Category Archives: advocating civic education

podcast on civic education and engagement in Catholic communities

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Here, starting at minute 39, is my recent conversation with Msgr. Kevin Sullivan, Executive Director of Catholic Charities, New York, on his SiriusXM Radio Show, “Just Love.” We talked about why Millennials volunteer so much (I named a combination of idealism and structured opportunities and expectations), why civic education seems to work well in Catholic schools, why the media is biased against Millennials, why Obama ’08 and Sanders ’12 drew youth support, the difference between service and social change, and the argument for expanding service opportunities.

“Explainer” on civic education

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Over at The Conversation, I have a new article that’s meant to be a short overview of civic education today. It begins:

Any election demands knowledge, attention and wisdom from the whole electorate. When a campaign season does not seem to be going well, there’s often angst about whether the public has been sufficiently educated.

Anxious eyes turn to our public schools.

For instance, writing in The Atlantic recently, Jonathan Zimmerman, professor of education and history at New York University, decried the incivility of the 2016 campaign and named “a flaw with civic education.” He wrote: “Put simply, schools in the United States don’t teach the country’s future citizens how to engage respectfully across their political differences.”

I have studied and advocated civic education for almost two decades. I believe civic education must be improved in the United States. First, though, it’s important to understand the condition of America’s civic education.

new article: “Join a club! Or a team – both can make good citizens”

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This new article explores reasons that k-12 athletics may boost civic engagement, as well as some important differences between sports and civic life. Student associations in general teach civic skills, and sports are best understood as examples of associations. Indeed, high school teams should be more like standard school clubs, in which participation is voluntary and the students are primarily responsible for managing the group.

Citation: Peter Levine, “Join a club! Or a team – both can make good citizens,” Phi Delta Kappan, vol. 97, no. 8 (May 2016), pp 24-27

the question each citizen must ask

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(New York City) “The Question Each Citizen Must Ask” is my new piece in Educational Leadership, the magazine for k-12 school administrators (vol. 73, no. 6, March 2016, pp. 30-34. It begins:

When universal public education was invented in the United States, visionary proponents like Horace Mann believed they were building the first large-scale democracy in the history of the world. They realized that citizens would have to be educated to play their parts in a system that depended on millions of wise and active participants. They made a courageous bet that children could be taught to make democracy work.

I argue that civic education must equip students to ask the citizen’s core question, and I explain what that is and what pedagogies are most promising. (The article is also available via academia.edu).

teaching online civic engagement

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For several years, Joe Kahne and his colleagues have been conducting intensive research on young people’s use of digital media for politics and what that means for education. Their research has taken the form of large-scale youth surveys, interviews, and experiments. The following is a broad and detailed new article that pulls together much of their research and provides concrete examples of classroom practice:

Joseph Kahne, Erica Hodgin & Elyse Eidman-Aadahl, “Redesigning Civic Education for the Digital Age: Participatory Politics and the Pursuit of Democratic Engagement,” Theory & Research in Social Education, Volume 44, Issue 1, 2016, pp. 1-35 (open access)

The authors address two concerns that I have raised in previous work. First, “Many efforts to produce and circulate content will confront what Levine has termed ‘the audience problem’ (2008, p. 129). Simply put, many blogs or other digital content may get relatively few views and little or no response.” I would add that this is almost a logical inevitability because there aren’t enough eyeballs to allow millions of content-producers all to reach large audiences. As I can testify from years of experience, the median blog or video reaches just a few. The authors reply:

Of course, many off-line political activities also fail to engage many members of the public. We would classify a blog that addresses a political issue but has few readers an act of participatory politics just as we would classify a protest that people ignore as a political activity. That said, clearly, the power of public voice is diminished if one fails to reach a public. This reality highlights the need for educators to help set realistic expectations and to support and scaffold activities so that youth can more effectively produce and circulate political content.

