Arne Duncan’s nine commitments on civic education

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Here are the nine steps that the US Department of Education recently pledged to take to advance civic education in America. Each of these is spelled out in somewhat more detail in this PDF.

1. “Convene and catalyze schools and postsecondary institutions to increase and enhance high-quality civic learning and engagement.”

2. “Identify additional civic indicators.” [For example, the Department commits to put some civic measures on national longitudinal youth surveys and make the data available.]

3. “Identify promising practices in civic learning and democratic engagement—and encourage further research to learn what works.” [This is a pledge that will mean real money, because civic outcomes will be treated as priorities in the Department’s regular research funding competitions, for the first time in my memory.]

4. “Leverage federal investments and public-private partnerships.” [This basically means allowing federal grantees in the education field to promote civic engagement as a fundable objective–which, like #3, could in principle provide substantial funding to the field.]

5. “Encourage community-based work-study placements.” [This means encouraging colleges to use some of the Federal Work Study money for jobs in community organizations, which would be good civic education for the student workers. I have been advocating that for years.]

6. “Encourage public service careers among college students and graduates.” [This basically means advertising the availability of the federal Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program, which is underutilized.]

7. “Support civic learning for a well-rounded K–12 curriculum.” [The Administration proposes a bucket of funds for disciplines left out of No Child Left Behind, including civics as well as arts, foreign languages, physical education, etc.  But they need Congressional authorization for that.]

8. “Engage Historically Black Colleges and Universities and other Minority-Serving Institutions … and Tribal Colleges and Universities—in a national dialogue to identify best practices.” [I am not sure what this means concretely for those institutions, but it is true that they are historic leaders and have much to contribute to the whole field.]

9. “Highlight and promote student and family participation in education programs and policies at the federal and local levels.” [This is the Department’s pledge to involve citizens in education policy, pursuant to the President’s very first Executive Order, which was about transparency, participation, and collaboration. It could be the biggest step of all, but everything depends on whether it is truly a priority.]

I think these are good and important ideas. We should help them turn out well, and we should hold the Department accountable for them.

public work in Massachusetts (and the nation)

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Our colleagues at Harvard’s Institute of Politics and the National Conference on Citizenship recently released a report on the civic health of Massachusetts. My organization, CIRCLE, did much of the underlying statistical analysis, although the Harvard team of students deserve full credit for the report and its argument.

One aspect we contributed was the suggestion that “public work” could be measured by identifying individuals who say they both attend public meetings and “work with neighbors to fix or improve something.” Our idea is that people should talk and listen with peers and act, letting their conversations guide their actions and their practical experience inform their discussions. Deliberation without work is empty, but work without deliberation is blind.

Using our definition, the report finds that 5.7% of Massachusetts residents do public work. Our measure is obviously imperfect. Leaving aside the usual problems of biased survey responses, this is an imperfect measure because you could attend meetings that had nothing to do with your working with neighbors. Or you could do real public work outside your neighborhood.

Nevertheless, I believe it’s a useful proxy measure for comparison purposes. The rate in Massachusetts is a full percentage point greater than the national rate (4.7%). Particular groups are more or less involved. For example, Native Americans are nationally the most likely group to meet the definition, perhaps because of traditions of collaborate governance. Public work (as we define it) correlates with education, so that 10% of Massachusetts college graduates participate, but no one in the Massachusetts sample who had less than a high school diploma met the definition.

a rigorous test of the Straus and Howe generational hypothesis

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William Straus and Neil Howe proposed that history followed a generational cycle, with an alternating sequence of Prophet, Nomad, Hero, and Artist generations, each representing people born within 20-year periods. They started their story in 1433 and carried it through at least 2014, when the last of Generation Z will be born. Their evidence was mostly a series of examples of people who exemplified the ostensible spirit of their generation. They also proposed a logic for why the cycles would recur.

The danger is selection bias. For 2,000 years, physicians convinced themselves that leeches cured disease by sharing stories of patients who were bled and then improved. Pierre Charles Alexandre Louis put that practice to scientific test, using what he called the “numerical method,” and found that it did not work. The essence of the “numerical method” is to create an appropriate sample and then look for the predicted patterns.

