Monthly Archives: June 2013

activist forms of civic education are traditional

(Washington, DC) One of my refrains is that we have not recently invented the idea that students can learn to be citizens by practicing citizenship. That is a traditional concept, rooted in Aristotle, de Tocqueville, Mill, and other theorists, but, more importantly, built on deep and continuous experience in schools.

In 1915, for example, the U.S. Bureau of Education (the forerunner of today’s Department of Education) formally endorsed an approach called “community civics.” The Bureau’s guide for teachers named “action … as the end of all good citizenship and of all good teaching.” The guide drew the implications for pedagogy: “A lesson in community civics is not complete unless it leaves with the pupil a sense of his personal responsibility and results in right action.” As an example, students might make an

appeal … to public officials …, as, for example, in regard to the establishment of a playground. But such appeals should be made under proper supervision. The good citizen should be able to write a courteous letter to the public official. Practice in writing such letters should be given to pupils, preferably relating to actual conditions observed by the pupils, or containing practical suggestions by them.

Moreover, the manual advised, “It is sometimes desirable for the class to undertake a special piece of work of direct use to the community.” In an elaborate real example that the manual described, students were concerned about the impact of a snowstorm on their city, learned about the ordinance that required homeowners to shovel, and noted that many residents were out of compliance. The students considered various responses, including “speak[ing] personally to offenders,” but decided that would be “slightly officious and perhaps offensive to older citizens.” Finally, they created a paid snow-shoveling service that they offered to seniors.

If this example sounds like service-learning, plus social entrepreneurship, with a dose of “action civics,” that’s because it is. And it was the official recommendation of the federal government in 1915.

how to reach a large scale with high-quality messages

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(Washington, DC) This post–cross-posted on the Democracy Fund blog—is the third in a series about CIRCLE’s evaluations of the Fund’s initiatives to inform and engage voters during the 2012 election. These posts discuss issues of general interest that emerged from our specific evaluations. The previous entries in the series are: “Educating Voters in a Time of Political Polarization” and “Supporting a Beleaguered News Industry.” Join CIRCLE for discussion of the posts using the hashtag #ChangeTheDialogue, as well as a live chat on Tuesday, June 25th at 2pm ET/1pm CT/11am PT.

Since 2012, the Democracy Fund has invested in projects and experiments intended to inform and engage voters. Several of these efforts sought to change the way citizens respond to divisive and deceptive rhetoric. To succeed, an organization would have to (1) create an experience that altered people’s skills, attitudes, and/or habits, and (2) reach a mass audience.

In this post we focus on the second issue: scale. Since adults cannot be compelled to undergo civic education, and about 241 million Americans were eligible to vote in 2012, engaging citizens in sufficient numbers to improve a national election is challenging. Democracy Fund grantees used at least four different strategies to reach mass audiences with nonpartisan education.

First, the Healthy Democracy Fund’s Citizens Initiative Reviews convened representative groups of citizens to deliberate about pending state ballot initiatives in Oregon. The citizens’ panels wrote summaries of these ballot initiatives that the state then mailed to all voters as part of the Oregon voter guide. Although only 48 people were directly involved in the deliberations, the results of their discussions reached hundreds of thousands of Oregon voters. Penn State Professor John Gastil found that nearly half of Oregon voters were aware of the statements that these deliberators had written and that a significant portion of the voting public found the statements to be useful. In an experiment that Gastil conducted, citizens who read the statements shifted their views substantially and showed evidence of learning. So, in this case, a small-scale exercise in deliberative democracy led to mass public education.

Second, Flackcheck.org produced videos ridiculing deceptive campaign ads. The videos were free, online, and meant to be funny. A major reason to use parody and humor was to increase the odds that viewers would voluntarily share the videos with their friends and relatives. We asked a representative sample of Americans what would generally encourage them to share a political video, and 39% said that they would be more likely to share it if it was funny. The only attribute that attracted more support was the importance of the topic. We also asked respondents to watch one of three Flackcheck parody videos, and 37% thought the one they saw was funny, although 20% did not.

In the end, the Flackcheck parody videos attracted some 800,000 views. That is a relatively large number, although a small proportion of the electorate. On a subcontract from CIRCLE, Marc Smith is analyzing the dissemination network created by the sharing of Flackcheck videos online. Below are shown the people and organizations that follow Flackcheck’s Twitter account and their mutual connections. It is a substantial online community.

