(Washington, DC) Today, I will be meeting with students and staff of the Chavez Schools in DC. This blog shows that I have visited before–in February and April 2003. The Chavez network has since grown to four schools and 1,300 students. Its founder, Irasema Salcido, not only wanted to provide an excellent education for DC students by engaging them in the critical study of public policy; she also wanted to improve DC’s governance by developing a new generation of mostly minority leaders who had the skills and motivations to run the city. It was an inspiring vision from the start, and the early outcomes were impressive. I look forward to catching up.

See also my posts on Charter Schools and Democracy, The Argument for Small Schools, and Illumination from the Charter Debate–and especially a great series of case studies and policy briefs on “teaching citizenship in charter schools,” from the AEI Program in American Citizenship.

Today I am traveling from Boston to DC to speak and then on to Atlanta for the American Association of Colleges & Universities meeting. In DC, I will present some information about youth political participation. CIRCLE is busy collecting and assembling data for the Commission on Youth Voting and Civic Knowledge that we have formed. The Commission will deliberate and come up with its own conclusions, but some basic premises are already clear.

First, with support from the S.D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation, we have collected and coded all state laws and policies relevant to civic education. Most states have civics requirements, but I would say that none has a system of assessment that supports and encourages good teaching. The few states that have high-stakes civics tests rely almost exclusively on multiple-choice questions about facts.

Then, during the election, we conducted two waves of a national Knowledge Networks youth survey that tracked young people’s opinions on issues and their degree of engagement with the campaign. Perhaps the most salient finding for the Commission is that most young people did not know the pertinent election laws in their own states. This is a summary of the poll.

On the day after the election, we calculated youth turnout (50%) and followed that with some additional analysis of the available turnout statistics. These CIRCLE posts summarize some interesting headlines:

• At least 80 electoral votes depended on youth
• Youth on issues, difference from older voters
• Youth vote by gender and race
• Gap in turnout by educational attainment

We also tried a very quick-and-dirty method for investigating the relationships between state laws and turnout . We looked at whether states that had changed their civic education policies or voting laws also saw changes in youth turnout. There were no real signs of a relationship, which points to some interesting challenges that I will return to below. (See our quick analysis of state voting laws and state education laws.)

Starting immediately after the election, with funds from the Spencer Foundation, we surveyed 4,483 young Americans, ages 18-24, with large African American and Latino oversamples and a minimum of 75 respondents in each state. This was a random-digit telephone survey, reaching cell phones and landlines and conducted in Spanish or English.

We will use the results to build a multivariate model in which state policies, state political factors, young people’s demographics and backgrounds, and their civic experiences (both in and out of school) are used to predict their turnout and their knowledge of politics.

We already know from our initial analysis that both knowledge and voting are strongly correlated with whether individuals recall civic education experiences that we would define as “high quality.” That correlation is not adjusted (yet) for other factors, such as socioeconomic advantage or community-level differences. It is well known that advantaged students receive better civic education, so the apparent impact of civics may diminish once we incorporate controls. Nevertheless, we thought the correlations were noteworthy. At the least, we know that students who become active citizens typically have experienced better-than-average civic education in school.

Additional research for the Commission includes a literature review (already released), a planned national survey of civics/government teachers, and interviews with stakeholders that will be conducted “on the record” so that they can inform the final report.

Speaking just for myself (and welcoming debate), I would hypothesize that high-quality civic education and being contacted by political campaigns and movements both boost young people’s knowledge and engagement to a meaningful extent. However, existing state laws related to civic education and voting do not seem to affect the rate at which these positive experiences occur, at least not to an impressive degree. It is possible that deeper analysis will reveal important differences in current state laws and policies. But it is also possible that existing state laws don’t vary enough or are all too poorly designed to provide models that deserve to be replicated. If no existing state laws are impressive, we may need to think about other levers (not just state laws) and about research-based proposals for entirely new laws and policies.

Today, CIRCLE released the results of a randomized experiment using a computer-based teaching module called Drafting Board, from the nonprofit organization iCivics. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor founded iCivics to improve civic education through video games and related products.

Drafting Board is not exactly a game; it’s a computer-based lesson that takes students through the steps of writing an argumentative essay. It includes tools like the Issue Analyzer, the Claim Creator, and the Critic Crusher.

We conducted a study in urban Florida schools, involving 3,700 students. About half were randomly assigned to use Drafting Board; the rest used their regular curricula. Afterwards, every student hand-wrote an additional argumentative essay in the form of a letter to their school newspaper regarding a hypothetical proposal to lengthen the school year. Graduate students at Tufts graded all the papers, blind to whether the students had used Drafting Board or not. Those who had used it scored considerably better on the essays, despite the fact that they had used Drafting Board for only 2-3 sessions, and even though the students in the treatment group happened to be less advantaged than those in the control group.

I consider this study a double win for civic education. First, it establishes the quality of an iCivics’ product, and iCivics is a valuable player in the field. Second, the outcome–writing a persuasive essay on a policy issue–is itself a civic achievement.

Please see please see Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg, “Summary of Findings from the Evaluation of iCivics’ Drafting Board Intervention,” CIRCLE Working Paper #76 (2012).

(Providence, RI) I am here for several meetings. Right now I am with members of Young Voices, a statewide organization that involves teenagers in research and advocacy on school reform. The organization’s homepage displays lots of examples of the members’ formal testimony before state and local boards and committees. Of the 20 young people with me today, almost half have given such testimony. They are practicing how to write and deliver testimony right now, as part of their Leadership Transformation Academy (LTA). They also conduct impressive research on the climate and policies of their schools. Participating with Young Voices is a powerful learning experience for the kids (who are poised and effective–and quick to engage me as an adult visitor); but even more promising is the program’s impact on the school systems of the state.