Orozco’s Gods of the Modern World

Posted on February 6, 2015 by Peter

(Hanover, NH) It’s amusing to be at Dartmouth, talking earnestly with high school civics teachers–after a week of thinking about the civic mission of higher education–while nearby stand the forbidding professors of “Gods of the Modern World,” a pertinent panel from Jose Clemente Orozco’s “Epic of American Civilization” (1932-4):

While behind them the world burns, the skeletal academics in full regalia bring into being a new skeletal graduate or colleague. The skeletal fetuses of other students are embalmed in display cases over piles of musty volumes.

On the other hand … Dartmouth paid Orozco to paint this critique, the college preserved his work despite the resulting controversy, and now they proudly display and assiduously study this exemplary Mexican mural. One could conclude that academia is a haven of free inquiry, that elite institutions can profit from even the most radical assaults, that art is immortal, that art is toothless … Pick your lesson.

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civic education and deeper learning

Posted on February 5, 2015 by Peter

Today, Jobs for the Future (JFF) a national nonprofit that advocates for all youth to gain the skills they need to succeed in the economy, releases a paper entitled “Civic Education and Deeper Learning” by me and CIRCLE Deputy Director Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg. This paper was funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation as part of its Deeper Learning Initiative. It was discussed at a Harvard Graduate School of Education event: “More than College Readiness: Engaging Students in Work and Civic Life.”

The Hewlett Deeper Learning initiative envisions k-12 students “using their knowledge and skills in a way that prepares them for real life.” When deeper lear`ning occurs, students “are mastering core academic content, like reading, writing, math, and science, while learning how to think critically, collaborate, communicate effectively, direct their own learning, and believe in themselves (known as an ‘academic mindset’).” Deeper Learning should occur in all disciplines and should encourage interdisciplinary learning.

In “Civic Education and Deeper Learning,” we argue that k-12 civic education must be strengthened to meet these goals. The best civic education exemplifies deeper learning, but many students receive more superficial and less interactive forms of civics. For its part, the deeper learning agenda must encompass civic education, because among the topics that students must learn to think critically about, discuss, and collaborate on are social and political issues.

We argue that aligning civic education with deeper learning points the way to pedagogical, curricular, and policy innovations that will be overlooked if we think of civic education as merely the acquisition of basic facts about the political system—the view that seems to drive such policies as requiring students to pass multiple-choice civics tests.

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recent research on state laws and youth voting

Posted on February 4, 2015 by Peter

In 2013, we used our own survey data, public data, and a literature review to assemble evidence on the effects of state voting laws on youth. I would say the highlights were:

For young people without college experience, the existence of a photo ID law in their state predicted lower turnout in 2012, even after we included many other potential explanations in our statistical models. Photo ID requirements may also disenfranchise some eligible college students, but the law did not lower the college student turnout rate appreciably. The overall turnout effects of new photo ID rules were modest in 2o12, but these laws were met with active opposition that year, so their effects may worsen in the future.
Allowing people to register to vote on the same day that they vote had a positive effect on youth turnout in 2012, and that finding is consistent with previous research on other elections.

We have had another election since 2013 and also seen a lot of new research using historical voting data. I would note these findings:

Allowing early voting is often thought to increase turnout only among people who are likely to vote anyway, but Ashok, Feder, McGrath, and Hersh find some evidence that young voters who were likely to be targeted by political campaigns in the weeks before the 2012 election (because they lived in high-profile swing states), had higher turnout if they could vote early. The argument here is that young people vote when mobilized, and early voting helps mobilization efforts.
Citrin, Green, and Levy find that informing minority voters about photo ID requirements raises their turnout (by informing these voters about the process or by making them angry about the potential barrier to their participation). It does not discourage them from voting. This is an argument for getting the word out, as long as photo ID laws are on the books. It is also a warning that photo ID laws may have worse suppressive power once the salience of these now-controversial laws declines.
Another policy option is to allow 16- or 17-year-olds to preregister, so that they are automatically registered on their 18th birthday. That reform has the advantage of allowing outreach to occur in schools and gets youth on the rolls at the earliest possible opportunity. The sooner a young person is registered, the sooner she can be canvassed and mobilized by parties. Holbein and Hillygus find that preregistration boosts youth turnout, and they find that the youth electorate diversifies, so that Republicans do better than they would if turnout were lower.
Keith Gunnar Bentele and Erin O’Brien argue that states are more likely to impose restrictive voting measures if they have higher minority populations, higher and/or rising minority turnout, and if the state is both competitive and has a Republican legislative majority. This is circumstantial empirical evidence in favor of the view that these restrictions have partisan motivations.