The Straus/Howe hypothesis says that all else being equal, a person is more likely to have the attributes of a “Prophet” (per their definition) if that person was born within a time span when prophets predominated–e.g., between 1945 and 1964. One’s generation should be a statistically significant predictor of one’s public character, even controlling for gender, race, education, class, region, religion, parents’ opinions, etc. Moreover, one’s generation should be a better predictor than one’s birth year: in other words, people should come in 20-year blocs divided by what Straus and Howe called “turnings.” Someone born in 1966 should more closely resemble an individual born 19 years later (since they are both Xers, who are Nomads) than someone born one year earlier.

Here is a proposal for how to test the hypothesis. The American National Biography is a reference book that describes 17,400 notable Americans. I would take a random sample of those entries and conceal their names, gender and race, and birth year. I would ask several people to read their brief bios and code them as Prophet, Nomad, Hero, or Artist. I would check the consistency of coding and retrain coders until they could reach the same conclusion at least 80% of the time. I would then add a dummy variable for generation and see whether there was a statistically significant relationship between that variable and the coding. Finally, I would control for at least gender, race/ethnicity, and birth year to see if any relationship survives (or emerges).

The Straus/Howe theory has enough plausibility–and a vast enough following–that it seems to deserve a test. I don’t want to do it, so the idea is available for anyone ….

new ejournal focused on citizenship

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Introducing the eJournal of Public Affairs, a free, online, peer-reviewed journal published by Missouri State University and affiliated with the American Democracy Project:

Although the title makes it sound as if this journal would cover any topic related to policy or politics, it is focused on “the following themes”:

  • Considerations of citizenship and what it means to be a citizen, including global citizenship and eCitizenship
  • Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, problem solving, and leadership related to citizenship and civic engagement
  • Assessment of civic-engagement projects
  • The relationship between social media (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) and civic engagement

The journal is accepting submissions. With many colleagues, I’m on the editorial board.

how much of a constraint is conscience?

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I recently asked students to discuss Seamus Heaney’s poem, “A Republic of Conscience.” When the narrator departs from that republic, he is offered dual citizenship; he is authorized to speak “on [the republic’s] behalf in my own tongue”; and he is installed as an ambassador who can never be “relieved.”

The Republic of Conscience is a metaphor. But when Heaney imagines it as an actual place, he presumes that it would have a government, including customs and immigration officials, ambassadors, and “public leaders” who, “at their inauguration … / must swear to uphold unwritten law / and weep to atone for their presumption to hold office.”

Evidently, this is a minimalist state, a “frugal republic.” Its leaders are very gentle and accommodating. But it still has borders, officials, and laws. Is that the right way to think about conscience?

We might say that in a hypothetical place where everyone fully obeys his or her conscience, there would be no need for restraint or coordination. Conscience would constrain individuals’ will and opinion to the point that all our thoughts and behavior would be in full harmony. As Hamilton writes in Federalist 51, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.”

A different view holds that we are irreducibly diverse in our backgrounds and perspectives. Conscience constrains us a bit, but two people of excellent conscience can still hold legitimately different and even contrary views and desires. Since citizens of the Republic of Conscience would disagree and conflict, they would need some system for decision-making and adjudication: a government.

At its deepest level, this is the question whether there is a right thing to do in each particular situation. If there is a right choice, then people of ideal conscience would know it and act accordingly. If there is not a right decision–if it’s a matter of opinion–then one can ask why doing right matters (or why right is better than wrong).

Other views are available. For example, one might argue that there is a right thing to do in each case, but we cannot know it by conscience alone; knowing what is right also requires information and prediction. Equipped with perfect conscience but imperfect reasoning ability, people in the Republic of Conscience would legitimately disagree. In short, if people were moral angels with human-sized IQs, they would need a government.

That conclusion depends on a particular definition of “conscience.” If it means good will or altruistic intent without any cognitive element, then it can accommodate deep disagreement. But that view is problematic, at least if taken to an extreme. Hannah Arendt portrayed Adolf Eichmann (the bureaucratic leader of the Holocaust) as a man compelled by a sense of duty that constrained his natural inclinations, yet a profoundly stupid man unable to see things from other people’s perspectives–to a loathsome degree. Can we say that he had a conscience, and his only defect was cognitive? I would say he was responsible for his failure of understanding, and therefore his conscience was appallingly bad even though it constrained his will. That reading pushes us in the direction of the idea that conscience requires seeing what is right, and therefore everyone with perfect conscience would act in harmony and there could be an Anarchy of Conscience.