Third, AmericaSpeaks recruited individuals to deliberate online as part of Face the Facts USA. AmericaSpeaks is best known for large, face-to-face deliberative events called 21st Century Town meetings. Although they convene thousands of people, often in conference centers, their scale is small compared to the national population. The Face the Facts project provided an opportunity for AmericaSpeaks to recruit participants to low-cost and scalable Google Hangout discussions. That is a model that could be replicated as an alternative or a complement to more expensive, face-to-face discussions.

Finally, several projects involved influencing professional journalists or media outlets as an indirect means of educating the public. These projects took advantage of the fact that millions of Americans still receive information and commentary from news media sources. The Democracy Fund grantees strove to improve the quality of their coverage and thereby reach a substantial portion of the voting public.

The Columbia Journalism Review’s “Swing States Project” attempted to improve the quality of local media coverage by commissioning local media critics to critique the coverage . We interviewed political journalists in the targeted states. Among respondents who were aware of the project, 59% responded that it had influenced them. Thirty-six percent indicated that it had a moderate influence or influenced them “very much.” Although we cannot estimate how this influence on journalists affected voters’ understanding of the issues, the findings suggest that a fair number of journalists whose work is being read and watched by voters in swing states were taking steps to improve their coverage.

The Center for Public Integrity’s “Consider the Source” provided in-depth reporting on campaign finance issues that newspapers, broadcasters, and other news sources could use. CIRCLE interviewed 13 prominent experts who report on money and politics. Nearly half of these interviewees felt that CPI resources had influenced the conversation among media professionals, and that consequently the media now offers more comprehensive stories about money in politics. Although only 200,000 people read the CPI stories at the CPI website, the organization’s media tracking service estimated that the stories reached a potential circulation of 48 million people through pick up by other media organizations.

Although CIRCLE’s evaluations did not yield recipes for changing mass behavior, the following conclusions are consistent with our findings:

Distributing recommendations from a credible public deliberation can have significant influence on the public, if the deliberation is reflected in an official vehicle, such as a state voter guide.
“Providing resources to the media can be an effective means of reaching scale, if the source is viewed as fair and providing them with relevant and valued content
It’s hard to get to scale by trying to become a destination site.

young people and government data surveillance

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Sixty percent of young Americans support Edward Snowden’s leaks of the NSA data surveillance program, versus 36% of people age 65 and older. CNN’s latest poll finds that just 45% of young people now approve of the president’s performance, down from 69% in May. Granted, the CNN survey has a margin of error of plus or minus 7.5 percentage points, but it still suggests a decline, and the NSA story is one possible explanation. In USA TODAY, Lauren Kirkwood and Michael Auslen quote me:

Members of the younger generations were also more likely to disapprove of the government’s collection of data, which Peter Levine, director of Tufts University’s Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, attributed to a greater distrust of government.

Although young people are used to sharing private data on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, which often share user information with advertisers, they don’t view information the NSA gleans from its surveillance programs in the same light.

“I don’t think it’s right for corporations to do that either, but it’s different,” Grace Quiroz, a 24-year-old graduate student from Houston, said. “They (the NSA) can go as far as to hear phone conversations.”

Young people’s concerns don’t all stem from an expectation of privacy online, though.

“I think there’s an expectation of transparency – not privacy,” Levine said. “They’re in a world where they don’t have much privacy because of commercial data mining. But they do seem to have faith in transparency, so they expect governments and other institutions to be open.”

…

Levine said that although 18- to 29-year-olds might not expect all the information they put online to remain personal, they retain a sense of ownership over it.

“People are used to being traceable and visible. They don’t have a sense of privacy, but they don’t like powerful people using their information, whether it’s Facebook or the government,” he said. “I think they’re pretty suspicious of shadowy power.”

supporting a beleaguered news industry

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This is the second in a series of blog posts about CIRCLE’s evaluations of initiatives funded by the Democracy Fund to inform and engage voters during the 2012 election. It is cross-posted from the Democracy Fund blog.

Two Democracy Fund grantees–the Center for Public Integrity (CPI) and the Columbia Journalism Review–worked to support reporters and editors in order to improve their election coverage and better inform the public on key issues of national concern. We evaluated these initiatives by interviewing some of the potentially affected journalists, 97 in all.

One theme that emerged very clearly was the challenging situation that confronts the news industry. This context has been well documented in other research. For example, according to a study of the changing news environment in Baltimore, conducted by the Pew Research Center, the number of news outlets in the city has proliferated to 53 “radio talk shows, . . . blogs, specialized new outlets, new media sites, TV stations, radio news programs, newspapers and their various legacy media websites.” But the number of reporters has fallen. That means there is more written and spoken about the news than ever, but it is highly repetitive. A search of six major news topics found that 83 percent of the articles and blog posts repeated the same material—sometimes with commentary—and more than half the original text came from paid print media such as the Baltimore Sun.

