Category Archives: advocating civic education

Making Civics Count: new book

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Making Civics Count: Citizenship Education for a New Generation is a book co-edited by David E. Campbell, Meira Levinson, and Frederick M. Hess. The authors explore the civic development of adolescents from a variety of perspectives (they span a broad ideological spectrum but avoid predictable positions), and they consider all of the most significant subtopics, e.g., Michael Johanek on the history of civics and the traditional importance of school/community partnerships, Meira Levinson on diversity and civic education, Keith Barton on civics in ed. schools, Joe Kahne and colleagues on digital learning, Diana Hess on professional development for teachers, and Dave Campbell on private and religious schools–to name just some.

Yours truly has an argumentative chapter claiming that we’re doing OK at teaching kids about the constitution and the formal political system, but we need youth to learn how to participate in civil society.

Overall, this is the most current book on “civics” and, in my judgment, the most comprehensive and sophisticated.

Service and Activism in the Digital Age

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(In DC for a Street Law board meeting) For anyone interested in the potential of the new electronic media to enhance young people’s active citizenship, I recommend “Service & Activism in the Digital Age: Supporting Youth Engagement in Public Life,” A Digital Media and Learning Working Paper written by Ellen Middaugh with contributions by me and five colleagues/friends. Thanks to Ellen, this is an ambitious, detailed, and compellingly written report, drawing on extensive scholarship and offering numerous current examples of programs. (PDF here).

One way to summarize the report is to list four “Core Principles” that should generally guide youth civic programs, whether offline or online. For each principle, the report offers a theoretical argument, provides examples of excellent practice, explores the potential of the new electronic media, and then raises unresolved questions for research and practical experimentation

1. “Youth civic development is best supported in the culture and context of communities and movements.” (But we don’t know enough about “how to effectively use new media in building and connecting to community and movements.”)

2. “Youth civic development is best supported when youth are treated not just as future civic leaders, but also capable participants in the present.” (But we don’t know, for example, whether being young is a disadvantage in online discussions of real issues, or whether it is better to mix ages or create youth-only spaces online.)

3. “Youth civic development is best supported when youth have access to authentic learning experiences.” (But I think there is an important unresolved debate about what counts as “authentic” in an era of games and simulations.)

4. “Youth civic development requires opportunities for youth to grapple with issues of what is just and what is fair.” (But we don’t know whether typical methods, such as asking students to post videos online, contribute to rich and productive discussions.)

discussing our new YouthBuild Evaluation at the White House

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Today CIRCLE released a major new report entitled Pathways into Leadership: A Study of YouthBuild Graduates, funded by the Knight Foundation and distributed  during the White House Summit on Community Solutions for Disconnected Youth. This was the outline of my comments at the White House (although I had to truncate for time):

You know YouthBuild as a set of local programs in communities across the country that enroll high school dropouts and provide GED classes, job training, community service opportunities, and leadership development. Previous research has found good effects on the participants’ education, employment, and (for the students who had criminal records) recidivism.

We studied something different: a leadership pathway that begins in the local programs when students are asked to help manage the organization and continues at the national level for alumni who choose to participate.

When I say “we” studied it, I mean CIRCLE along with 10 YouthBuild alumni who were our co-investigators.

Surveying and interviewing alumni who were involved with the alumni programs, we found a gigantic difference between then and now.

Then: these were “disconnected youth,” outside of school of college, jobs, and civic organizations. None had high school degrees. Most struggled with violence and depression. Half expected to die before age 30, many before age 25.

Now: these are civic leaders. Some hold public office or serve as pastors. About one third are professional youth workers. All expect to live to a ripe old age and feel they have a lifetime of service to contribute. They are optimistic, satisfied, and dedicated. “I’m important to me community and my community is important to me … I build everything off that premise” is how one person summarized things.

We draw two lessons:

  1. Leading and serving others is integrally connected to succeeding and flourishing in life
  2. To lead and serve requires opportunities that must be deliberately built and maintained, and very few organizations other than YouthBuild are building those opportunities for disconnected youth.

Fault Lines in Our Democracy (ETS report)

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Today the Educational Testing Service released a major new report entitled Fault Lines in Our Democracy, along with a website that provides videos and other ancillary materials.

Youth civic engagement and civic knowledge are crucial issues, and it is great that the ETS has issued a prominent report.

Their analysis in the report itself is accurate and rigorous. For full disclosure: I consulted on an earlier draft.