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a new youth political poll

Posted on February 3, 2015 by Peter

The first youth poll of the 2016 election is out, and it appears to be solid methodologically, with a phone sample and 1,000 respondents (up to age 34). It’s from Fusion. I am not interested in the young adults’ preference among the presidential candidates, because now is way too early to be forecasting the election. (For the record, young adults prefer Hillary right now.) But I am interested in these nuggets:

Party and ideology: The biggest group is composed of Independents (46%), but when you ask which way people “lean,” the results are 43% Democrats and 31% Republicans. (Most political science research finds that Independent leaners behave exactly like party members.) Fifty-seven percent say government is “helpful,” much higher than the national rate and a sign of a persistent Democratic tilt. About two thirds say they belong to the same party as their parents. It looks as if the remaining third has mostly shifted left of their older relatives.

Knowledge: Only 23% of respondents can name one of their US Senators. The rates are 20% for women, 18% for 18- to 24-year-olds, 16% for Latinos, and 10 percent for African-Americans. This is a form of political knowledge that I would really like to be higher. If you don’t know who represents you, you are not able to hold your representatives accountable. Note that this is a distinct problem from the scores on civics exams, because standardized tests never ask about current facts like the names of one’s elected officials. If we were guided by standardized test scores, we would spend less time on current events, not more time.

Issues: The top issue is the usual–“jobs and the economy”–at 19%. Health care follows at 10%, and education, at 7%. Police brutality is the top issue for 1%, as is racial harmony. Climate change is also at 1%. The most striking finding here is the wide dispersal of top issues. As I often note, young adults are not an interest group. They do not have one or a few defining issues. They face all the issues that confront us as human beings, from taxes (1%) to immigration (4%).

Age of candidates: We are often asked whether young voters prefer younger candidates. That question will come up again if Hilary Clinton is the Democratic nominee. For what it’s worth, this survey asked whether respondents would be more likely to vote “if there were more young candidates.” Seventy percent thought it would make no difference. Twenty-six percent saw it as a positive change, and 6% thought they would be less likely to vote if there were more young candidates.

Comedy: And if comedians ran for president, the leading candidate among young adults would be Colbert, followed pretty closely by Stewart and Fay.

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on daily blogging after 12 years

Posted on February 2, 2015 by Peter

I started this blog on Jan. 8, 2003 and have posted virtually every work day since then. Each January 8, I have posted some thoughts about the blog on its blogaversary (while trying to avoid such self-absorption for the rest of the year). This January, I forgot, but then Andrew Sullivan announced he would stop posting daily after more than 15 years, and various prominent bloggers reflected on whether the whole form was dying. (See Ezra Klein or Kevin Drum.) Those articles reminded me to pause and say something about the evolution of this blog and its context.

In the early 2000s, most blogs were the property and invention of individuals who sought to participate in a national or global conversation called (with tongues partly in cheek) the blogosphere. Some, like Sullivan, were already famous, but others wanted to become pundits or public intellectuals without needing the approval of paid editors and other gatekeepers. These bloggers linked to each other and replied to each others’ arguments. As I noted on Dec. 6, 2004, the blogosphere had a “long tail” distribution, with a few sites attracting a vast majority of the links and many sites drawing only a few. I was definitely out on the long tail, very occasionally noticed by the high-traffic blogs. But, apart from its lower traffic, my blog was otherwise similar to the big ones–self-published, unpaid, part of a network connected by html links. You found new blogs to follow by seeing links on established blogs.