Second, “a number of scholars (Levine, in press; Sifry, 2014) have detailed ways that individuals’ and non-institutionalized groups’ efforts to achieve greater voice by leveraging the power of the digital media often fail to prompt institutional change. Expressing caution, Milner (2010) wrote, ‘[youth who] turn their backs on [institutional] politics in favor of individual expression will continue to find their priorities at the top of society’s wish list–and at the bottom of the ‘to do’ list”(p. 5).” Here I would add that loose online movements are frequently defeated by disciplined organizations, such as corporations, armies, and security agencies. But the authors reply:

one might note that a wide range of significant change efforts ranging from #BlackLivesMatter, to the DREAMer movement, to the protests against SOPA, to the push for marriage equality have employed digital media in ways that changed public attitudes and that these changes have enabled new legislation. Still, the concern remains. Watkins (2014) noted, for example, that when it comes to digital media, youth are often “power users” (frequent users), but they are not necessarily “powerful users” (influential users). In order for youth to realize the full potential of participatory politics, they will frequently need to both understand and connect their efforts to institutional politics. Helping youth identify ways to build bridges from voice to influence is vitally important.

These are just two of many issues discussed in this extensive and deeply researched survey article.

civic education in the year of Trump: neutrality vs. civil courage

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In the minds of many dedicated civic educators, two deep instincts are clashing as Donald Trump dominates the news media and the Republican presidential race.

One instinct is to try to be as neutral as possible about issues and candidates. It’s dangerous for an arm of the state, a public school, to take sides on political issues. Citizens are forced to pay for public education. Kids are especially impressionable and form a captive audience in the public school classroom. Teachers have great power since they can influence students’ educational progress and economic success. Arguably, the most ethical way for a public school teacher to treat students and their families is as bearers of authentic political views that should be respected in the classroom. Furthermore, students can learn a great deal by wrestling with genuine ideological diversity. Arguing from diverse perspectives is a challenging educational practice that teaches reasoning, interpretation, and perspective-taking. Finally, we suffer from a particular problem today: ideological polarization and a failure to interact productively across partisan lines. The social studies classroom–as Diana Hess and Paula McAvoy show–almost always harbors ideological diversity and can be a precious place to cultivate productive discussions.

The other instinct is to preserve the constitutional republic by teaching students to honor and protect its core principles when they are threatened from within or without. The ultimate test of civic education is the graduate’s readiness to resist assaults on human rights and the rule of law–if necessary, with her life. We must learn to be upstanders, not bystanders. In the Federal Republic of Germany, this outcome is called “civil courage.” A measure of successful civic education might arise if a new authoritarian ordered a particular minority group to wear the equivalent of the Nazis’ yellow star. In that case, every citizen who had learned Zivilcourage would put the star on. In the US, civil courage is a central goal of certain civic education programs, such as Facing History and Ourselves (whose roots were in Holocaust education), but it’s also consistent with provisions in many state standards documents.

This year, one of our major parties is likely to nominate a man who has been called, by leading figures in his own party, a threat to fundamental constitutional principles and human rights. Under such circumstances, the two agendas I’ve presented above come into conflict.

For instance, normally I’d recommend k-12 teachers to assign their students to debate the issues in the presidential campaign. I think they should often assign students to sides so that they don’t just argue from their own beliefs. But would you assign a student of Mexican heritage or a Muslim student to take the side of Donald Trump? If not, why would you assign any student to that role?

In 2012, according to a CIRCLE poll, 72% of high school government teachers required their students to watch a presidential debate. I endorse that idea. But when the debate was like last night’s fiasco, how should the assignment be presented and how should the experience be debriefed? More than one of the candidates behaved in ways that would be completely unacceptable in an 8th grade classroom. Should the teacher note that?

Andy Sabl wrote some years ago:

Professors worship at the altar of “maybe.” We prize the intellectual courage to say, “I’m not sure what’s right.” In the process, we slight what the Germans have learned — the hard way — to call civil courage: saying that you do know what’s right even when those around you are getting it backward. Training students in supple thought, do we undermine decent character?

I agree, especially during the year of Trump. But it’s not easy to decide precisely what counts as an assault on essential values rather than an expression of free speech in a rough-and-tumble competitive democracy. In Germany, the label “civil courage” gets used for people who stand up for immigrants–and also for people who criticize immigrants in the face of what they decry as political correctness.

