Monthly Archives: May 2012

Fault Lines in Our Democracy (ETS report)

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]

diversity arguments in education depend on learning as collaboration

Why might you favor racial and gender diversity in education?

  1. As a matter of distributive justice. Places in colleges or universities convey political and economic advantage. Thus you may think they should be distributed equitably with regard to race and gender. To reach this conclusion, you may have to criticize other rationales for distributing places in college, such as arguments that grades and test scores reflect relevant merit or dessert.
  2. To obtain desirable social outcomes later. You may believe, for example, that we will be much better off as a society if we have plenty of Latino doctors, female police officers, and African American lawyers, which requires distributing places in college equitably.
  3. Because learning requires deliberation (or the construction of knowledge together), and deliberation requires diversity, and race and gender contribute valuable diversity of perspective.

Setting policy based on the first or second argument has been pretty much barred by the Supreme Court. These are also unpopular arguments because they appear to be zero-sum. If someone else’s kid deserves a place in college, that implies that my kid may have to give it up.

The third argument offers an appealing alternative. It presumes that colleges and universities are communities that engage their members (students, staff, and faculty) in producing knowledge together and in shaping common values.

I think the typical view of the liberal arts is quite different: the student learns skills or ideas from the material (e.g., from great books) and from the professor, who is also paid to create knowledge. Other students are basically competitors for the professor’s time, which is why student/faculty ratios are so often cited as measures of quality. Education is understood as modular: you learn ideas or skills from each course–actually from each reading or lecture. That is why there is so much enthusiasm now for online and “distance” learning, and it’s why students and families are OK with transferring from one college to another until they have accumulated enough credits to graduate.

The vast majority of college students do not get anything like a deliberative liberal  education. They sit in gigantic lecture classes, they commute to large and defuse public institutions where they are anonymous, they interrupt their college careers to work (picking up credits over time), and they study vocational fields. One conclusion might be that many more people need to be offered real liberal arts educations in diverse learning communities. But another conclusion might be that this is really an elite opportunity, and therefore the third argument for diversity (above) is irrelevant to most people. The demographic composition of the student body is not particularly helpful for an individual’s learning if that person studies accounting at the University of Phoenix or even chemistry in a big lecture class.

A liberal arts education based on deliberation and collaboration is expensive. Few Americans have experienced it, and its benefits are relatively intangible. So unless people come to understand learning as collective and deliberative, they aren’t going to pay for a residential liberal arts education (either through tuition or taxes). Nor will they accept the argument that learning requires diversity. A diversity agenda in higher ed will look like a mere matter of redistributing scarce resources. This is why the fundamental argument has to be about the collaborative nature of learning and of knowledge itself.

the insidious impact of felon disenfranchisement

Jeff Manza and Christopher Uggen (2006) estimated that 5.3 million citizens were ineligible to vote on Election Day in 2004 because of felony convictions. This number had increased rapidly since 1980, mainly because of rapid growth in felony convictions. About one quarter of the felony-disenfranchised in 2004 were incarcerated; the rest had formerly been imprisoned but were now living in communities. A disproportionate number were African American men; in fact, five states had disqualified more than 20 percent of their Black populations (pp. 76-79).

Several studies find that these laws depress the turnout of people who were never convicted of felonies, especially African Americans, in part by reducing the amount of election-related activity in their communities (McLeod, White & Gavin 2003; Bowers, M., & Preuhs, 2009).

These are the results of policy choices, which vary widely. Maine and Vermont have no felony disenfranchisement provisions, but “possession of an ounce of marijuana can result in lifetime disenfranchisement in Florida” (Manza and Uggen, 2006, p. 9). (RespectmyVote.com has a list of the states where you get your right to vote back, because people with criminal convictions in their past shouldn’t refrain from voting out of a misunderstanding.)

Voting is a pro-social act. You don’t get want you want by voting (because too many other people also participate), but you do get to say what you think is best for the community. Ex-felons who choose to vote are surely taking a step toward rehabilitation. Blocking them from voting not only deprives them of a fundamental right but may also discourage them from becoming constructive members of their communities.

 references

  • Bowers, M., & Preuhs, R. R. (2009). Collateral consequences of a collateral penalty: The negative effect of felon disenfranchisement laws on the political participation of nonfelons, Social Science Quarterly, 90(3), 722-743.
  • Manza, J., & Uggen, C. (2006). Locked out: felon disenfranchisement and American democracy: Oxford U Press.
  • McLeod, A., White, I. K., & Gavin, A. R. (2003). The locked ballot box: The impact of state criminal disenfranchisement law on african american voting behavior and implications for reform. Virginia Journal of Social Policy & the Law, 11, 66-88.