Most of the really popular bloggers are now paid for their work and blog on platforms owned by firms like The Atlantic or Mother Jones or by the bloggers themselves. Some did not start as bloggers but were well-known editorialists who now also maintain blogs. I bookmark a few of these and still read them frequently (now on my phone as well as a computer). They are news sources, comparable to a newspaper, and they draw my attention because of their professionalism and their volume. I am unlikely to bookmark a page that is updated less than once a day.

Meanwhile (like a few billion other people), I follow a lot of individuals and organizations through Facebook and Twitter. Some of these people link to their own blogs, which I read when the summaries interest me. Others post substantive comments on the social media sites themselves. Although short, these tweets and status updates play a similar role to blog posts ca. 2003. One difference is that I personally know and like most of the people I follow. Because these are social networks, they appropriately include a high proportion of baby photos and vacation updates along with political commentary. The link structure of the whole network is more transient and less public than it used to be when people pasted html links into their blog posts.

The traffic on this blog has been remarkably stable for a very long time, averaging between 6,000 and 8,000 visits per month in both 2006 and 2014 (two years for which I saved data). But I think more people are now also catching glimpses via social media. My most popular post of 2014, in terms of the number of unique page views, was “Foucault and Neoliberalism.” I was never able to find the Tweet that sent 6,000 people there in a few days, nor did I see many replies, but somehow it became part of a social media conversation prompted by a Jacobin Magazine article.

One difference between a blog and social media is that the former builds up a public collection of searchable writing. Of my top 10 most visited posts in 2014, two are notes on famous poems (Auden’s “Sept. 1 1939″ and Elizabeth Bishop’s “At the Fishhouses.”) They appear fairly high on Google searches for those two poems, and I suspect they are being consulted by students facing essay assignments. The most common searches that take people here include “types of freedom,” “kinds of freedom,” and variants thereof, which send people to a post in which I suggested that freedom came in at least six forms. Again, I suspect that students are working on class assignments and Googling their way here. These posts are more like archived publications than social media contributions.

I guess what I aspire to is some kind of durability. I’d like to write things that people still want to read in a while. Although I strive to engage with events in the world, I’d prefer not to be merely topical. When blogging began, it seemed to be highly responsive, nimble, offering a very short path from conception to publication–but also prone to superficiality. In the era of social media, a long-standing blog is beginning to look more like a curated collection of relatively careful writing than an ephemeral contribution to the day’s discourse. And that’s why I’m still at it.

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Tisch talks on the humanities and civic engagement

Posted on January 30, 2015 by Peter

The Initiatives in the Public Humanities at Tisch College sponsor this series of monthly brown bag lunches during the spring semester of 2015. The Tisch Talks in the Humanities seek to identify areas of mutual interest and concern through conversations informed by contemporary civic and cultural practices.

All sessions take place at 12pm at Tisch College, Rabb Room, Lincoln Filene Hall
Moderated by Diane O’Donoghue, Senior Fellow for the Humanities, Tisch College

Feb 2: Source @Sourcing
Marie-Claire Beaulieu, Assistant Professor, Department of Classics
Jennifer Eyl, Assistant Professor, Department of Religion

Professors Beaulieu and Eyl will discuss the impact of contemporary practices of knowledge production, such as found in the digital humanities and open-source scholarship, on the audiences and reception of classical and biblical texts.

March 30: Generative Empathies
Amahl Bishara, Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology
Doris Sommer, Ira Jewell Williams, Jr. Professor of Romance Languages and
Literature and Director, Cultural Agents Initiative, Harvard University
Peter Levine, Associate Dean for Research, Tisch College

Professors Bishara, Sommer, and Levine will explore current discourses around the meanings and uses of “empathy,” a topic with implications that are both compelling and complex.

