Category Archives: advocating civic education

a portrait of American teenagers’ out-of-school life

Earlier this week, we released CIRCLE Working Paper #80 by Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg: “Harry, Hermione, Ron, and Neville – Portraits of American Teenagers’ Extracurricular Involvement, and Implications for Educational Interventions.” Kei uses cluster analysis to divide all American high school seniors into six groups, depending on their extracurricular activities. Each group has strikingly different social class backgrounds and divergent prospects for academic success and civic engagement after high school.

Extracurricular activities provide crucial opportunities to learn skills, develop networks, and explore passions. We must invest in opportunities for the roughly 35% of American high school seniors who are largely left out of after-school activities. (And that is an underestimate, because Kei assesses only those students who have stayed in school until 12th grade.)

Following in the tradition of an excellent 2001 paper that associated groups of real American teenagers with characters from the movie “The Breakfast Club,”* Kei identifies each cluster of American teens with a different character from the Harry Potter series. This is partly a mnemonic, but it also makes the point that characters are complex and trajectories are changeable. If we called 16% of American youth “slackers” (because they do not report being involved in anything constructive out of school) that would present a unidimensional image and suggest that they are irretrievably lost to civic society. But by associating them with the Weasley Twins, Kei reminds us that they have complex and varied characters and are subject to change.

* Barber, B. L., Eccles, J. S., & Stone, M. R. (2001). Whatever happened to the jock, the brain, and the princess? Young adult pathways linked to adolescent activity involvement and social identity. Journal of Adolescent Research, 19(5), 429-455

a concise and general argument for civic education reform

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(Logan Airport) This article is newly out and publicly available:

Peter Levine, “Teaching the Deeper Aspects of Civic Education,” The Standard (National Association of State Boards of Education), March 24, 2014, pp. 37-39.

It is my best effort at a 3-page argument for policymakers and advocates, describing what we should want young people to learn, what obstacles stand in the way of satisfactory outcomes, and what policy changes would help.

three paths to civic education reform

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Today, CIRCLE releases case studies of three significant state-level reforms for civic education. We chose them because they reflect very different approaches to improving civics (or any other major topic) through state legislation:

In Florida, the Justice Sandra Day O’Connor Civics Education Act passed in 2010, mandating a high-stakes standardized test in civics.
In Hawaii, a required “Participation in Democracy” course places a strong emphasis on experiential education; the requirement was passed in 2006 and an effort to repeal it was defeated.
In Tennessee, recent legislation mandates project-based civics assessments at the middle and high school levels.

It’s too early to say which reform “works,” in the sense of generating the best outcomes for students, but the CIRCLE studies reveal some of the pros and cons of each strategy.

civics projects are good for AP scores (and what that means more generally)

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University of Washington Professor Walter Parker and colleagues are running experiments in which some classes take AP US Government as it’s typically taught (textbooks, lectures, and some discussion), and others experience a curriculum based on mock trials and other projects. All the kids take the same AP standardized test. The project-based curriculum evolves from year to year, because Parker and colleagues didn’t have a perfect model all ready to adopt. But, as they have run the experiment, the kids in the project-based courses have performed at least as well on the AP test as their peers, while also demonstrating higher scores on civic engagement.

All this is well described in a Seattle Times piece by Linda Shaw. The project is important as a rigorous test of the theory that people learn better when they are engaged and interested. Here, the outcome measure (an AP test) is artificial and isolating. Each kid answers the questions privately, to demonstrate her knowledge of relatively abstract material. The kids’ creativity and interaction with each other are not assessed. And yet, learning the material through experience yields equal or better test scores.

The project is also important as a model of collaboration between teachers and university-based scholars. It isn’t a randomized study of a prepackaged intervention (although we do those, and I would defend them), but rather a collaborative process of design and redesign that is then measured very rigorously.

Finally, this project suggests a partial solution to a deep problem. Contrary to popular belief, we have not really cut civic education from our schools. But we have transformed it from a set of discussions and projects into a bunch of academic courses that mimic the social sciences in college–of which AP US Government is a prominent example.

In 1928-9, according to federal statistics, more than half of all American ninth-graders took “civics.” This was the tail end of the Progressive Era, and “civics” meant learning about one’s own community and, often, doing group projects outside of the school.* Enrollment in courses called “civics” had fallen to 13.4 by the early 1970s.

In 1948-9, 41.5 percent of American high school students took “problems of democracy,” which typically involved reading and debating stories from the daily newspaper. By the early 1970s, that percentage was down to 8.9.** But the percentage of high school students who have taken any government course has been basically steady since 1915-1916, and AP US Government is the fastest growing AP course.

Thus we have basically transformed civic education from guided experience of citizenship*** into a dispassionate study of the US government. On philosophical grounds, I object. But as long as that trend continues, Walter Parker’s research is enormously helpful. He shows that by using some of the old techniques of “civics” and “problems of democracy,” we can actually achieve higher scores on a what amounts to a poli. sci. exam–presumably because kids are more engaged and challenged.

