major CIRCLE study of state policies for civics

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Yesterday, we released a study of all the states’ standards, course requirements, and tests related to civic education. The American Enterprise Institute’s Program on American Citizenship says, “New CIRCLE Research Confirms: Civic Education Lacking in Most States.” The Washington Examiner is pithier: “Civics Cuckoos: Only 9 states require high schoolers pass civics.” Nora Fleming, in Ed Week, quotes me for a summary:

“The standards in most states include some high aspirations, but typically have nothing to do with assessments. The standards are miscellaneous, the assessments are lacking, and when they are high stakes, they are trivial,” Levine said. “I think in a big, deep way, civics and preparation for citizenship has been left out by policymakers, who think in terms of preparation for college and for a difficult labor market but don’t think of civics as part of this.”

Over at “Voices for Education” (the blog of Harvard Education publishing), I make an argument for the kind of civic education we need. I will have a longer Huffington Post editorial up pretty soon with a different version of the argument. [Update; it’s here.]

Nora Fleming also uses the study as a springboard for a second piece in which she describes Mikva Challenge as an example of good programming; see “Out of School Engagement in Civic Education and the 2012 Election.”

Haunted House

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Last week I slept in an old B&B,
Victorian, Midwestern, built to convey
High respectability: a house for
A father of its foursquare, limestone town.
Now it wears a bohemian skrim,
Offering brownies and soy granola.
There is said to be a ghost. I don’t know
What kind. Scuttling waif in long nightdress?
Guilt-wracked hypocritical reverend?
As I lay in the high, four-poster bed
Marking midnight on the digital clock,
Watching LEDs blink from my cell phone,
The laptop, and the TV’s complex box,
To the sound of cars and central A/C,
I compared this ghost to an endangered bird,
Her nesting woods cut to shreds by strip malls,
Office parks, and the Interstate, cheeping
Forlornly for a mate. In the sober
Morning light, the lacy lampshade over
The candle-shaped 40-watt GE bulb
Began to rock inexplicably.
I thought: Have you now been reduced to this?
In your own house? Is this what “haunting” means
For you? Trying to catch a stranger’s eye
For an instant as he starts his cluttered day,
Just to say that once you were living too?

the changing role of email in our lives

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(Chicago) I have the habit of saving all non-spam emails and preserving my old email archives whenever I get a new computer. I saved 22 incoming emails from 1994, and 17,926 so far from 2012. It took just five minutes to graph the trend in email volume, best shown by the number received each day for each 365-day year:

(I may have lost some emails from 2008, when we moved from University of Maryland to Tufts; and 2012 is a projection based on 10 months.)

I show this graph not to make any special point about myself. I suspect both the trend and the total numbers are pretty typical. The growth rate is not exponential (I checked), but it is rapid. I get eight times more email than I did a decade ago. We’ve reached a point where it’s not unusual to receive 6-8 emails that are worth reading and saving per hour during a work day. If that trend continues–hypothetically–then by 2022, I’ll be getting one substantive email per minute, 24 hours per day, 365 days per year.

It’s worth asking whether this is a good way to live.

unemployment and civic engagement: the video

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(Bloomington, IN) This video shows former White House Domestic Policy Council director John Bridgeland, Federal Reserve Governor Sarah Bloom Raskin, Knight Foundation Vice President Paula Ellis, Corporation for National and Community Service CEO Wendy Spencer, and me discussing the new report Civic Health and Unemployment II: The Case Builds. This was at the National Conference on Citizenship in Philadelphia on Sept. 14. Wendy Spencer says:

I just had an epiphany listening to Kei [Kawashima-Ginsberg, CIRCLE’s lead researcher] talk, while I was sitting there, about what I would like to do if I had a magic wand. I would take this report, tonight, and send out couriers to read it aloud to every mayor in America, aloud for emphasis. Because if I am I mayor, and I am looking at this, I’m thinking: OK, this actually is going to help my community strengthen.

California Civic Engagement Project

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I am in Indiana but wanted to note the official launch of the California Civic Engagement Project. Housed at UC-Davis, the Project seeks to collect and analyze data on civic engagement in the nation’s largest state, where the civic infrastructure is relatively weak–which may explain its serial crises in governance. I am on the advisory board and recommend the Project’s work. Their second big public report finds,

California youth voter registration numbers have grown substantially over the course of the last decade, 25% from the 2002-2010 November elections, outpacing growth in the general electorate. Despite these gains, youth remain underrepresented in California’s electorate, with disparity greatest in regions with some of the poorest outcomes for youth.