April 27: Neighboring
Penn Loh, Director, Master in Public Policy Program and Community
Practice, Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning
Peter Probst, Professor and Chair, Department of Art and Art History

Professor Probst and Mr. Loh will discuss the implications of proximity as the provocation to objects and acts of “neighboring.”

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Greece and Germany and getting to yes

Posted on January 29, 2015 by Peter

The situation involving Greece and the European Union is a complex game, with numerous players and potentially many phases. Just as an example, voters in Spain are players who will have a chance to choose the new government in December; they may opt to support Podemos, the relatively left-wing Spanish party, if they think that the Greeks did well by choosing Syriza last week.

Nevertheless, we can dramatically simplify the game to have two key players: Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Tsipras can accept some level of debt relief, from zero to 100%, or walk out of the Euro. Merkel can support some level of debt relief, or let Greece walk.

There are principles on both sides. My sympathies lie much closer to Syriza, on the grounds that: austerity is generally bad economics; Greek residents count for as much (morally) as Northern Europeans; and the Greek meltdown, although abetted by poor national governance, was mainly a consequence of neoliberal economic policies driven by Germany and other Northern economies in their interests. However, a German Christian Democrat or a British Tory could make a sincere case against leniency, based on moral hazard, the virtues of fiscal responsibility, Greeks’ responsibility for Greek debt, and other such arguments.

My suggestion of the day is based on Getting to YES: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In, the 1981 best-seller by Roger Fisher and William L. Ury. It is a popular and breezy book but based on some serious analysis. Fisher and Ury present two forms of positional bargaining in this table:

FisherandUry

In this case, Mr. Tsipras could opt to be hard or soft in his approach to the European Central Bank and other key European players. Fisher and Ury would predict that either approach will yield a bad outcome for Greece and for Europe as a whole, because people have systematic weaknesses that make positional bargaining go badly, whether the players opt to be nice or tough. By the way, that prediction holds even if Mr. Tsipras is completely correct on all matters of principle: this is a game, not a seminar.

Instead, Fisher and Ury propose “negotiation on the merits,” which has four key features:

“Separate the people from the problem.” Create settings in which negotiators who have not publicly defined one another as adversaries are asked to address the problem and propose solutions.
Interests: Drop the debate about principles (ban words like “neoliberalism” and “fiscal responsibility”) and just try to maximize the outcomes for the various parties.
Multiply options: Don’t be satisfied with the choices that seem to confront the players right now, e.g., Greece either leaves or stays in the Eurozone. Instead, deliberately brainstorm a whole range of options. Could a massive new EU investment in some public good, such as climate mitigation, be designed especially to benefit Greece? Could a new loan package be offered simultaneously to Portugal, Spain, and Greece? (etc.)
Criteria: bring in a neutral party to establish concretely measurable objectives. Don’t ask how much each player must (or should) give up, but rather whether the agreement maximizes these objectives.

There is much more in the book, but this offers a flavor.

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why not require high school students to pass the citizenship exam?

Posted on January 28, 2015 by Peter

FOX

Arizona recently passed legislation requiring all high school students to pass the test required for naturalization as a US citizen. About a dozen other states are considering similar bills. Some of my friends are supporters, and the idea seems attractive for several reasons. It sounds like a way to strengthen civic education, and it subjects native-born Americans to the same test we require of immigrants, which may seem just.

I am nevertheless against the idea. First, I am worried that the time allocated to civics will shrink as a result. After all, this is an easy test. You can see all the questions and answers in advance. It takes a matter of hours to study for it. People who do not read English still memorize the answers and pass it, without comprehension. If passing this test comes to be seen as adequate preparation for citizenship, there will be no reason to spend a semester on civics, for the demands on math and science are much higher.

Importantly, more than 90% of US high school seniors have spent a semester in a civics course. They have also spent a year on US history, which is actually the topic of most questions on the naturalization test.

