Category Archives: advocating civic education

CIRCLE in the news

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(Woods Hole, MA) With our new report on civic education published recently–and the election coming up–we have been in the news a lot lately. Here’s a sampling of recent coverage:

Nora Fleming, Out of School Engagement in Civic Education and the 2012 Election, Education Week, 10/10/2012 (interview format)

Education Week: And in the future? Is there more interest now in early engagement around elections, politics, and civic life than in the past?

Peter Levine: It’s a mixed picture. I think more organizations and individuals are concerned about these issues and doing their best to help. I think some of the new strategies are very innovative and promising, such as the use of computer simulations to teach politics. On the other hand, as our new study shows, states have cut back a lot on civics requirements, and social studies tests have shifted to exclusively multiple-choice. Neither No Child Left Behind nor Race to the Top did anything positive for civics. So policies have been unhelpful.

Nora Fleming,  Civic Education Found Lacking in Most States, Education Week, 10/10/2012

“The standards in most states include some high aspirations, but typically have nothing to do with assessments. The standards are miscellaneous, the assessments are lacking, and when they are high stakes, they are trivial,” Levine said. “I think in a big, deep way, civics and preparation for citizenship has been left out by policymakers, who think in terms of preparation for college and for a difficult labor market but don’t think of civics as part of this.”

Amelia Woodside, Parenting young voters: There’s still time in this election season, Christian Science Monitor, 10/12/2012

“Young people age 18-29 are a large bloc of 46 million eligible voters, larger than the senior population, and they tilted sharply in favor of Obama in 2008,” writes Peter Levine, director of The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) & Lincoln Filene Professor of Citizenship & Public Affairs at Tufts University in an e-mail interview. “If their turnout is much lower, or if Mitt Romney controls more of their votes than John McCain did in 2008, that could have a substantial effect on the outcome. In 2008, if young voters had not supported Obama, he would have lost Indiana, North Carolina, and Virginia.”

Steven Yacino, Colleges Take a Leap Into Voter Registration, The New York Times 10/13/2012

Roughly 11 million eligible voters ages 18 to 24 are in college, about a quarter of all eligible young voters, according to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University.

Zoë Carpenter, The Missing Millenials, The Nation, 10/17/2012

The public discussion about millennial turnout has focused on educated voters like Amber rather than her sisters. “The media talks about college students as if they’re all young people, and all young people are college students,” CIRCLE’s Peter Levine says. “And that contributes to the fact that noncollege youth are overlooked.” Voter registration and turnout are strongly correlated with education, and about 42 percent of the current youth population has never been to college. However, studies show that when undereducated youth are registered to vote, they do so at rates similar to nearly every other group. It’s the classic chicken-or-the-egg problem: campaigns don’t target poor and uneducated voters because they’re considered “low potency,” while those populations are less likely to vote because they aren’t engaged by the campaigns. The destruction of institutional networks in poor neighborhoods has further increased their distance from the electoral process. Older generations left high school, joined unions and worked in organized workplaces such as factories. They read newspapers and went to church. That is no longer the case, according to Levine: “They’re on their own in a way that is unprecedented.”

Fawn Johnson, Growing Young Voters (Without Boring Them), National Journal (online)  10/22/2012

If the casual mention of a high school social studies class makes your eyes glaze over, you aren’t alone. The stereotype of the throw-away, easy A class taught by the football coach is there for a reason.

But you also aren’t thinking about civics the way that education scholar Peter Levine thinks you should. “In 1948, 41 percent of American kids took a class called Problems of Democracy. It was reading the newspaper and discussing the issues and writing papers about it, which is pretty much what I would want to happen. …It’s basically gone now,” said Levine, who runs the civic engagement organization CIRCLE.

Levine worries a lot about how kids learn to become citizens. He says schools aren’t teaching them about civics in any consistent or meaningful way. CIRCLE’s research on government curriculum finds that all states require some form of social studies, but most states don’t test on it and those that do use the cheapest multiple-choice tests.

Also:

reforming civic education

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In lieu of a substantive blog post here today, I’d like to invite people to read my Huffington Post essay entitled “What We Need to Do About Civic Education” (and, if you are so moved, to like it or share it there, because that boosts its placement.) The HuffPost also ran a news article on our research entitled “Civics Education Testing Only Required In 9 States For High School Graduation: CIRCLE Study.”

I begin my piece:

Whether and how well we teach civics are important questions, especially in the midst of an election campaign in which millions of Americans are being asked to sort through complicated issues and navigate an increasingly difficult voting process.

We found recently that 68 percent of young people didn’t know whether their state required a photo ID to vote, and 80 percent of the young people didn’t know their state’s early registration rules. Other news reports have raised the question of whether citizens understand broader issues. In the New York Times online (Sept. 23), Thomas B. Edsall quoted a Romney supporter who explained why President Obama might win that state: “People are stupid. … [Governments] eliminated civics from our curriculum. The students don’t know about civics, they don’t know about our history, our government, our constitution.”

I note that, contrary to popular belief, states do still require some civics. But the civics course comes late–often just one semester in senior year of high school–and the content is  not aligned to worthwhile tests or assessments.

That means that a student preparing for a civics test (if there is a test) may have to memorize how many votes it takes to overcome a veto or which house of Congress must originate revenue bills. That is useful information if you want to assess a president or influence Congress, but it has no value if it is simply stored in short-term memory and the student doesn’t see how to apply it. A multiple-choice exam is a poor tool for assessing advanced knowledge or the application of knowledge to complex situations, let alone students’ abilities to work together in groups.

Many states make lofty statements about civic skills and virtues in their standards (which are official regulations), but since the standards are unaligned with assessments, they mean little.

major CIRCLE study of state policies for civics

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Yesterday, we released a study of all the states’ standards, course requirements, and tests related to civic education. The American Enterprise Institute’s Program on American Citizenship says, “New CIRCLE Research Confirms: Civic Education Lacking in Most States.” The Washington Examiner is pithier: “Civics Cuckoos: Only 9 states require high schoolers pass civics.” Nora Fleming, in Ed Week, quotes me for a summary:

“The standards in most states include some high aspirations, but typically have nothing to do with assessments. The standards are miscellaneous, the assessments are lacking, and when they are high stakes, they are trivial,” Levine said. “I think in a big, deep way, civics and preparation for citizenship has been left out by policymakers, who think in terms of preparation for college and for a difficult labor market but don’t think of civics as part of this.”

Over at “Voices for Education” (the blog of Harvard Education publishing), I make an argument for the kind of civic education we need. I will have a longer Huffington Post editorial up pretty soon with a different version of the argument. [Update; it’s here.]

Nora Fleming also uses the study as a springboard for a second piece in which she describes Mikva Challenge as an example of good programming; see “Out of School Engagement in Civic Education and the 2012 Election.”

do we teach civics anymore?

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In the New York Times online (Sept. 23), Thomas B. Edsall quotes a Romney supporter who explains why Obama may win that state: “People are stupid. … [Governments] eliminated civics from our curriculum. The students don’t know about civics, they don’t know about our history, our government, our constitution.” The mega-blogger Atrios asks whether it’s true that civics has been eliminated, and Kevin Drum thinks not, heading his blog post, “Civics is Alive and Well in American High Schools.”

This is an empirical question (a matter of fact), and a relatively full analysis is coming very soon from CIRCLE. We are at the proofreading and layout stage of a study that investigates all the standards, course requirements, and tests for civics and government in the 5o states plus DC. I do not want to scoop our findings, but my previous writing on this topic has already disclosed a major theme: We do still teach–and require–civics, but how we define and assess the subject is not satisfactory if we are trying to produce active and responsible participants in civil society.

how to teach Sept. 11

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My post for the day is over at CNN. It’s entitled “My View: How schools should handle 9/11 in class,” and it begins:

I can vividly remember September 11, 2001, but today’s fifth-graders were not even born on that day. For them, September 11 is history – and often, a topic in their history class. Most teachers use best-selling civics and American history textbooks that describe the attacks on New York and Washington. And as of last fall, 21 states specifically mentioned 9/11 in their social studies standards.

Those are results from a scan of state laws and textbooks conducted by William & Mary professor Jeremy Stoddard and University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Diana Hess. My organization, CIRCLE, published its study last year.  The authors tell me that not much has changed since then.

When we released the study, many readers expressed dismay that September 11 was mentioned in less than half of the states’ standards – as if that meant that policymakers and educators did not care enough about terrorism. When lawmakers are concerned about any topic, they are often tempted to add it to the state’s social studies standards. The Illinois Legislature, for instance, has passed bills requiring or encouraging social studies teachers to spend time on Leif Erickson, the Irish Potato Famine and the importance of trees and birds. So why not mandate teaching 9/11?

[…]

The most important back-to-school question about September 11 is not whether to require it in standards, but how to address it if teachers decide to discuss it at all. …