These are some notes for a presentation I will make later today at the New England Association of Schools & Colleges conference. NEASC is one of the six regional accrediting associations in the US. It works by “developing and applying standards, assessing the educational effectiveness of pre-school, elementary, middle, secondary, and postsecondary educational institutions.”
As measurement and accountability have become more important at all levels of education (from pre-K to graduate school), the measurement of civic outcomes has generally been forgotten. It is not clear that civic education has been dropped as a result. All states still have some kind of civic education requirement at the k-12 level. Most colleges still have programs that emphasize service or activism. However, levels of attention, innovation, and investment have clearly suffered because we do not measure civics very seriously.
Measuring anything valuable and complicated is a challenge, and trying to improve any form of education by imposing measures from the outside is always somewhat problematic. But measuring civic education raises special challenges:
- Civic engagement is intrinsically interpersonal. Being a citizen means relating to other citizens and to institutions. Measures of individual civic performance (such as multiple-choice tests, essays, or surveys of individual behavior) may miss the point altogether.
- Citizens engage on current issues that are often local. That means that the topics of their engagement vary and change rapidly. Standardized tests of civics–simply because they are standardized–must emphasize abstract and perennial questions (such as the US Constitution) and omit equally important current and local matters.
- Civic engagement can be either good or very bad, depending on the means, methods and objectives of the participants. Margaret Mead said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” But Mussolini and his fellow fascists started as a small group of thoughtful and committed citizens. They changed the world for the worse. Measures of activity or impact that are value-free fail to distinguish between fascists and Freedom Riders.
- In many fields, we can decide what students should learn by assessing whether they are prepared to succeed in their chosen profession or in the labor market more generally. For instance, good engineering education makes good engineers, and good engineers are those who succeed in engineering jobs. Likewise, good citizens succeed in democracy and civil society. But what “success” as a citizen means is controversial. That is what radicals, liberals, conservatives, libertarians, patriots, cosmopolitans, Greens, and others argue about: what we owe to each other (and to nature and future generations) and how we should relate to the community and the state.
- When assessing education overall, it makes sense to ask whether it enhances the long-term well-being of the students, which can be measured in terms of earnings, health, or psychological flourishing. Some evidence suggests that being an engaged citizen boosts such outcomes. For instance, being able to define and address problems with peers is a civic skill that can also pay off in the labor market. Contributing to your community can make you happier. But the relationship between being an excellent citizen and flourishing as an individual is complex. In his great book Freedom Summer, Doug McAdam shows that the volunteers paid a severe personal price for their efforts to register Black voters in Mississippi in 1963. They were worse off than a comparison group in terms of happiness, career success, and health ten years later. That is no argument against the Freedom Summer program, which wasn’t meant for their benefit. It was one part of a glorious struggle against Jim Crow. To measure it in terms of the developmental benefits for the participants would have been a travesty.
I think it’s essential to measure civic education in an era of assessment and accountability–if only so that educators and students can track their own progress. Assessments must be interactive, not private and individual. Evaluation must consider ethics and values; it is not enough to act or to affect the world–you have to make it better. The question of what to measure is somewhat controversial because it relates to questions about what kind of society we should have. But there is a lot of common ground and room for compromise. In any event, we should decide what makes a good citizen not by asking what skills pay off in the marketplace or what civic activities boost students’ welfare. We must start with a theory of the good democratic society and then ask what skills, values, knowledge, and commitments we need from the next generation of citizens.
In my recent book, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For, I argue that citizenship fundamentally means: (1) deliberating with other citizens about what should be done, (2) actually working with other people to address problems and reflecting on the results, and (3) forming relationships of loyalty and trust. That theory derives from my study of politics, not primarily from a theory of education or youth development. I argue that the US political system depends on these three aspects of citizenship, all of which are in decline for deep, structural reasons. If I am right, these are the attainments that we should try to teach, and our measures should capture whether people can (1) deliberate, (2) collaborate, and (3) form civic relationships. If I am wrong, the counterargument should be a different theory of what our society needs from its people.
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