{"id":10979,"date":"2013-03-07T15:17:02","date_gmt":"2013-03-07T20:17:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=10979"},"modified":"2013-03-07T15:20:57","modified_gmt":"2013-03-07T20:20:57","slug":"what-to-do-about-k-12-civic-education","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=10979","title":{"rendered":"what to do about k-12 civic education"},"content":{"rendered":"

(Chicago) These are my remarks for tonight’s Illinois Civic Mission Coalition<\/a> “Annual Convening.”\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

When Americans turn their attention to civic education in k-12 schools, very frequently they make the following claims:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Kids today don\u2019t know anything about government and civics!<\/li>\n
  2. Kids today don\u2019t vote!<\/li>\n
  3. Schools today don\u2019t teach civics the way they used to when I was a kid. What happened to civics classes!?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    A couple of additional assumptions are buried under those claims. Civics is seen as the name of a course in high school, rather than a broader set of opportunities. And success in that course is defined as knowing some information (the kind that we test) and acting in particular ways, above all, by voting<\/p>\n

    I see the political value of this argument\u2014it is easy for people to grasp, it fits into their preconceived ideas that civics is in decline, and it grabs attention. When the United States Department of Education released the 2011 National Assessment in Education Progress (NAEP) Civics results, the New York Times<\/em> story was entitled \u201cFailing Grades on Civics Exam Called a \u2018Crisis.\u2019\u201d \u00a0The story began, \u201cFewer than half of American eighth graders knew the purpose of the Bill of Rights.\u201d<\/p>\n

    Maybe getting that story was a win for the civics field.<\/p>\n

    But I want to complicate matters a bit. All the claims I started with are at least a bit inaccurate and misleading\u2014just as factual matters. From a strategic point of view, they are problematic, too. Since they present the wrong diagnosis, they naturally lead to the wrong cure. Adults are liable to say: Let\u2019s require a year of civics in high school and test kids on the US Constitution! But that is not a good reform plan, as I\u2019ll explain.<\/p>\n

    Isn\u2019t it true that kids today don\u2019t know anything about government and civics?<\/p>\n

    Well, just 24% of seniors performed at the proficient level on the NAEP in 2010. It sounds like an objective scientific fact that students don\u2019t know enough civics. But you should realize that the test was designed<\/em> to yield a proficiency score right around that level. I served on the 2010 and 2013 design committees, and we carefully screened and selected questions so that the test would have a certain difficulty level that would make it comparable to past tests, all of which have generated very similar scores, going back to 1972. If most students could answer a question correctly, it was dropped unless it helped fill the quota of easy items.<\/p>\n

    There is certainly no crisis<\/em> of falling<\/em> scores if scores have been flat, and indeed, they rose just a bit in 2010 compared to 2006\u2014with the gains limited to 4th<\/sup> grade only.<\/p>\n

    So the question is: what should kids know, and do they know it? This is not a scientific question\u2014you have to look at their performance on specific items and ask if they\u2019re doing well enough. The fact is, they do well on some items. How often do you see in the news that 69% of high school seniors know the main ruling in Marbury v Madison<\/em>? They were asked this question in the spring of their senior year, when senioritis is acute, and most were not then taking civics or government and they had no incentive to study or prepare for the NAEP. In my subjective opinion, the test is quite difficult, and some of the scores on particular items are surprisingly high.<\/p>\n

    Here\u2019s another illustration that the NAEP scores don\u2019t tell you that students are ignorant. On the most recent NAEP Economics<\/em> assessment (2006), 42% of seniors reached the proficient level. That\u2019s 18 points higher than the scores for the most recent NAEP in Civics<\/em>.\u00a0 It sounds as if students know a lot more economics than civics. That would be a bit surprising since they are much more likely to study civics than economics, and civics doesn\u2019t require all those equations and abstract principles. But again, it\u2019s just that one test happens to be harder than the other.<\/p>\n