*Meira Levinson and Peter Levine, “Taking Informed Action to Engage Students in Civic Life,” Social Education, vol. 77 no 6 (Nov Dec 2013), pp. 339-341

**Richard G. Niemi and Julia Smith, “Enrollments in High School Government Classes: Are We Short-Changing Both Citizenship and Political Science Training?” PS: Political Science and Politics, vol. 34, no. 2 (June 2001), p. 282.

***”Guided experiential education” is Levinson’s term.

the benefits of service for low-income youth

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Here are five key points for anyone who promotes service as a means to improve the success of low-income young people.

1. Teenagers who participate in community service have much better academic and psycho-social outcomes than their peers.

Sources: Alberto Dávila and Marie T. Mora, “An Assessment of Civic Engagement and Educational Attainment” (Medford, MA: Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, 2007); Christopher Spera, Robin Ghertner, Anthony Nerino, and Adrienne DiTommaso, Volunteering as a Pathway to Employment: Does Volunteering Increase Odds of Finding a Job for the Out of Work? (Washington, DC: Corporation for National and Community Service, Office of Research and Evaluation, 2013); Dawn Anderson-Butcher, W. Sean Newsome, Theresa M. Ferrari, “Participation in Boys & Girls Clubs and Relationships to Youth Outcomes,” Journal of Community Psychology, vol. 31, No. 1 (2003), pp. 39–55; Jennifer A. Fredericks and Jacquelynne S. Eccles, “Is Extracurricular Participation Associated with Beneficial Outcomes? Concurrent and Longitudinal Relations,” Developmental Psychology, vol. 42, no. 4 (2006), pp. 698-713.

Caveat: These correlations do not prove causation. Teenagers who serve may have personality traits or positive influences from peers, families, institutions, and communities that also explain why they succeed academically. Besides, service clubs and programs have other features (apart from service) that may explain their benefits.

2. At risk-youth enrolled in certain programs that involve service see substantial improvements in academic and economic outcomes

Sources: CIRCLE, “Pathways into Leadership: A Study of YouthBuild Graduates” (Medford: MA, CIRCLE, 2012); Megan Millenky, Dan Bloom, Sara Muller-Ravett, and Joseph Broadus, Staying on Course: Three-Year Results of the National Guard Youth ChalleNGe Evaluation (New York: MDRC, 2011); Constance Flanagan & Peter Levine, “Youth Civic Engagement During the Transition to Adulthood,” in Mary Waters, Gordon Berlin, and Frank Furstenberg (eds.), Transition to Adulthood (Princeton/Brookings: The Future of Children), vol. 20, no. 1, Spring 2010, pp. 159-180.

Caveats: These programs always have other aspects besides service (e.g., caring adults; academic coursework, sometimes residential living). Also, the evaluation methods leave some uncertainty about causation.

3. Service programs have characteristics that resemble the 21st Century workplace. Therefore, they should prepare students for success in the job market.

Sources: Reed W. Larson and Rachel M. Angus, “Adolescents’ Development of Skills for Agency in Youth Programs: Learning to Think Strategically,” Child Development, vol. 82, issue 1, pp. 277–294; Peter Levine, “Jobs, Jobs, Jobs: The Economic Impact of Public Work in America’s Colleges and Universities,” in Harry C. Boyte (ed.), Democracy’s Education: A Symposium on Power, Public Work, and the Meaning of Citizenship (Vanderbilt University Press, in press)

Caveats: Service programs vary in the degree to which they impart valuable skills and habits. Other factors besides skills and habits affect success in the job market. Students may actually obtain valuable skills but not be able to demonstrate those skills to potential employers.

4. There is some evidence that hiring managers see volunteering as relevant experience to consider when making employment decisions.

Sources: CareerBuilder Study Reveals Surprising Factors that Play a Part in Determining Who Gets Hired,” August 28, 2013; Deloitte, “2013 Volunteer IMPACT Survey.”

Caveats: These are based on surveys of managers, who may say they want to hire volunteers even though volunteering does not actually matter.

5. Communities with more civic engagement have much better economic, educational, and social outcomes than similar communities with less engagement.

Sources: Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg, Chaeyoon Lim & Peter Levine, “Civic Health and Unemployment II: The Case Builds,” National Conference on Citizenship: Washington, DC, 2012; Robert D. Putnam, “Community-Based Social Capital and Educational Performance,” in Diane Ravitch and Joseph P. Viteritti (eds.), Making Good Citizens: Education and Civil Society (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 58-95; Robert J. Sampson, Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Sean Safford, Why the Garden Club Couldn’t Save Youngstown (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009); Peter Levine, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For: The Promise of Civic Renewal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013)

Caveats: In these studies, volunteering per se does not predict economic success. Other civic engagement variables–e.g., the number of nonprofits per capita; the density of civic networks; or “collective efficacy”–are the predictors. Also, we do not know whether increasing the civic engagement of (some) youth would boost their communities’ civic engagement in a lasting way.