That brings me to a bigger objection. Requiring a single, short test of concrete factual knowledge in civics would be a step forward if most kids never faced such a test. But at least 90% of students do face regular testing that is quite a bit more demanding than the naturalization exam. If you take a US history sequence and an American government course–as most students must–then you are tested, at least by your teacher and, in many cases, also by the state.

If our problem were a total neglect of civics, then we might begin by requiring a simple test. But that is not the situation.

Instead, one major problem is that we do not take the time to teach (nor assess) the deeper and more demanding civic skills that we really need–such skills as following and interpreting a complex current issue, or advocating in a court or legislature, or developing an argument for a public policy. These are the kinds of outcomes that tend to be missing from state assessments. I don’t see how a new test like Arizona’s will increase the time or effort spent on learning these skills. I can see us spending less time if adequate performance on civics comes to be equated with passing the naturalization test.

The other problem is that adult Americans don’t know basic facts about the political system. According to today’s New York Times story about civics, “A survey last year by the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania found that more than a third of respondents could not name a single branch of the United States government, while fewer than a quarter knew that a two-thirds vote of the House and Senate is required to override a presidential veto.”

But most of these adults had to study precisely these topics in school and faced tests on them. So the problem is that they don’t remember the concrete factual information (much as I have forgotten my high school chemistry). Now, why would they forget these facts? I would posit: because they have not formed habits of actively engaging with news and current events. You will remember the branches of the government if you are interested in President Obama’s current tensions with the Republican Congress. If you don’t follow such news, you can easily forget what you crammed for in 11th grade civics.

Thus the second problem is really that civics is often boring. It doesn’t inspire interest that will continue after the test. And again, I don’t see how the Arizona legislation will address that problem, but I can see it making it worse.

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diagramming Sarah Palin’s Iowa speech

Posted on January 27, 2015 by Peter

Northeastern political scientist Nick Beauchamp has developed a remarkable, free tool (Plot Mapper) that identifies keywords in a stream of text and plots them on a two-dimensional plane. The words are placed automatically but meaningfully (using a form of principal components analysis), and a line traces the order in which the ideas unfolded over time.

Beauchamp’s analysis of the 2015 State of the Union was covered in the Washington Post. He demonstrated the neat arc of the president’s rhetoric:

I wanted to try the tool, so I looked around for another recent speech that might contrast with the SOTU. Sarah Palin’s Iowa speech has been widely panned on the right as well as the left, being called a “tragedy”–or at least “an interminable ramble.” I pasted the text into Plot Mapper and this is what I got:

I actually think the quality gap between these two texts is a little obscured by this form of analysis. “America,” “country,” and “people” seem to play similar roles in both speeches. We also see an actual organizing structure to Palin’s words: she moves from nationalism through right-populism (real people are conservative) to conclude with the local (veterans in Iowa). Finding such an arc may be giving the speaker a bit too much credit. Nevertheless, the tool has enormous potential for comparing discourse. I’d be especially interested in using it to analyze how people affect each others’ ideas when they deliberate.

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Frontiers of Democracy 2015

Posted on January 26, 2015 by Peter

Frontiers of Democracy 2015 will take place in Boston, MA on June 25-27.

While powerful forces work against justice and civil society around the world, committed and innovative people strive to understand and improve citizens’ engagement with government, with community, and with each other. Every year, Frontiers of Democracy convenes some of these practitioners and scholars for organized discussions and informal interactions. Topics include deliberative democracy, civil and human rights, social justice, community organizing and development, civic learning and political engagement, the role of higher education in democracy, Civic Studies, media reform and citizen media production, civic technology, civic environmentalism, and common pool resource management. Devoted to new issues and innovative solutions, this conference is truly at the frontiers of democracy.

More information, including a link to a registration page, can be found here.

Frontiers of Democracy is a public conference, open to anyone who registers. It follows the Summer Institute of Civic Studies, a seminar that is accepting applicants for 2015.

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