Category Archives: advocating civic education

sessions at the American Political Science Association

I am helping to organize three sessions at this year’s APSA Conference that are relevant to civic renewal and civic education. The theme of the whole conference is “Power and Persuasion,” and the APSA president is the excellent Jane Mansbridge. Improving the relationship between persuasion and power is an essential goal of civic renewal. In that context …

1. Theme Panel: “Power and Persuasion from Below: Civic Renewal, Youth Engagement, and the Case for Civic Studies”
Aug 30, 2013, 4:15 PM-6:00 PM
Chair: Peter Levine, Tufts University. Participants: Paul Dragos Aligica, George Mason University; Carmen Sirianni, Brandeis University; Karol E. Soltan, University of Maryland; Filippo A. Sabetti McGill University; and Meira Levinson, Harvard University

“Civic renewal” refers to an international set of movements and practices that enhance citizens’ agency and may therefore strengthen persuasion over raw power. In the US, it includes public deliberation, broad-based community organizing, and collaborative governance, among other efforts. Its values have also been reflected in aspects of the Occupy Movement and the Arab Spring, to name just two recent global movements. Youth are at the forefront of some of these efforts and must always be incorporated in them. “Civic Studies” is an emerging scholarly field inspired by Elinor and Vincent Ostrom and the Bloomington School, by social science as phronesis, by the new constitutionalism, by theories of public work and democratic professionalism, by research on deliberative democracy, and by related academic movements that take civic agency seriously. Civic education should draw on Civic Studies and support civic renewal.

2. APSA Committee on Civic Education and Engagement Roundtable: The Measurement and Assessment of Civic Learning in K -12 and College Education
Saturday, Aug 31, 2013, 8:00 AM-9:45 AM
13:00-14:30 on 29, 30 and 31 August 2013, Chicago
Chaired by Peter Levine. Participants: Elizabeth Bennion, Indiana University, South Bend; David Campbell, Notre Dame; Meira Levinson, Harvard University.

We will be thinking about what should be measured, how to measure it, and new opportunities afforded by tools like games and badges. One topic will be the ideas in the APSA’s edited volume, Teaching Civic Engagement: From Student to Active Citizen. But we will broaden the discussion beyond the question of how to measure students’ learning in college-level political science classes.

3. APSA Working Group on Young People’s Politics
August 29, 30 and 31, 2013, 1:00-2:30 PM
Convenors: Peter Levine, Tufts University; James Sloam, Royal Holloway, University of London

The political participation of young people in industrialized democracies has changed significantly over the past few decades. Although youth turnout in elections may be declining (or, as in the United States, has flatlined at a relatively low level), there is overwhelming evidence to show that young people are not apathetic. Indeed, it is young people who are diversifying political engagement: from consumer politics, to community campaigns, to international action groups; from the ballot box, to the street, to the Internet. Since the onset of the global financial crisis, we have witnessed a proliferation of youth protest: against authoritarianism (the Arab Spring), corporate greed and economic inequality (Occupy), youth unemployment (the ‘outraged young’ in Spain), and political corruption (the rise of populist parties like the Five-Star Movement in Italy). The international dimension of young people’s politics has also become increasingly apparent through the diffusion ideas and mobilisation from Cairo, to Madrid, to New York, to Istanbul to Rio. The APSA working group on young people’s politics will explore research on the nature of youth participation from a comparative perspective. To contextualise youth participation, it will also examine how public policy defines young people’s lives in our democracies e.g. through participation (or non-participation) in the labour market or opportunities (or lack of opportunities) for social mobility. Finally, the working group will focus on efforts to strengthen the civic and political engagement of young people (e.g. through civic education or political science education).

