Category Archives: advocating civic education

two op-eds on civic engagement

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I am on a winter vacation and not blogging, but two op-eds of mine have been published this week:

High school students still read in textbooks about how the legislature is designed to work, and how government depends on the consent of the governed. But Congress passes virtually no bills, and almost all adults seem to despise the government.  …

This is compounded by another problem. At times in our history, we have seen people distrust the national government but trust one another. That combination encourages populist reform proposals like term limits, referenda, and campaign finance reform that increase the people’s control over the government. However, today we are living in a time when Americans trust “the people” almost as little as they trust the government in Washington….

If you grow up not trusting the government and not trusting your fellow Americans, you will not admire the political system, but you will also be unmoved by proposals to reform it by empowering the people. That combination is a recipe for cynicism and withdrawal. Unless we want to live in that environment of distrust and suffer its consequences for many decades to come, we must change the situation quickly. …

In schools that serve low-income and minority students, kids are less likely to experience interactive civic education, meaning discussion of current events, participation in school governance and school media, field trips and simulations, such as mock trials. In schools that serve economically diverse students, those who are headed to college tend to get most of these interactive experiences. And in schools that serve several different racial groups in significant proportions, discussions of current events are particularly rare.

wrapping up the year

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(en route to Georgia for the holidays) As it says on the CIRCLE website:

It has been a busy, productive, and satisfying year. In the past 12 months, we have released a groundbreaking major report, taken a leadership role in several initiatives to improve civic education, advised and evaluated youth development programs, and even helped design and evaluate an innovative multiplayer game.

Last month, we released the CIRCLE Annual Report, which offers an overview of all our work from August 2012 to September 2013. Some highlights:

The Annual Report also looks ahead to the work we will embark on in the near future. For example, we are excited about opportunities to play a role in evaluating and refining emerging tools for civic education like multiplayer games, massive open online courses (MOOCs), and e-portfolios of students’ civic work.

We are extremely grateful to our many friends, funders, colleagues, and collaborators from the past year. See you in 2014!

Read the full 2012-2013 Annual Report.

our study of state policies for civic engagement

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Just published: “Policy Effects on Informed Political Engagement” by Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg and me. It is in American Behavioral Scientist and available online. (A print copy is coming soon.)

Abstract:

For this article, we tested whether and to what extent young people’s rates of informed voting are influenced by laws and policies that regulate the electoral system and by civic education policies. Education policies and state voting laws vary widely and are in rapid flux; their impact is important to understand. Immediately after the 2012 election, a sample of 4,483 youth was surveyed that included at least 75 respondents in each of the 50 states and national oversamples of African Americans and Latinos. Their experiences with civic education and support from their families predicted their informed political participation as young adults, but variations in the existing state policies did not matter. This may suggest that the kinds of policies that states have enacted—such as allowing early voting or requiring one course on government in high school—are not helpful but policies that promote extracurricular participation and discussion of current issues in schools could be much more effective.

assessment and accountabillity for civics

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These are some notes for a presentation I will make later today at the New England Association of Schools & Colleges conference. NEASC is one of the six regional accrediting associations in the US. It works by “developing and applying standards, assessing the educational effectiveness of pre-school, elementary, middle, secondary, and postsecondary educational institutions.”

As measurement and accountability have become more important at all levels of education (from pre-K to graduate school), the measurement of civic outcomes has generally been forgotten. It is not clear that civic education has been dropped as a result. All states still have some kind of civic education requirement at the k-12 level. Most colleges still have programs that emphasize service or activism. However, levels of attention, innovation, and investment have clearly suffered because we do not measure civics very seriously.

Measuring anything valuable and complicated is a challenge, and trying to improve any form of education by imposing measures from the outside is always somewhat problematic. But measuring civic education raises special challenges:

  1. Civic engagement is intrinsically interpersonal. Being a citizen means relating to other citizens and to institutions. Measures of individual civic performance (such as multiple-choice tests, essays, or surveys of individual behavior) may miss the point altogether.
  2. Citizens engage on current issues that are often local. That means that the topics of their engagement vary and change rapidly. Standardized tests of civics–simply because they are standardized–must emphasize abstract and perennial questions (such as the US Constitution) and omit equally important current and local matters.
  3. Civic engagement can be either good or very bad, depending on the means, methods and objectives of the participants. Margaret Mead said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” But Mussolini and his fellow fascists started as a small group of thoughtful and committed citizens. They changed the world for the worse. Measures of activity or impact that are value-free fail to distinguish between fascists and Freedom Riders.
  4. In many fields, we can decide what students should learn by assessing whether they are prepared to succeed in their chosen profession or in the labor market more generally. For instance, good engineering education makes good engineers, and good engineers are those who succeed in engineering jobs. Likewise, good citizens succeed in democracy and civil society. But what “success” as a citizen means is controversial. That is what radicals, liberals, conservatives, libertarians, patriots, cosmopolitans, Greens, and others argue about: what we owe to each other (and to nature and future generations) and how we should relate to the community and the state.
  5. When assessing education overall, it makes sense to ask whether it enhances the long-term well-being of the students, which can be measured in terms of earnings, health, or psychological flourishing. Some evidence suggests that being an engaged citizen boosts such outcomes. For instance, being able to define and address problems with peers is a civic skill that can also pay off in the labor market. Contributing to your community can make you happier. But the relationship between being an excellent citizen and flourishing as an individual is complex. In his great book Freedom Summer, Doug McAdam shows that the volunteers paid a severe personal price for their efforts to register Black voters in Mississippi in 1963. They were worse off than a comparison group in terms of happiness, career success, and health ten years later. That is no argument against the Freedom Summer program, which wasn’t meant for their benefit. It was one part of a glorious struggle against Jim Crow. To measure it in terms of the developmental benefits for the participants would have been a travesty.

I think it’s essential to measure civic education in an era of assessment and accountability–if only so that educators and students can track their own progress. Assessments must be interactive, not private and individual. Evaluation must consider ethics and values; it is not enough to act or to affect the world–you have to make it better. The question of what to measure is somewhat controversial because it relates to questions about what kind of society we should have. But there is a lot of common ground and room for compromise. In any event, we should decide what makes a good citizen not by asking what skills pay off in the marketplace or what civic activities boost students’ welfare. We must start with a theory of the good democratic society and then ask what skills, values, knowledge, and commitments we need from the next generation of citizens.

In my recent book, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For, I argue that citizenship  fundamentally means: (1) deliberating with other citizens about what should be done, (2) actually working with other people to address problems and reflecting on the results, and (3) forming relationships of loyalty and trust. That theory derives from my study of politics, not primarily from a theory of education or youth development. I argue that the US political system depends on these three aspects of citizenship, all of which are in decline for deep, structural reasons. If I am right, these are the attainments that we should try to teach, and our measures should capture whether people can (1) deliberate, (2) collaborate, and (3) form civic relationships. If I am wrong, the counterargument should be a different theory of what our society needs from its people.

putting action in the state standards

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I am in St. Louis for the big annual gathering of social studies teachers, the National Council for the Social Studies conference. Last fall, the NCSS released a new voluntary framework for state standards entitled College, Career, and Civic Life (C3). For full disclosure, I helped write it. One part that seems especially important to me is the section near the end about “taking informed action” (shown below). I will be discussing why this is important and what it means in classrooms.

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At each level, we ask students to analyze a problem, then consider options for addressing the problem, and then make deliberative decisions about what they will do. The scope of action expands from the classroom in grades k-2 to beyond the school by 12th grade.

These standards were written by a large group, but they are consistent with my personal view that good citizens deliberate. By talking and listening to people who are different from ourselves, we learn and enlarge our understanding. We check our values, strategies, and facts with other people. We form ideas about topics that we didn’t even consider before we talked and listened. We also make ourselves accountable to our fellow citizens.

But (I argue) deliberation is not enough. Talking without ever acting is pretty empty. You can say most anything without learning from the results or affecting the world. Deliberation is most valuable when it is connected to work or action. At least sometimes, we should be part of groups that talk about what we should do, then actually do what we have talked about doing, and then reflect on the experience, holding themselves ourselves for the results. This is both the best way to improve the world and the best way to learn to be a good citizen.

Concretely, “taking action” can mean many things: not just community service, and definitely not just political activism (which is hard for a public school to recognize), but also managing and leading student groups, organizing public events, and creating and sharing knowledge.

As Meira Levinson and I argue in the new issue of the NCSS journal, taking action is nothing new.* There is a great old tradition of American students being asked to deliberate and then act as part of their social studies classes. If anything, I suspect the prevalence of action has declined because high schools now mimic colleges (which makes social studies into History or Poli Sci 101 for teenagers) and because conventional standardized tests cannot measure students’ facility at deliberation and action. The new framework, if taken seriously, would require a whole new approach to assessing students’ work.

*Meira Levinson and Peter Levine, “Taking Informed Action to Engage Students in Civic Life,” Social Education, vol. 77, no. 6 (Nov/Dec, 2013) pp. 337-9