    I am not going to go deep into the weeds on the civics test scores, but I want to make one more point about them. We measure only certain things\u2014mainly, factual knowledge about the permanent features of the US political system, like the three branches of government and Marbury v Madison. Kids do study those topics, and they do pretty well, in my opinion, on standard questions about them. We almost never test current events on standardized tests. Teenagers, like adults, are misinformed about some aspects of current events. Right after the 2012 election, we asked 4,500 young adults: \u201dDoes the government spend more on Social Security or foreign aid?\u201d (What\u2019s the right answer, by the way?). Only 29% got that one right. This is the kind of thing that is rarely taught and rarely tested.<\/p>\n

    I said that the first myth was: Kids don\u2019t know any civics! The second is: They don\u2019t participate! According to Mark Brown in the Sun Times, \u201cIllinois State Comptroller Judy Baar Topinka was doing a post-election interview on WBEZ radio [after the November election] when host Tony Sarabia turned the subject to the comparatively lower turnout of young voters compared to older voters.Sarabia asked if young people don\u2019t vote because they feel their message is not being heard \u201cNo,\u201d Topinka shot back. \u201cThey don\u2019t vote because very often they\u2019re lazy, and they\u2019re too busy playing with their little machines . . . They\u2019re just too in tune with texting and not in tune with what\u2019s going on around them.\u201d<\/p>\n

    Well, they actually did vote in 2012. <\/strong>The youth voter turnout rate was near a record high in 2008 and then, contrary to expectations, reached the same level again in 2012 even though young people were clearly less enthusiastic about the candidates. Volunteering, meanwhile, reached record levels in the early 2000s and remains considerably higher than it was in the 1970s.<\/p>\n

    This is starting to sink in. I am hearing less \u201cYoung people don\u2019t participate\u201d than \u201cThese young people are responsible for electing Barack Obama, and that\u2019s a bad thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

    The third myth is that schools don\u2019t teach civics any more. Most (87.8%) respondents in our CIRCLE poll recalled taking civics in high school, or a class with another name that involved discussion of social and political issues. This rate is consistent with the fact that 86% of high school seniors in 2009 had a civics, government, or politics course on their transcripts. All 50 states have civics standards. Forty states require courses.<\/p>\n

    To be sure, the social studies curriculum has changed. In the mid-twentieth century, three courses were common: American government, civics (which emphasized the role of individuals in their own communities), and \u201cproblems of democracy\u201d (which involved reading and discussing the news.) The latter two courses basically disappeared, but economics and other social sciences have become far more common. Overall, the shift is not from more social studies to less, but from courses about current events to ones based on academic disciplines. That shift, however, is countered somewhat by the rapid rise in \u201cservice-learning\u201d: courses that combine hands-on community service with research and reflection learning. Between one quarter and one third of schools offer service-learning, down since 1999 but way up since 1979<\/p>\n

    Now, you might say that teaching a civics class is far from sufficient, and I would agree. As the Democracy Schools initiative in this state strongly argues, \u201ccivics\u201d is not<\/em> just the name of a course.<\/p>\n

    Civic education is accomplished by at least six deliberate activities in schools: 1) courses on history, government, social issues, law, and civics; 2) discussions of controversial public issues in various courses and events within schools; 3) service-learning;\u00a0 4) all extracurricular activities; 5) student voice in school governance; 6) simulations. In addition, who is assigned to which school, how the school is architecturally designed; school size; how parents affect school issues, etc. may matter.<\/p>\n

    Do we have a problem at all? Can we just go home and congratulate ourselves that civic education is in good shape. Unfortunately, no.<\/p>\n

    For one thing, other educative institutions have lost the capacity or will to recruit young citizens into public life: newspapers, unions, membership organizations have all shrunk. People are substantially less likely to work on community projects or to attend meetings than they were a generation ago. This decline most seriously affects working-class and poor people and the communities in which they live. People without college experience have virtually disappeared from civil society. By the way, I recommend Robert Sampson\u2019s brilliant book called Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect, published last year. Sampson finds that a strong organizational infrastructure boosts a community\u2019s capacity for collective civic action, which has substantial benefits for the neighborhood\u2019s safety and health.<\/p>\n