Some criteria for deciding when to be neutral and when to stand up for principles won’t quite work. For instance, I wouldn’t distinguish an acceptable “mainstream” from radical alternatives that should be beyond consideration. Donald Trump’s opinions have broad and deep roots in American culture. As a factual matter, they are mainstream. Besides, our political debate is too narrow; radical voices can be salutary. Bernie Sanders is not actually very radical, but he’s arguably further from the empirical mainstream than Donald Trump is, and I think that (at worst) Sanders is improving the national debate. I would object if teachers presented Sanders as some kind of threat because he challenges the status quo.

Also, it’s not Trump alone who uses propaganda–however you define that–or who ignores constitutional limits, or who holds some lives cheap. I am a defender of the current administration, but this president routinely orders drone strikes that kill innocent civilians in foreign countries. So if teachers should drop their neutrality and demonstrate civil courage against Trump, why not also against the current, center-left administration?

In sum, I think this issue is genuinely hard. Valid principles conflict. It would be a mistake for public schools to abandon the quest for neutrality and enter the political fray against the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party. But they would also err if they taught students that it’s their responsibility to protect the republic and then presented a clear and present threat to the constitution as just another campaign. There are few sharp lines in politics, and good judgment usually requires deciding where on a continuum to make a stand. Teachers and schools should and will reach subtly different conclusions about the 2016 election, depending on their local communities’ norms and their students’ demographics and opinions, their personal commitments, and the way the campaign actually plays out. (Will the threat to constitutional rights become even more explicit, or much less so?) But I think everyone who has a role in educating the next generation of American citizens must at least think seriously about these tensions.

every Republican president since 1901 has insisted that the US is a democracy

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Anyone who works on civic education or grassroots civic engagement will sooner or later encounter critics who say, “The US is not a democracy–it is a republic” as if that were a profound objection to teaching or practicing democratic values. In a longer post, I analyzed the terms “democracy” and “republic” in the language of the Framers and subsequent authors. I argued that: (1) populist Framers like Jefferson used the word “republic” to mean what can also accurately be called a democracy, and (2) the original Constitution did include undemocratic elements, but they have been deliberately removed by the 15th, 17th, 19th, and 24th amendments to the Constitution. That means that although the Framers would call the United States a republic, it is now a democracy, at least in aspiration.

Here I would like to emphasize a related point. During the 20th century, almost all American political leaders asserted that the US was a democracy. Conservatives tended to be more sanguine about how much of a democracy we actually had. Left-liberals were the ones who argued that America was not authentically democratic because of persistent injustices. It is only in the last decade that it has become a talking-point for some conservatives that the US is (and ought to be) a republic and not a democracy.

I have quickly found one quotation from each GOP president since McKinley in which the president called the US a democracy. This was the result of 30 minutes of web searching; many more examples could be found:

[*It’s been noted that I accidentally omitted William Howard Taft, and it’s not easy to find a positive statement by him about democracy. He was, indeed, an opponent of the direct-democracy reforms of his era. So Taft may be an exception.]