In turn, Baltimore’s remaining professional journalists are so overstretched that they cannot provide what is called “enterprise reporting” (digging to find new information not already in the public domain). The city government and other official institutions now have more, rather than less, control over the news. The report notes, “As news is posted faster, often with little enterprise reporting added, the official version of events is becoming more important. We found official press releases often appear word for word in first accounts of events, though often not noted as such.”

Our interviews found ample evidence of similar conditions. One reporter said, “the political reporting in our state has shrunk to the point where a lot of the major reporters are ones that have been doing it for decades and, quite frankly, their reporting (and lack of digging) reflects how tired they are.”

On the whole, our interviewees were very pleased to be provided with support in the form of CPI’s in-depth reporting and the Columbia Journalism Review’s coverage of their work. For example:

“Without that kind of work I don’t know how one could sort themselves through what’s happened, unless they’ve been following for the past 5 years.”
“Without Open Secrets and CPI I don’t know how a journalist who is new could figure this stuff out.”

They noted various ways in which these interventions had affected them. They mentioned learning about good practices that are used in other newspapers, getting ideas for stories, and encouraging high quality work. Commenting on the CJR’s effort, one reporter said, “It sort of serves as a watchdog to remind people to do a good job, to do a thorough job, to look for fresh angles, to dig beneath the surface, and, ah, hopefully those are things that I’m doing already.”

Local coverage emerged as an area that needs special attention and support. As a reporter told us, “One of the faults with journalism coverage and journalism criticism, in general, is that it tends to focus on the big national players and the big national issues. And as we’ve seen a number of major publications pull back on local coverage …, it’s become all the more important that we have some sort of press criticism function taking care of local media and engaging with local media. And I think that a lot of reporters working locally and regionally would benefit from that sort of attention and that sort of engagement as well.”

There were, however, a few concerns that also related to the limited capacity and fragile financial condition of the news industry. CPI’s model is to provide in-depth reporting that news sources can use in writing their own articles and broadcasts, and a few respondents were worried that CPI might become a competitor for readers. The Columbia Journalism Review wrote appreciative as well as critical articles about political news coverage, but a few respondents felt that these articles did not demonstrate adequate sensitivity to the limited capacity of local newsrooms. Although most interviewees were pleased with the CJR’s coverage, the relatively few respondents who felt it was unfair were likely to think that the CJR’s correspondent had overlooked their limited capacity to accomplish what was being suggested.

CIRCLE’s interviews suggest the following conclusions:

Because of staffing cuts and turnover in the profession, the news media struggles to cover politics. They are aware of their difficult situation and generally grateful for assistance.
Providing high-quality information and constructive criticism does change reporters’ behavior.
Professionals in the news media are understandably somewhat sensitive about being given advice unless the person offering it recognizes the practical limitations they face.
They are also concerned about being manipulated by ostensibly nonpartisan organizations that they fear may have partisan objectives. (See our previous blog post on the problem of distrust.)
Interventions designed to support the news media should not inadvertently compete with the news media by taking away readers or viewers.

why so few new colleges?

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Americans found colleges and universities. That tradition started in 1636 and it explains why we have nearly 4,500 degree-granting institutions today. Typically, periods of population growth and migration are marked by the founding of lots of new colleges and universities, which creates the opportunity for innovation. We’ve seen waves of new types: religious liberal arts colleges, Land-Grants, women’s colleges, research universities on the German model, HBCUs, “multiversities,” community colleges, and urban public universities, among others. Each wave also affects the older institutions. Harvard and Yale, for example, were founded as religious liberal arts colleges but adapted in imitation of the Germanic research universities and the state multiversities.

But look at the growth of postsecondary student enrollment from 1991-2011 versus the total number of colleges and universities. (Data from the Institute for Education Sciences; my graphs):

Some new institutions have been launched since 1999, but for the most part, the additional students are being squeezed onto existing campuses. For instance, the University of Central Florida was born in the 1960s, during the last burst of new college foundations, but its enrollment has grown from 1,948 in 1968 to 59,767 in 2012. The problem with that method of accommodating growing numbers of students is that it blocks innovation. Existing colleges are locked into their priorities and structures. We have also seen the rapid growth of for-profit colleges, like the University of Phoenix, which are included in the trends shown above. They innovate, but in ways that make me highly suspicious. Until we see the birth of a substantial number of new nonprofit or state institutions, I will be pessimistic about innovation in the sector as a whole.