    The New York Times<\/em>\u2018 Benedict Carey recently used Sampson\u2019s analysis to write a good article<\/a> about the Chatham neighborhood in Chicago. Racially segregated, economically challenged, and threatened by occasional random violence from outside the community, Chatham still has so much collective efficacy that it can usually hold crime at bay. Carey writes, \u201cChatham has more than a hundred block groups, citizen volunteers who monitor the tidiness of neighborhood lawns, garbage, and noise, as well as organize events.\u201d When an off-duty Chicago police officer, Iraq War veteran, and civic leader named Thomas Wortham IV was shot to death outside of his parents\u2019 house, \u201cresidents of Chatham didn\u2019t wait long to act.\u201d They arranged public events that were intended to reinforce collective efficacy and organized crime watches and other practical efforts to suppress crime. They were so effective that essentially no<\/em> crimes were reported in the vicinity for months after Officer Wortham\u2019s tragic murder. (This example comes straight from Sampson\u2019s book but is retold in the Times.<\/em>)<\/p>\n

    How to help more American communities become like Chatham is not an easy question, but it could mean better civic education that is more focused on helping people to be active participants in local civic life.<\/p>\n

    Although our civic education and civic outcomes are OK on average and not in decline, we permit vast gaps in civic opportunities and civic engagement. Within a school of mixed SES, the most advantaged kids dominate the opportunities. When we compare diverse schools, the ones with the most affluent families provide many more opportunities. Universal public schooling was established to create universal civic engagement, but it actually exacerbates inequality.<\/p>\n

    The question is not: Why can more kids name the Three Stooges than three justices of the Supreme Court? Believe me, if that\u2019s what we want them to learn, we can teach it and test it, and they will memorize the names. The question is: Why are so many of our low-income and minority kids not being given opportunities to contribute to their communities in meaningful ways?<\/p>\n

    Civic education can be a pathway to better outcomes for young people, a path we lose if we fail to provide the least advantaged with high-quality civics. For instance, students who perform required service in courses are much more likely to graduate even when we adjust for demographics. In one randomized experiment, teenage girls who performed service and discussed issues were half as likely to become pregnant as the control group. Reading civic material seems to boost literacy.<\/p>\n

    A study that we conducted at Tufts found that undergraduates who were involved in community service over a sustained period were more likely to be happy\u2014psychologically fulfilled\u2014than other students, as long as they saw their service as addressing serious problems. YouthBuild USA is a program that enlists marginalized young people and gives them opportunities to serve and lead. One graduate of the program told my colleagues, \u201cDoing those kinds of things changes something inside of you, you develop a whole new kind of happiness inside of you\u2014that you don\u2019t feel like smoking weed, buying $150 dollar sneakers\u2014it\u2019s the kind of happiness that only you can get by doing good deeds and helping others.\u201d<\/p>\n

    Finally, what happens in the best civic education is a precious activity that is missing elsewhere in our society.<\/p>\n

    We have sorted ourselves into ideologically homogeneous communities and conversations in which we don\u2019t have to engaged with people who disagree. Bill Bishop argues in The Big Sort<\/em> that Americans now live in counties\u2014and other fixed geographical jurisdictions\u2014that are far more politically homogeneous than they were in previous generations, because we \u201cvote with our feet.\u201d But Diana Hess and other experts find ideological and philosophical diversity in almost all social studies classes, and good classes are places where, thanks to skillful moderation, diverse young people can learn from one another. Facing History and Ourselves is a model program in this respect and a rigorous national study finds that participating students gain tolerance for diverse views, understanding of history, and the capacity to make a difference.<\/p>\n

    For the most part<\/em>, our political and media leaders offer uncivil shouting matches, but good social studies classes are places where civility is taught and required.<\/p>\n

    For the most part<\/em>, citizens\u2019 talking about public issues is separated from any action, because we have constructed public institutions that fail to engage ordinary people in important work. But excellent civic education encourages young people to discuss and study issues, and then take constructive action.<\/p>\n

    For the most part<\/em>, our politics is manipulative. Experts\u2014politicians, pundits, consultants, marketers, leaders of advocacy groups, and the like\u2014study us, poll us, focus-group us, and assign us to gerrymandered electoral districts; they slice-and-dice us; and then they send us tailored messages designed to encourage us\u2014or to scare us\u2014into acting just how they want.<\/p>\n

    This is true of liberal politicians as well as conservative ones. It is true of public interest lobbies as well as business lobbies. It is true of big nonprofits as well as political parties.<\/p>\n

    Americans know they are being manipulated, and they resent it. They want to be able to decide for themselves what is important, what should be done, and then act in common to address their problems. They are interested in what other people think; they want to get out of what students call their \u201cbubbles.\u201d They want an open-ended, citizen-centered politics in which the outcomes are not predetermined by professionals.<\/p>\n

    Civic education, at its best, is open-ended politics. We don\u2019t try to manipulate our students or neighbors into adopting opinions or solutions that we think are right\u2014-at least, we shouldn\u2019t. We give them opportunities to deliberate and reflect and then act in ways that seem best to them. In a time of increasingly sophisticated manipulative politics, these opportunities are precious.<\/p>\n

    We know what works at the classroom level\u2014the six proven practices that I mentioned earlier and that are centerpieces for the Democracy Schools Initiative. Just to repeat, those are:<\/p>\n

      \n
    1. Simply studying civics<\/li>\n
    2. Moderated discussions of current, controversial issues<\/li>\n
    3. Service-learning when well done<\/li>\n
    4. All extracurricular activities as opportunities for leading groups<\/li>\n
    5. Student voice in schools<\/li>\n
    6. Simulations<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      The policy question is tougher. It raises some dilemmas:<\/p>\n

        \n
      • If we don\u2019t test civics, it gets dropped or downplayed. But if we test it with standardized tests, they drive instruction toward knowledge and they create a new way for kids of schools to fail (unless we relax other tests). Many things can be tested but it us unethical as well as difficult to test values and out-of-school behavior.<\/li>\n
      • If we don\u2019t require civics courses, they get dropped. But some requirements (such as the service-learning mandate in MD) seem to produce bad quality<\/em>.<\/li>\n
      • In general, when we studied the mix of existing state civic education policies and their effects, we find NO EFFECTS at all (despite significant variation in the policies)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

        How can that be? For one thing, the existing policies are very modest. Some states require one course on American government; others do not. Some states mandate a multiple-choice test of civic knowledge; most do not. Some states allow early voting or registering on the day of the vote. But no state has policies that make civic education a priority throughout k-12 education and also \u00a0assesses higher-order outcomes such as deliberation or policy analysis.<\/p>\n

        Besides, quality<\/em> matters so much. No policy reform, by itself, can guarantee adequate and fair civic education in our schools. What students experience is affected by a whole range of factors, including:<\/p>\n

        requirements, opportunities, standards, evaluations, curricula, textbooks, materials, local civic associations, and teachers\u2019 education and certification for civics.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

        These factors must be \u2026<\/p>\n

        \u00a0well designed, thoughtful, ideologically balanced, mutually consistent, developmentally appropriate, and broadly and equitably implemented in all of our diverse and largely self-governing school systems.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

        Reforming civics is a marathon, not a sprint. Rather than expect any reform to solve our civic education problem, we need to be there year in an year out, working on quality and equality.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

        (Chicago) These are my remarks for tonight’s Illinois Civic Mission Coalition “Annual Convening.”\u00a0 When Americans turn their attention to civic education in k-12 schools, very frequently they make the following claims: Kids today don\u2019t know anything about government and civics! Kids today don\u2019t vote! Schools today don\u2019t teach civics the way they used to when […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10979","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-advocating-civic-education","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10979","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10979"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10979\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10985,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10979\/revisions\/10985"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10979"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10979"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10979"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}