notes from the Summit on Civic Learning and National Service

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On October 16, 2014, the White House, the U.S. Department of Education, and the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service at Tufts University hosted a Summit on Civic Learning and National Service. This invitational Summit brought together 75 higher education leaders, government officials, representatives of civic organizations, and researchers studying civic learning and engagement. The rich conversation brought up many themes and disagreements.

We have posted the Summit Proceedings here. They are based on a review of the notes from the Summit, compiled and summarized by representatives from Tisch College. These are the key seven themes:

  1. Colleges and universities must support democracy. Educating for democracy and generating knowledge to serve democracy were central purposes of the Morrill Land Grant Act, the GI Bill, and the creation of community colleges. The 1947 Truman Commission on Higher Education for Democracy stated that educating for democracy “should come first … among the principal goals for higher education.” But this heritage has largely been forgotten. The public, policymakers, and leaders of higher education now appear to focus primarily on preparing students for a competitive labor market.
  2. Democratic education means engagement with politics, institutions, and contentious issues—by students, faculty, and staff in their capacity as teachers, learners, researchers, and civic actors. Serving democracy means more than service, although service-learning programs contribute to that mission. Colleges and universities should be places of courageous conversations and action, where the most pressing social, economic, and political needs the nation and world are identified, studied, and debated, and where students develop the skills and sense of agency to act on those needs.
  3. Civic learning must move from “elective and available” to “pervasive and expected.” Since the 1980s, many colleges and universities have created impressive centers and programs for civic engagement, community service, community partnerships, and related topics. These special programs represent a valuable network, distributed across the country and connecting higher education to other sectors. However, they remain fairly marginal in academia itself, enlisting especially interested students and faculty. Some of the institutions represented at the Summit have taken the next step by making civic learning pervasive or even required on their campuses.
  4. Colleges and universities should be partners in local problem solving and anchors in democratic communities. Campuses can support reciprocal faculty-community collaborative research, open their doors to the community, and serve as conveners to identify and facilitate change about local challenges.
  5. Civic learning must be measured and assessed. Unless colleges and universities collect data and use it to improve programs and hold themselves accountable for results, civic learning will not be pervasively effective. Better measurement systems would also demonstrate the value of civic learning for employment and thus mitigate the tradeoff between education for democracy and education for work.
  6. Higher education should tackle growing economic and social inequality based on class and social identity. Many students face economic barriers to civic engagement. At a time of rapidly rising college costs, students may have to work at least one job, may have children of their own, and may hold substantial debt. Some possible solutions to those barriers are course credit for public service experiences, loan forgiveness, and connecting civic and career skills.
  7.  Leadership must come from many places, including federal and state policymakers, college administrators, academic departments, students, and also from community-based organizations and business. Many positive steps were proposed at the Summit, from raising the proportion of work-study funds available for community work to changing state or even federal measurement systems to include civic outcomes. Above all, the stakeholders must return the civic and democratic mission of higher education to its traditional high status in American life.

Based on the Summit discussions, we would suggest both an interest in and a need for continued work in two areas:

  • Collective work among scholars and practitioners on what the research shows regarding the nature, scope, and effectiveness of civic learning and engagement in democracy; and
  • Further, focused discussion among educators and policy makers to prioritize specific actions at the campus, collaborative, state, and federal, levels to advance civic learning and engagement in democracy.

Community partners/representatives should be key participants in both sets of discussions

community organizing, community-engaged research, and the problem of scale

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“I have yet to see something big that’s good.” So said a friend and esteemed colleague  at a conference that I have been attending for the past two days. The conference is on “Collaboration Research for Action and Equity in Education,” and most of the participants practice either community-engaged research or community organizing. They build or participate in rather small, participatory projects, but they also care about large forces and structures. So the problem that my friend posed is a fundamental one for them.

I actually don’t believe that the precise issue that matters is scale. In the 21st century, things that used to be limited to small scales (such as friendship networks and discussions) can now be very big. The difference that interests me is between relational politics and impersonal politics.

In relational politics, you know the other people you are affecting directly. You know their names and locations and something about what they want. There is at least a possibility that you can work together. In impersonal politics, you affect people you have never heard of or met. Impersonal politics includes such structures as votes, laws, rights, policies, large firms, and markets.

