The annual Phi Delta Kappa survey of public attitudes toward education is out.

Adults are asked whether preparing students to be good citizens is important and how well schools are doing it. Eighty-two percent say it’s extremely or very important, and 33% say schools are doing it extremely or very well. As a priority, it ranks somewhat below developing work habits and providing factual information, it ties with critical thinking, and it comes ahead of working in groups.

In a different question, respondents are asked to pick the single main goal of education. About a quarter choose preparing students to be good citizens, which is on par with preparing students for work but behind preparing students academically.

The advantage of a forced choice is that most people will favor a whole set of good outcomes if allowed to pick them all. However, there’s something a little artificial about the results of a forced choice. My job is to study and advocate for civic education, so I’d pick the “citizenship” choice. I nevertheless believe that preparing students academically and for work are essential goals, and are complementary with civics. So it’s not the case that 26% of Americans think only citizenship matters, or that 74% think it doesn’t matter at all.

Still, the forced-choice reveals that education for citizenship is the top priority for quite a few Americans. That’s valuable to know, because the major reforms that have passed through education like earthquakes’ seismic waves since 1980 have hardly mentioned civics at all. The PDK survey doesn’t prove that Americans put the civic mission of schools above all else, but it does suggest a lot of support, which ought to be reflected in policies.

Further, the forced choice reveals differences within the public. It appears that the civic mission is most important to young and older citizens; parents and other adults in the traditional child-rearing years are more concerned about academics.

There’s also a partisan and ideological split: “Fifty percent of conservatives emphasize academics vs. 43% of moderates and 40% of liberals. Liberals instead are more likely (33%) than moderates (24%) and conservatives (22%) to say schools should focus on building citizenship. Republicans are less apt than others to value a role for citizenship instruction in public schools.” The partisan divide creates challenges for proponents of civic education. In my opinion, citizenship should be a core value for conservatives, and it’s important to make that case.

The PDK poll doesn’t ask people what they mean by “good citizens.” We know from other studies that answers would vary. Some think of good behavior–obedience in the kindergarten classroom or staying out of trouble as a teenager. Others think of patriotism and support for the regime; still others, of activism and debate. Note that support for citizenship education is strongest among liberals and young people, and I doubt that most of them favor simple obedience.

One thing we can conclude is that good citizenship shouldn’t be an afterthought for policymakers, for 82% of adults think it’s at least very important, and 26% think it’s the main goal of schools.

This graph is based on data from the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) American Freshman survey. I don’t think I have seen the trend presented in one place and continuing until 2015, so I offer the graph for public consumption. The trend is consistent with what we know about high school civics. Service programs became much more popular after the 1980s, as new initiatives, such as the federal Learn & Serve America grants, came online. Rates of volunteering have plateaued since ca. 2010, but at high levels. Service is pretty much expected of today’s prospective college students. However, volunteering is strongly correlated with socioeconomic advantage. People of the same age as these admitted freshman who are not going to college volunteer at much lower rates.

I’m back from a very inspiring meeting of civic activists, civic educators, and students in the White House. It was convened by the Domestic Policy Council along with Civic Nation and the Beeck Center, with support from Tisch College and others. Committed and skillful teachers and students attended from selected schools across the country. These students are not just learning about civic engagement, practicing to be citizens, or developing civic skills. They are at the forefront, right now, of addressing the most serious issues in their communities. We need them, and many more like them, to govern the republic better than it has been governed and to achieve justice that has eluded us so far.

We learned that US Secretary of Education John King is sending a “letter of guidance” to all state education agencies about new federal support for the humanities as part of the “well-rounded” education mandate of the Every Student Succeeds Act. As a humanities person, I am glad about that direction, and as a civics advocate, I’m pleased that civics is included among the humanities. 

The US Department of Education has also made civics a core component of the Department’s “Blue Ribbon Schools” program, which recognizes excellence. 

Meanwhile, the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor/HHS and Education recently passed the 2017 appropriations bill, which includes the first funding for civics and American History in years. The appropriation includes $6.5 million for competitive grants to improve instruction in American history, civics, and geography, particularly for schools in under-served rural and urban communities. It also includes nearly $2 million for American History and Civics Academies: professional development opportunities for teachers of these disciplines. For now, it’s just a House appropriations bill, but it’s an important step toward actual dollars for civics.

Washington (DC): I am on a civics road trip: the First Annual Civics Literacy Conference in Massachusetts, an advisory board meeting for iCivics inside the Supreme Court building, and then a meeting with executive branch people.

The public discourse about civic education often takes the form: “Why don’t people (meaning adults) know basic facts about politics? Why do 10% of college graduates think Judge Judy is on the Supreme Court? We should teach schoolkids these facts!”

But almost all students study and face some kind of tests on facts like the number of US Senators. The problem is, adults don’t remember what they learned as kids.

That is because adults are not obligated to retain or update their civic knowledge. You spend 13 years of school learning to read and write. Then, if you have a job that involves written words, you must constantly update your literacy skills. You spend a few dozen hours in school learning about politics, and then you’re a citizen—but that role comes with no rewards or penalties. Nothing bad happens to you if you forget what you learned. Yes, politics affects us all. It is interested in you even if you aren’t interested in it. But just because it affects us all, each of us can let others take care of it.

Some of us do update and even dramatically expand what we learned as kids about civics. The reason is: we’re interested. Something made us feel that politics was intriguing, important, dramatic, and rewarding for us as individuals. I conclude that the main purpose of civic education in k-12 schools is to increase the proportion of young people who reach that conclusion.

One of the most exciting current efforts in civic education–which also has applications far beyond civics–is a project on reinventing the high school civics course led by Walter Parker with Jane Lo and others.

Typically, a civics course involves presenting and explaining a whole lot of material to students, who then face a test to see what they have understood and remembered. Walter has noted that, all around the world, the final-year of high school tends to be dominated by courses that are fast-paced surveys of information, known for being difficult mainly because they cover so much ground. It doesn’t seem likely that students obtain advanced skills or remember much of the content from these classes.

Walter and his colleagues worked with teachers of the American Government AP course to redesign it so that projects become fundamental. The redesign process was a collaboration with the teachers and involved iteration: trying projects, evaluating, and changing the design. In the fully redesigned courses, activities–such as a mock trial, or a model Congress–come first, and students learn the content that is tested on the AP because they need to know it in order to succeed in the projects. As Parker and Lo write in a very valuable new overview article, “Projects carry the full subject matter load of the course. They are not culminating activities that come at the end of an instructional sequence nor lively interludes inserted periodically into traditional recitation.”

As reported in earlier articles, students in the redesigned AP course “did as well or better on the AP test than students in comparison groups, and … found the course and projects personally meaningful.” That means that there is no tradeoff between learning to be an active citizen by participating in simulations and mastering the content tested by the AP. If teachers use this redesigned curriculum, they can achieve both outcomes together.

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.

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

(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: