I’ll be spending today at a meeting of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, a broad coalition that includes businesses and the teachers’ unions. The meeting began last night with some speeches about the need to increase math and science skills in the face of global economic competition. I’ll be sticking up for civic skills, which are already included in the Partnership’s list but could be overlooked.

My friends Lew Friedland and Shauna Morimoto have published a new CIRCLE working paper (pdf) that ought to interest a broad audience. Friedland and Morimoto found that anxiety about college admissions is a major aspect of adolescents? lives, affecting almost all students, from those on the honor roll to ones who are having trouble staying in high school. This anxiety is so pervasive that it cannot be separated from other motives that are driving youth to volunteer in record numbers. In other words, young people do not simply volunteer in order to get into college, but that goal is so central to their lives, and so fraught with apprehension, that it colors and shapes all their choices. To a disturbing degree, they cannot articulate other values or purposes of the volunteering that they do.

Because our business is youth civic engagement, we have packaged this working paper as an exploration of service in high schools. But it could be read in a much broader sociological context. The German sociologist Ulrich Beck–whom, unfortunately, I have not yet read–argues that risk has been individualized. People individually bear the long-term consequences of their performance at each stage of their lives, including early adolescence. Families, communities, and associations no longer protect them as much as they used to. For “high-performing” students, including those who are female or members of racial minorities, opportunities have probably improved. But the obverse of opportunity is risk. There are serious disadvantages to raising young people under circumstances of high (perceived) risk, even if they have a chance to obtain excellent outcomes through hard work. One disadvantage of individualized risk is a kind of hollowing-out of adolescence, as activities that should be deeply satisfying become merely instrumental. Volunteering is just an example. Learning, athletics, and religious participation can also lose their intrinsic significance if students feel they must “perform” at optimal levels at all times in order to maximize their economic opportunities.

I went to Capitol Hill yesterday to hear a panel on America’s Children: Key National Indicators of Well-Being 2005. This is a remarkable document, produced jointly by many federal agencies, that gives a detailed (if incomplete) picture of the state of children over the last 25 years.

In the audience and at a lunch event were several distinguished psychologists who have pioneered the field of positive youth development. They argue that we too often view adolescence as a period of great danger and difficulty. Thus we measure success as the absence of serious problems, such as criminality and violence, pregnancy, accidents, disease, and educational failure. The goal of parents and governments alike is to get our kids safely through to their twenties.

Adolescence is potentially a great time of life, when people can learn, socialize, expand their horizons, create, and serve others. But we tend not to measure the rate at which teenagers have such positive experiences, and we certainly don’t organize public policy to maximize positive opportunities. Of course, advocates of positive youth development want to reduce the incidence of teenage crime, disease, and other bad things. But they argue that we will get better results if we put resources into supporting positive activities, rather than preventing and punishing misbehavior. Clearly, this idea has a political valence. Liberals often want to spend money on arts programs and service-learning, and conservatives want more police. Nevertheless, the evidence for positive youth development is not merely ideological and should stand on its own.

There is a parallel–often noted by practitioners in the two fields–between positive youth development and asset-based community development, about which I have written before.

When we think of “accountability” in education, we usually envision standards (written by school systems, states, or the federal government), combined with measures to see if schools are meeting those standards–e.g., exam results, graduation rates, per/pupil spending, and teachers’ qualifications. This is “external” accountability: it comes from outside of each school. Most people think such pressure is necessary and appropriate. Schools are public institutions, so they should be accountable to the public through its elected representatives. Besides, there must be some device for keeping educators honest and up-to-speed. The main alternative to external accountability is market discipline (i.e., letting parents decide which schools are working best). There may be a place for some market discipline in education, but it has severe limitations. Thus legally-mandated standards and tests seem necessary.

However, “external” standards demonstrate a lack of trust for teachers. I know from the experience and testimony of friends and close relatives who are classroom teachers that this lack of trust is hard to accept, especially when a person is a good educator and the standards and exams are at least partly foolish (as they tend to be). Moreover, “external” accountability measures are always blunt or crude, whether they are used in business, medicine, education, or any field. Any such measures will apply unjustly or inappropriately in certain particular circumstances. And if people want to resist them, they can–by shifting blame, “working to rule,” or even cheating.

Therefore, we shouldn’t forget about “internal” accountability. For example, a good teacher feels that she doesn’t want to let her kids down or disappoint their parents, her peers, or her principal. “Internal” accountability is also what drives really successful students. It’s not the grade they care about, ultimately, but what their teacher and parents think about their work.

So the question becomes: How can we increase “internal” accountability in schools? Some promising ideas: —

Today is CIRCLE‘s event at the National Press Club on the civic potential of the “small schools” movement. In all, thousands of new high schools are being created in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and other big cities. In addition to being small, they tend to have a strong sense of internal community, connections to outside organizations, and coherent curricular “themes,” so that a whole school may be devoted to science and technology, or community service, or Asian studies. (This means that students have more choice among schools but less choice once they enroll in a particular building). We’re going to hear from former Gov. Bob Wise, various experts, educators, and students about the potential civic advantages of these schools. C-SPAN is planning to cover the whole day, but I don’t know when their tape will air (and they have a tendency to change plans if breaking news develops elsewhere). Click below for more details about the day.

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