The working group sessions will provide an interactive forum for participants to discuss their own research with colleagues working in the same area, to reflect on panels visited by participants at the Annual Meeting (in the first meeting, we will agree on panels to recommend to participants), and discuss the potential for future research collaboration (e.g. conferences, funding, edited volumes) and the establishment of an APSA organised section on young people’s politics.

activist forms of civic education are traditional

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(Washington, DC) One of my refrains is that we have not recently invented the idea that students can learn to be citizens by practicing citizenship. That is a traditional concept, rooted in Aristotle, de Tocqueville, Mill, and other theorists, but, more importantly, built on deep and continuous experience in schools.

In 1915, for example, the U.S. Bureau of Education (the forerunner of today’s Department of Education) formally endorsed an approach called “community civics.” The Bureau’s guide for teachers named “action … as the end of all good citizenship and of all good teaching.” The guide drew the implications for pedagogy: “A lesson in community civics is not complete unless it leaves with the pupil a sense of his personal responsibility and results in right action.” As an example, students might make an

appeal … to public officials …, as, for example, in regard to the establishment of a playground. But such appeals should be made under proper supervision. The good citizen should be able to write a courteous letter to the public official. Practice in writing such letters should be given to pupils, preferably relating to actual conditions observed by the pupils, or containing practical suggestions by them.

Moreover, the manual advised, “It is sometimes desirable for the class to undertake a special piece of work of direct use to the community.” In an elaborate real example that the manual described, students were concerned about the impact of a snowstorm on their city, learned about the ordinance that required homeowners to shovel, and noted that many residents were out of compliance. The students considered various responses, including “speak[ing] personally to offenders,” but decided that would be “slightly officious and perhaps offensive to older citizens.” Finally, they created a paid snow-shoveling service that they offered to seniors.

If this example sounds like service-learning, plus social entrepreneurship, with a dose of “action civics,” that’s because it is. And it was the official recommendation of the federal government in 1915.

the new civic education article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

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(Washington, DC) I am proud to announce that a new article on “Civic Education” is online on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which is a peer-reviewed, free resource that I use regularly for a wide range of topics. Jack Crittenden originally wrote the article and did a very good job with it. At his request, I have thoroughly revised it, so that it now has two authors. Here are the philosophical questions that the article poses at the outset:

Who has the full rights and obligations of a citizen? This question is especially contested with regard to children, immigrant aliens, and individuals who have been convicted of felonies.
In what communities ought we see ourselves as citizens? The nation-state is not the only candidate; some people see themselves as citizens of local geographical communities, organizations, movements, loosely-defined groups, or even the world as a whole.
What responsibilities does a citizen of each kind of community have? Do all members of each community have the same responsibilities, or ought there be significant differences, for example, between elders and children, or between leaders and other members?
What is the relationship between a good regime and good citizenship? Aristotle held that there were several acceptable types of regimes, and each needed different kinds of citizens. That makes the question of good citizenship relative to the regime-type. But other theorists have argued for particular combinations of regime and citizen competence. For example, classical liberals endorsed regimes that would make relatively modest demands on citizens, both because they were skeptical that people could rise to higher demands and because they wanted to safeguard individual liberty against the state. Civic republicans have seen a certain kind of citizenship–highly active and deliberative–as constitutive of a good life, and therefore recommend a republican regime because it permits good citizenship.
Who may decide what constitutes good citizenship? If we consider, for example, students enrolled in public schools in the United States, should the decision about what values, habits, and capabilities they should learn belong to their parents, their teachers, the children themselves, the local community, the local or state government, or the nation-state? We may reach different conclusions when thinking about 5-year-olds and adult college students. As Sheldon Wolin warned: “…[T]he inherent danger…is that the identity given to the collectivity by those who exercise power will reflect the needs of power rather than the political possibilities of a complex collectivity” (1989, 13). For some regimes—fascist or communist, for example—this is not perceived as a danger at all but, instead, the very purpose of their forms of civic education. In democracies, the question is more complex because public institutions may have to teach people to be good democratic citizens, but they can decide to do so in ways that reinforce the power of the state and reduce freedom.
What means of civic education are ethically appropriate? It might, for example, be effective to punish students who fail to memorize patriotic statements, or to pay students for community service, but the ethics of those approaches would be controversial. An educator might engage students in open discussions of current events because of a commitment to treating them as autonomous agents, regardless of the consequences. As with other topics, the proper relationship between means and ends is contested.