China teaches the value of political pluralism

When today’s middle-aged Chinese citizens were young, the People’s Republic was a gigantic experiment in egalitarianism, anti-capitalism, anti-consumerism, and opposition to Western imperialism. One of its core values was unending “people’s war”: a “revolutionary struggle of the vast majority of people against the exploiting classes and their state structures.” Today, the same Communist Party still rules. There was never a specific economic crisis or meltdown, and China was never seriously threatened from overseas.  The Party’s leadership cadres have turned over with relatively little violence or stress. Yet the children of the heads of the still-ruling Party are now “princelings”:

Jiang Mianheng, the 61-year-old son of Jiang Zemin, the former Communist Party leader and the most powerful political kingmaker of China’s last two decades [has undertaken] ventures with Microsoft and Nokia and [oversees] a clutch of state-backed investment vehicles that have major interests in telecommunications, semiconductors and construction projects. …

Wen Yunsong, the son of Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, heads a state-owned company that boasts that it will soon be Asia’s largest satellite communications operator.

President Hu Jintao’s son, Hu Haifeng, once managed a state-controlled firm that held a monopoly on security scanners used in China’s airports, shipping ports and subway stations.

And in 2006, Feng Shaodong, the son-in-law of Wu Bangguo, the party’s second-ranking official, helped Merrill Lynch win a deal to arrange the $22 billion public listing of the giant state-run bank I.C.B.C., in what became the world’s largest initial public stock offering.

This is a powerful reminder that ideologies, laws, explicit principles, and cultural norms mean only so much. If one party rules and no one can challenge its political control, it is bound to turn into a kleptocracy. Even cynics might be taken aback by the speed and scale of this particular transformation, but the pattern is general. That’s why, even if your political opponents really outrage you, you should be glad they exist.

what’s good about Americans Elect

I have been very quiet about Americans Elect, the organization that obtained open lines on the presidential ballot in 29 states, reserving those spots for whomever its members chose as nominees for president and vice president.

On the one hand, I disagree with several aspects of the organization’s diagnosis and strategy. On the other hand, their leaders were kind enough to meet with me early in the process to discuss youth participation, and my lengthy discussion with them gave me confidence in their motives and made me doubt the most hostile attacks. Yet I couldn’t really rebut those charges except by citing a superficial personal relationship, which needn’t persuade anyone else.

Now that they have decided not to field a nominee, I feel more free to comment.

One take on Americans Elect is that they want to be a moderate alternative to the polarized Democrats and Republicans. I happen to believe that the national Democratic Party is a moderately conservative one, that there is little daylight between the two parties, and that the only space left between them should be filled by the Republican Party itself, once its moderates strengthen their hand. So I am uninterested in building a centrist third party. On the other hand, the Americans Elect website does not prominently cite either moderation or centrism, and its leaders emphasized to me that their ticket could be taken by, for example, a Democrat and a Green. They required that the two nominees come from different parties, but not necessarily one from the left and one from the right.

Another read of Americans Elect is that they wanted to offer voters an alternative because both major parties had failed. That is closer to their own rhetoric and I don’t completely disagree with it. The problem is tactical. In a close presidential reelection race like the one we face in 2012, a third party is just a spoiler. Anyone who votes for the third-party candidate is actually helping Obama or Romney but cannot know which one. That is the opposite of empowering; it means giving up your vote for a random draw. A case can be made for greater political pluralism, but a close presidential reelection campaign is the worst time to add a third choice.

A different interpretation is what the leaders stressed to me. They argued that the major parties’ nominating systems are corrupt and broken. Why, after all, should one state vote at a time, starting with two almost entirely white and heavily rural states, and reaching California and New York well after the contest is over? Why should you have to vote on one particular day but register a month before? Why should the “money primary” (the race for private funding) be so important?

By getting on the ballot in 29 states and promising an entirely different nominating process (online, deliberative, simultaneous), Americans Elect reminded us that alternatives are possible. Our political system is the oldest in the world and is now sclerotic and corrupt. We take things like the parties’ nominating systems for granted when those are eminently changeable.

The main reason Americans Elect failed to field a candidate was the unwillingness of serious contenders to participate. Some presumably preferred either Obama or Romney and didn’t want to play a spoiler role. Others were put off by the prospect of a national race that would require half a billion dollars to be reasonably competitive. The campaign finance system of the general election is beyond the control of Americans Elect and represents a very serious obstacle to decent politics. But the experiment did remind us that our existing national parties could completely change their own nominating processes. At this point, the question is: Why don’t they?