scholarship program for students who conduct summer internships and report their results to local alumni clubs.

I was a philosophy major and received a doctorate in Philosophy from Oxford, but I might not have followed that route if I hadn’t received a Rhodes Scholarship. Winning the Rhodes was, of course, mostly a matter of luck; but my application was all about civic engagement. My first job after graduate school was with Common Cause, the citizens’ lobby. On the strength of that practical experience plus my doctorate, the Institute for Philosophy & Public Policy decided to hire me. And the Institute turned out to be a fabulous platform for conducting research and experimenting with practice in civic engagement. It was the base of the National Commission on Civic Renewal, the National Alliance for Civic Engagement, the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning & Engagement (CIRCLE), the Prince George’s Information Commons, and numerous other projects. Only because of the institutional and personal resources available to me at Maryland have I been able to find a place in strategic national discussions about civic renewal.

Tufts is committed to precisely this role of generating rigorous and independent scholarship on civic engagement, in dialog with practice and political reform. It might be possible to sustain that work at Maryland, but I believe the odds are better at Tufts that we can expand the seriousness, originality, and rigor of our scholarship and its impact on society.

(Syracuse, NY) It’s fun for reporters to pick out young people on the street and ask them hard, policy-wonk questions to show that they don’t know anything. This, however, was the wrong young man to condescend to: