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.

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.”

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.

Today, CIRCLE released our study entitled “That’s Not Democracy. How Out-of-School Youth Engage in Civic Life and What Stands in Their Way.” It’s really the fruit of several years’ work, including focus groups and survey analysis.

The study documents the deep sense of alienation experienced by working-class young adults in an era when the organizations that traditionally organized and engaged them–unions, churches, grassroots political parties, and metropolitan daily newspapers–are  shattered, and national leaders generally ignore their concerns.

On the positive side, it shows that they discuss political issues, perhaps with more intensity than their college-bound peers, and they want to engage, especially on behalf of the children in their households and neighborhoods. It’s a bookend to our major study of YouthBuild USA, which found that when young people from similar backgrounds are recruited and encouraged to be leaders, they thrive. The implication from putting the two studies together is clear: invest in working class young adults!