The framing, especially of the press release, is very negative: “Dismal Civics Knowledge Linked to Decline in Voting, Volunteering Among Young.” That’s not wrong, but the glass is half-full as well as half-empty. The statement about  “dismal” knowledge relies on the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) in civics, on whose design committee I have served. The NAEP’s cutoffs for “advanced” and “proficient” are essentially arbitrary, so it is not a fact that most youth lack proficiency; it  is a value-judgment. If you look closely at performance on particular questions, you will see that young people often perform quite well. For example, in 2010, 74 percent of 12th graders could identify the main ruling of Schenk v United States (1919) when given a quotation from the Supreme Court to analyze. Also, the NAEP mainly measures understanding of constitutional law and formal politics, not current events, social issues, or local affairs. Current-events knowledge is what predicts voting, and NAEP doesn’t measure that. Finally, it’s odd to lead in the press release with “declines” in voting and volunteering when both have risen in the past decade. But the negative framing is stronger in the press materials than in the report–and the report does identify real problems with civic knowledge and engagement.

Above all, we endorse the report’s emphasis on unequal civic knowledge and engagement. Average levels are not necessarily bad, but there are gigantic gaps in participation and knowledge by race and social class. These gaps reflect differences in opportunities to learn about politics, which CIRCLE has studied in depth.

[this entry cross-posted on the CIRCLE website]

education and research for democracy need not be democratic

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Moving in the circles that I do, I often hear claims that education for democracy must be democratic–and that research that serves citizens must be conducted in collaboration with citizens. These views reflect some wisdom and experience, but they are not logical truths.

Many leaders have been deliberately prepared in disciplined, authoritarian educational settings to serve democracies. Consider, for example, how Martin Luther King Jr. portrayed his father:

Martin Luther King, Sr., is as strong in his will as he is in his body. He has a dynamic personality, and his very physical presence (weighing about 220 pounds) commands attention. He has always been a very strong and self-confident person … He never hesitates to tell the truth and speak his mind, however cutting it may be. This quality of frankness has often caused people to actually fear him. I have had young and old alike say to me, “I’m scared to death of your dad.” Indeed, he is stern at many points.

I assume this portrait was a bit euphemistic, because the elder King was very much alive to read it. “Daddy King” was not one for engaging children as equals in democratic discussions, yet he set MLK Jr. on a path to genuine democratic leadership.

I am inclined to think that the Venn diagram for democratic education looks like this (below). “Education for democracy” is any practice that increases the odds that children will turn into active, ethical, and effective members of communities. “Education that is democratic” is any pedagogy that emphasizes students’ voice in choosing topics, debating issues, and making things together. The two circles overlap in practices like “Action Civics,” which have been frequently found effective. But there can be good education for democracy that isn’t democratic (see “Daddy King,” above), and some democratic education doesn’t produce good citizens. That can be because it isn’t sufficiently political or because it simply isn’t good–kids waste their time.

Likewise, I think the Venn diagram for research looks like this (below). “Knowledge of value to citizens” means knowledge that we can use to improve the world. For example, a cure for cancer would be excellent, but it would not be useful for citizens unless it gave us something to do. Meanwhile, “knowledge produced collaboratively by citizens” includes the fruits of practices such as Participatory Action Research, Community Based Participatory Research, Popular Education, etc. Professors may be central players in this work, but they act as peers of fellow citizens.

Again, knowledge of value to citizens need not be produced collaboratively by citizens. Game theory, for example, has yielded many insights about how small groups work most effectively. Citizens should learn from game theory even though they did not co-produce it. Meanwhile, some knowledge produced collaboratively by citizens is not useful to citizens, because the results are incorrect, or partial, or too narrow and instrumental.

I happen to love the overlapping parts of these two Venn diagrams. At CIRCLE, we are completing a year-long and very ambitious evaluation of YouthBuild USA that we conducted with YouthBuild alumni as our co-investigators. My favorite educational programs use democratic pedagogies. But I do not assume that the circles above coincide, so that democratic education and research are always and exclusively valuable for citizens.

Rather, the core reason for my preference is ethical and pertains to means, not ends. I would rather treat children democratically (unless that actively harms their life prospects) because I think they deserve such treatment in the present. Likewise, I would rather treat a community partner as a co-investigator than a research subject because we are moral equals in the Kingdom of Ends. But I think the empirical questions–whether and when democratic processes yield good democratic outcomes–deserve more critical attention.