at the Educational Testing Service

I’m in Princeton, NJ, staying for 24 hours at the headquarters of the ETS, the people who bring you the SAT and your other favorite standardized tests. I’m here with a group of civic education advocates, trying to learn more about testing. A system of high-stakes testing may be good or bad for education in general (I’m genuinely unsure about that). For civic education, it poses three problems:

1) Civic and political knowledge is usually not tested, at least not with high-stakes exams. What isn’t tested, isn’t taught. But even enthusiastic proponents of standards and accountability are leery about piling a civics exam on top of all the other tests. There is thus a serious danger that we will lose civics from the curriculum.

2) Civic knowledge, while important, isn’t all we care about. We also want students to develop civic attitudes, values, habits, skills, and behaviors. Yet we don’t know how to test these things.

3) A good approach to civic education is to involve students, teachers, staff, parents, and community-members in the governance of schools. But to the extent that important policy issues are determined by standards and tests, there are fewer important decisions to be made locally.

Nevertheless, there may be ways to infuse some civic content into the existing system, and that’s what I’m at ETS to explore.

website on Iraq

Some colleagues and graduate students and I have created a new website called The War, the Press, and Democracy. It collects and organizes some of the best discussions of press coverage of the current war. We pose some questions about the obligations of the press and the public in wartime. There’s also a discussion forum on which you can post your own comments. We encourage people to visit, participate in the discussion, and send advice on the site as a whole.

cyberbalkanization

There’s a lively discussion of “cyberbalkanization” on the Deliberative Democracy Consortium’s blog. The discussion was prompted by a New York Times article last Sunday that claimed that people use the Internet to sort themselves into small, homogeneous groups and to filter out views that don’t interest or please them. I’ve pasted my comment below, but I recommend the full discussion:

For my money, the best theoretical account of cyberbalkanization is still a 1996 paper by Marshall van Alstyne and Erik Brynjolfsson. They predict that the Internet will help people who are so inclined to increase the range and diversity of their information and contacts. They also predict that the Internet will allow people to “filter” out unwelcome ideas or contacts and to form narrow, exclusive groups. So the technology will not determine the outcome; people’s motives will. And clearly, people have various motives. Some prefer diverse ideas and serendipitous encounters; others want to shun people who are different and simply confirm their own prejudices.

I am fairly pessimistic about the cyberbalkanization problem, not because of the technology, but because of cultural trends in the US. Niche marketing has become highly sophisticated and has divided us into small groups. There’s more money to be made through niche programs than by creating diverse forums for discussion. Meanwhile, people have developed consumerist attitudes towards news, looking for “news products” that are tailored to their private needs. And broad-based organizations have mostly shrunk since the 1950s. In this context, the Internet looks like a means to more balkanization. In a different context, such as contemporary Saudi Arabia, it may have a much more positive impact.

jury duty

I was in the pool for jury duty today, although I was not selected for a panel. (This happens like clockwork every two years.) I used to want to be selected, because I study deliberation, and a jury is the paradigm of a deliberative body. Now I quietly hope that my number won’t come up; I feel I have too much to do at work–perhaps an indication that I’m putting too low a priority on civic duty. Anyway, they never seem to want me.

Waiting in the pool is, however, a nice chance to observe a random selection of my fellow Washingtonians. I have noticed, for example, that African Americans are much more likely than Whites to see someone else in the jury pool whom they already know. (The Black community is more stable, and residents are more likely to have gone to local schools.) Also, a striking percentage of jurors name someone in their family who serves in law enforcement. This is probably a DC phenomenon: we have numerous layers of police, prisons, and federal law-enforcement agencies here.

While in the courthouse, I helped my CIRCLE colleagues put out a press release on youth voting in New Hampshire. In Iowa, youth turnout quadrupled compared to 2004. In New Hampshire, it’s hard to say what happened to turnout. There was no contested Republican primary, so New Hampshire Independents who might usually vote in the GOP primary voted in the Democratic contest. Voting by all age groups increased in the Democratic primary, but this seems meaningless. Furthermore, the under-30’s did not increase their share of the vote, as they had in Iowa. I wonder whether youth turnout was lower in New Hampshire than in Iowa because some young Dean supporters became disillusioned during the last week. Dean came first among the under-30s in New Hampshire, but some of his young fans may have stayed home.