  • Teddy Roosevelt, “A Charter of Democracy” (1912): “I believe in pure democracy. With Lincoln, I hold that ‘this country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it.'”
  • Warren Harding, Inauguration Address (1921): “Because we cherish ideals of justice and peace, because we appraise international comity and helpful relationship no less highly than any people of the world, we aspire to a high place in the moral leadership of civilization, and we hold a maintained America, the proven Republic, the unshaken temple of representative democracy, to be not only an inspiration and example, but the highest agency of strengthening good will and promoting accord on both continents.”
  • Calvin Coolidge’s Address at the Celebration of the 150th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence (1926) is probably the most interesting, because it is an explicit and rather scholarly argument that the Framers had created a democracy. “Placing every man on a plane where he acknowledged no superiors, where no one possessed any right to rule over him, he must inevitably choose his own rulers through a system of self-government. This was their theory of democracy. In those days such doctrines would scarcely have been permitted to flourish and spread in any other country. This was the purpose which the fathers cherished.” Coolidge quotes Thomas Jefferson saying that his “‘best ideas of democracy’ had been secured at church meetings.” Coolidge says that Jefferson was influenced by John Wise, who had written, “Democracy is Christ’s government in church and state.”
  • Herbert Hoover, in a Challenge to Liberty (193o) argued that the New Deal had repudiated democracy, leaving “the Republican Party alone the guardian of the Ark of the Covenant with its charter of freedom.” He added, “You might think that reform and change to meet new conditions of life are discoveries of the New Deal. Free men have always applied reform. We have been reforming and changing ever since George Washington. Democracy is not static. It is a living force. Every new idea, every new invention offers opportunity for both good and evil.”
  • President Eisenhower’s Farewell Address as president (1961): “We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. … We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.”
  • Richard Nixon, State of the Union Address (1970): “In the majesty of this great Chamber we hear the echoes of America’s history, of debates that rocked the Union and those that repaired it, of the summons to war and the search for peace, of the uniting of the people, the building of a nation. Those echoes of history remind us of our roots and our strengths. They remind us also of that special genius of American democracy, which at one critical turning point after another has led us to spot the new road to the future and given us the wisdom and the courage to take it.”
  • Ronald Reagan, Normandy, June 6, 1984: “You all knew that some things are worth dying for. One’s country is worth dying for, and democracy is worth dying for, because it’s the most deeply honorable form of government ever devised by man.”
  • George H.W. Bush, Inaugural Address (1989): “We meet on democracy’s front porch. … Our children are watching in schools throughout our great land. And to them I say, Thank you for watching democracy’s big day. For democracy belongs to us all, and freedom is like a beautiful kite that can go higher and higher with the breeze. And to all I say, No matter what your circumstances or where you are, you are part of this day, you are part of the life of our great nation.”
  • George W. Bush at the National Endowment for Democracy (2005) “The roots of our democracy can be traced to England, and to its Parliament — and so can the roots of this organization. … Working democracies always need time to develop — as did our own. We’ve taken a 200-year journey toward inclusion and justice — and this makes us patient and understanding as other nations are at different stages of this journey.”

For more than a century, both Democrats and Republicans vigorously claimed that the US was a democracy as well as a republic. It’s possible that the names of the two major parties have recently encouraged some people to view the words “republic” and “democracy” as partisan labels. That is both an etymological error and an unfortunate barrier to what used to be shared aspirations. I happen to be confident that the language of democracy will regain its consensus appeal for Americans, thus inspiring us to honor our democratic ideals. But we are sailing through a rough patch right now, and virtually no political word seems able to unite rather than divide.

survey measures of civic learning and engagement that track change from grades 4-12

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Our colleagues Amy Syvertsen, Laura Wray-Lake, and Aaron Metzger have posted on the CIRCLE website a set of survey-based measures of civic engagement that they have carefully developed to be appropriate for kids all the way from fourth grade up to twelfth grade. Such measures are invaluable for assessing growth and learning. They are hard to develop, for reasons the authors describe on the CIRCLE website. Even just finding phrases that are appropriate for both children and older teenagers is a challenge. The new toolkit is the result of an intensive and highly professional project funded by the John Templeton Foundation, and it sets the standard.

See Civic and Character Development: Good Data Starts with Good Measures. The recommended citation for the toolkit itself is: Syvertsen, A. K., Wray-Lake, L., & Metzger, A. (2015). Youth civic and character measures toolkit. Minneapolis, MN: Search Institute.

citizens at work: how small groups address large-scale problems

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(Orlando) I am on my way home from a meeting of the Florida Partnership for Civic Learning. I’d like to argue that it exemplifies citizens’ work. To be sure, it has a specific mission: improving civic education in Florida’s k-12 schools. And it enlists a specific kind of person: professionals in k12 schools, ed schools, and state agencies, all of whom participate in the effort as part of their jobs. It thus differs in significant ways from a group of miners forming a union or volunteers fixing a neighborhood park. (I can spot k12 teachers and ed-school professors from 500 yards away, due to some ineffable mix of demographics, fashion/accessories, and ways of navigating the physical world). Still, the essential features of this group would apply to different issues and different people.