The two categories certainly come together. In fact, the street-level impact of impersonal politics is almost always relational. For instance, the edge of the policies that produce mass incarceration in the United States is the back of a police van in Baltimore. The police officers there knew Freddie Gray.

That example reminds us that relational politics isn’t preferable to impersonal politics. You can’t be truly cruel without being in a relationship with the victim. From office politics–or the activities of “street-level bureaucrats” (like police officers)–to torture, some of the most problematic human interactions are relational. And impersonal structures include such excellent creations as legal rights.

But we do need relational politics, because only in relationships can we learn from other people, build networks that are sources of power and capacity, and act with agency. It is only in relational politics that we can seriously ask the question “What should we do?” A difference between the conference I am attending and a more standard conference on urban America is not that this one has been more critical. There is a vast scholarly literature that documents and analyzes inequality and oppression. You can walk up and down the halls of a hotel during a sociology, public health, or education conference, and in every room they will be talking about oppression. But they are addressing the question “What should be done?”, not “What should we do?” Agency is lost when politics and research are impersonal rather than relational.

And yet practitioners of community-engaged research and community organizing are also deeply concerned about impersonal politics. One of the most frequently-used words at this conference was “neoliberalism,” understand as some kind of mass-scale and impersonal system. (But note that a social democracy would also be highly impersonal.)

So how can we make the relational improve the impersonal? I think the most common strategy is to create or support relational projects, connect them together in networks, recruit others to join the networks, and advocate for policies in institutions like universities that will directly support these projects. (For instance, we might advocate changes in the kinds of research that help scholars win tenure.) This strategy has been implicit in a lot of my own work. But I must admit that I don’t really believe in it, because I don’t believe that networks of relational projects will seriously trouble existing impersonal systems. Finding a better connection between the relational and the impersonal seems to me the most pressing issue of our time.

See also beyond small is beautiful; leverage as a moral issue; and civic relationships (what they are and why they matter).

media literacy education article

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This is just out today: Levine, P. (2014). Media Literacy for the 21st Century. A Response to “The Need for Media Education in Democratic Education.” Democracy and Education, 23 (1), Article 15. It’s an invited response to Jeremy Stoddard’s fine piece “The Need for Media Education in Democratic Education.” My response is not a critique but just a complementary perspective. The abstract:

We cannot pretend to educate young people for citizenship and political participation without teaching them to understand and use the new media, which are essential means of expressing ideas, forming public opinions, and building institutions and movements. But the challenge of media literacy education is serious. Students need advanced and constantly changing skills to be effective online. They must understand the relationship between the new media and social and political institutions, a topic that is little understood by even the most advanced social theorists. And they must develop motivations to use digital media for civic purposes, when no major institutions have incentives to motivate them. Until we address those challenges, students will struggle to make sense of the new media environment, let alone take constructive action.

 

CIRCLE’s release on today’s Civics results

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23% of 8th-Graders “Proficient” in Civics According to Nation’s Report Card Released Today
Today’s Release Shows Inequality in Civics Education, Serious Gaps by Racial and Economic Backgrounds Reflecting Unequal Education

Medford/Somerville, MA – Today, the Federal Government released the Nation’s Report Card: 2014 U.S. in Civics. Experts on civic education from the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning & Engagement (CIRCLE) based at Tufts University’s Tisch College – the preeminent, non-partisan research center on youth engagement – have been involved in both designing and analyzing the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) Civics Assessment and can provide informed commentary.

“The quality and equality of civic education is a reflection of our investment in a healthy democracy,” said Dr. Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg, director of CIRCLE. “The National Assessment of Education Progress, or the Nation’s Report Card, as it’s also known, is a difficult and complex test that successfully measures some key areas of civic learning and how well civics is taught. However, as the new Nation’s Report Card: 2014 shows, we are far from achieving an acceptable quality or equality of civics education.”

The 2014 NAEP Civics, released today, finds that 23% of America’s 8th graders are “proficient.” Although higher scores would certainly be desirable, many adults might be surprised by how difficult the NAEP Civics questions are. For instance, in 2014, 8th graders were asked to identify a power of the modern President not described in the Constitution and to understand that growth in the elderly population would affect Social Security spending.