school discipline in a democracy

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I recommend an important paper by Aaron Kupchik and Thomas J. Catlaw entitled “Discipline and Participation: The Long-Term Effects of Suspension and School Security on the Political and Civic Engagement of Youth.” This is the context that concerns the authors:

Since the early 1990s there have been sweeping changes in school discipline policies and practices. Schools across the U.S. have tightened their security practices and increased the punishments they give to students …. It is now common to find armed police officers, drug-sniffing dogs, surveillance cameras, and zero-tolerance policies in all types of schools and all areas of the U.S. Existing research documents several problems with these new school discipline and security practices, including: the increasing marginalization of poor students and youth of color …, unnecessary denial of future educational opportunities due to suspension and expulsion …, and increases in the numbers of students who are formally prosecuted in the juvenile and criminal justice systems (known as the “school-to-prison pipeline”) …. This body of research consistently finds large discrepancies in punishment rates between white youth and youth of color, where African American and Hispanic American students are far more likely than whites to be punished, even when controlling for self-reported rates of misbehavior.

The authors cite our work on how schools that serve low-income and minority students suppress civic engagement. They then use a federal longitudinal dataset to test the effects of school suspensions on voting once people reach early adulthood. They find a pronounced suppressive impact, which they explain as follows:

Following prior research, we speculate that the observed negative effect of suspension is because suspension short-circuits dialogue and student involvement; it removes a student from the school rather than responding constructively and therapeutically to problematic behavior. Research on suspension finds that it is administered in ways that alienate students from the school and from the school’s authority structure, leading them to view school staff as unfair, arbitrary, and uncaring.

It is possible that the most important reforms we could make to enhance civic engagement would not involve exciting new programs of civic education, but rather repealing widespread policies that suppress the political engagement of our least advantaged students.

lowering the voting age to 16

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Takoma Park, MD has lowered the voting age for municipal elections to 16. Lowell, MA, is working to allow 17-year-olds to vote, and there’s a pending bill in California that would make that change statewide.

I am in favor. Strong evidence suggests that when students are explicitly taught about voting and elections in their high school classes, they are more likely to vote and become informed voters once they reach voting age. I think schools will be more likely to teach about elections if most of their juniors are eligible to vote, and the impact of the lessons may be greater if students can put the information into practice right away.

No evidence suggests that 17-year-olds are less knowledgeable about politics or less responsible than older voters, and in fact there is the potential for current high school students to be particularly well informed because they would be studying social studies and civics around election time.

In the Washington Post, columnist Petula Dvorak has a piece entitled “Takoma Park’s new 16- and 17-year-old voters push a Cheech and Chong agenda,” in which she quotes people-on-the street saying things like, “This is the enfranchisement of Beavis and Butt-head.” Dvorak is getting lots of flack for the article and has been responding politely, so I don’t want to pile on or make her reporting the issue. But there are substantive questions here.

Like the people Dvorak interviewed, many Americans are cynical about youth as political actors. Practically every piece we publish attracts comments that mock young voters or assume a Democratic partisan agenda behind efforts to boost their engagement. Of course, if one is cynical about voters in general, that opens a worthwhile conversation. But young voters aren’t Beavis and Butt-head. Their top issues are economic. I have never seen marijuana or other behavioral issues attract significant interest as political priorities. Many (45% of the respondents in a recent Harvard poll of 18-29s) think that they lack sufficient information to vote–and they tend to disenfranchise themselves. In other words, Beavis and Butt-head will not turn out. A reform like Takoma Park’s is very unlikely to produce a mass of youth participating in local elections, but the ones who take advantage of the new right will probably be highly substantive and idealistic young people. Think of policy nerds rather than Cheech and Chong–if you have to use stereotypes at all.

In any case, it’s a worthy experiment, very well intentioned, and we will see what happens.