Using the terms I summarize in this 10-minute video, groups of effective citizens seriously ask the question, “What should we do?” That question implies a deep consideration of values, of facts and constraints, and of strategies. The group not only discusses (deliberates), but also takes collective action (collaborates) and learns from the results of its own actions. Finally, it is attentive to relationships both within the group and with outsiders. It specifically promotes civic relationships, which imply certain values–such as mutual respect and accountability–without relying on personal friendships or financial ties. Because the fundamental question is “What we should do (about some large question)?” the group is satisfied neither with just doing something by itself that has limited effects nor with wishing or hoping that someone else acts. It finds leverage over larger systems.

Without going into details about the Florida Partnership or its current work, I would argue that it embodies all the key words in the previous paragraph. The question for the Partnership is “What should we do to improve civic learning for all Florida students?” The main value-questions include: “What is important for a citizen to learn and know?”, “What rights/obligations do schools have to educate citizens?” and “What constitutes just outcomes for the population of students across the state?” Participants discuss extensive factual information: 7th grade civics test scores for every student in the state, detailed survey data on students’ values and behaviors, and information on the effectiveness of various programs. At this particular meeting, we looked at regression models that predicted test scores, elaborate maps of schools that surpassed expectations, toplines from surveys, and qualitative reports from some of those schools. Participants spent time building relationships among themselves and with other actors. Finally, the group considered a whole range of strategies, from working with elementary reading organizations to changing course requirements in state colleges.

Nothing is perfect, but I think we did a good job of avoiding these classic pitfalls:

  1. Turning everything into a communications problem, a problem of “getting the word out.” In an era of constant marketing and propaganda, it seems to come as second nature to focus on “messaging.” But rarely is the main problem that lots of people believe the wrong things. And even when they do, communicating is challenging in a very crowded media environment. Smart groups communicate as they need to but don’t overemphasize its importance.
  2. Imagining phantom agents. It’s a constant temptation to imagine–or hope–that someone else will solve a problem. Someone else’s actions may indeed be essential. For instance, it may take the state legislature to improve civics. But then the question becomes: How can we influence the legislature? The “we” has to be concrete and real: an actual list of individuals who know what to do next. We are the ones we have been waiting for.
  3. Oscillating between the trivial and the utopian. I have often observed groups jump back and forth between the ends of a spectrum of practicality. At one moment, they will convince themselves that a given problem cannot be solved without changing the whole political/economic system. At another moment, they will talk about making one presentation at someone else’s small-scale meeting. To make a substantial difference, you have to find space between those extremes.
  4. Operating at only one level of power. According to the train of thinking inaugurated by Steven Lukes and John Gaventa in the 1970s, power operates at several levels. There is explicit power: the power to do something (such as require a statewide civics test or grade an individual kid). There is the power to set agendas. There is power over other people’s preferences and values. And there is power to affect who uses the other forms of power. Truly effective citizen groups think at all these levels.
  5. Losing the moral questions in data. We have civics test scores for every 7th grader in Florida, and my colleagues have analyzed those data in several illuminating ways (geospatially, demographically, even qualitatively). But it is fundamentally a moral question what to measure on a 7th grade civics test. It is also a moral question whether the state should test students, and what consequences should follow from success or failure on a test. Finally, given a distribution of real test scores, it is a moral question what to do next. Should you devote all your resources to serving the lowest-scorers? Raise the median? Reward the high-scorers? In an age of positivism, we tend to be better at analyzing the data than at reasoning about what the data imply morally. But good groups hold philosophically diverse and productive explicit discussions of the moral issues.
  6. Losing sight of either the short-term or the long-term. Really effective citizen groups achieve short-term victories with an eye to building momentum and winning longer-term victories later. The two mistakes to avoid are looking only for easy “wins” that don’t create momentum or working directly on long-term problems without having enough people or money to sustain the effort.

Returning to our Roots: a new white paper on educating for democracy

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GCwhitepaperReleased today is a strategy paper entitled Returning to Our Roots: Educating for Democracy. The authors are Generation Citizen plus a committee from other groups, including my CIRCLE colleagues and me. I’m pleased to have been part of the discussions that generated this paper. It is distinctive in that it puts political engagement at the center of civic education and addresses both schools and out-of-school opportunities.

Generation Citizens’ executive director, Scott Warren, also has a piece entitled “Student protests reveal thirst for a dialogue on democratic process” in the Hechinger Report. Scott uses this article to summarize the recommendations of the report.