NAEP assessments in all other subjects yield roughly comparable proficiency levels to those found in civics. For instance, on the 2013 Mathematics NAEP, 27% of 8th graders scored proficient and 9% scored advanced.

More significant than the overall proficiency levels are gaps by student groups. For instance, only 9% of African American students reached at least the “proficient” level in the 2014 NAEP Civics, compared to 40% of Asian/Pacific Islander students. Students from urban areas, students whose parents didn’t attend college, students eligible for free and reduced-price lunch, and students with disabilities all scored lower than average.

“The NAEP Civics measures education for citizenship, which is an essential purpose of schools,” said Peter Levine, Associate Dean for Research at Tufts University’s Jonathan M. Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service and a member of the NAEP Civics Committee. “In 2014, due to budget cuts, the NAEP Civics was fielded only at the 8th grade level. It is important for the NAEP Civics to be administered regularly and at the 4th grade, 8th grade, and 12th grade levels so that we can assess our progress in educating America’s kids for citizenship.”

Previous research by CIRCLE has shown that what students know about civics is related to how much and how well they are taught civics. The gaps in NAEP scores reflect inequality in civic education.

Dr. Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg closely studied previous NAEP Civics results for a fact sheet entitled, “Do Discussion, Debate, and Simulations Boost NAEP Civics Performance?” In that work, Kawashima-Ginsberg explored the relationship between three promising teaching practices and NAEP scores for various demographic groups.

Dr. Peter Levine, Associate Dean for Research at Tisch College, has written a fact sheet entitled, “What the NAEP Civics Assessment Measures and How Students Perform.” The fact sheet looks closely at what the NAEP Civics test measures, the skills and values that it doesn’t capture, and in general how to interpret the results. Levine was a member of the committee that helped design the 2014 civics test.

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the struggle to control images from Baltimore

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“10,000 Strong Peacefully Protest In Downtown Baltimore, Media Only Reports The Violence & Arrest of Dozens”

There is a struggle underway to influence how Baltimore is portrayed visually to America. My news feed is full of images like the one above–of peaceful protests or hardworking Baltimoreans cleaning up the streets. I doubt many of those photos are getting through to the mass TV audience that is watching hurled stones and burning police cars.

For my own part, I believe the property damage and physical conflicts with police were pretty much inevitable; but images of them don’t communicate two other crucial facts: that thousands have protested peacefully (which is difficult to organize and sustain, by the way), and that everyday life in cities like Baltimore is deeply oppressed.

The experience of the 1960s teaches us that it matters which images predominate.

In 1964, the summer’s urban riots/insurrections were seen to benefit Barry Goldwater’s campaign. Johnson’s aides called them “Goldwater rallies” because they played into the Republican presidential nominee’s narrative about America. LBJ nevertheless beat Goldwater soundly. But 1968 was different. As Clay Risen writes in the Guardian,

The [1968] riots thus provided an entrée for conservatives to finally, fully assert law and order as a national political issue. Something that had been brewing for decades at the local level, and which had played a role in the GOP victories of 1966, became after April 1968 the single most important domestic concern in the 1968 presidential race. Polls repeatedly put it at par with, and even above, the Vietnam war. Richard Nixon, who had largely avoided talking about riots and civil rights before April, now made law and order – and the revulsion of white suburbia against the violent images of rioters reacting to King’s death – a central theme in his campaign.

The riots also vaulted Nixon’s eventual running mate, the obscure Maryland governor Spiro Agnew, to national prominence. In the wake of the violence in Baltimore, Agnew had called local civil rights leaders to a meeting and then ambushed them with accusations that they had facilitated the racial militancy that he – and much of white America – believed to be the cause of the riots. Nixon aide Patrick Buchanan clipped a news story about the speech and handed it to his boss. And while Nixon toyed with other running mates, he ultimately chose Agnew based on his newfound fame as the standard-bearer of the “silent majority”.

To be clear: I don’t care whether Democratic or Republican politicians benefit or suffer from the images from Baltimore and other cities. But it is important which direction the nation takes. And (fairly or not) it’s people far from Baltimore, Ferguson, and Cleveland who will decide. That is why we should all be drawing attention to the alternative images from Baltimore.