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!

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.

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.

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]