I have an op-ed on FoxNews.com against the recent wave of state laws that require students to pass the US citizenship test. It begins:

Quick: how many amendments to the U.S. Constitution have been ratified?

The answer is 27. The question comes from the federal test required for new citizens. Arizona and North Dakota recently made passing that test a graduation requirement for all their high school students, and several other states are considering the idea.  I fear imposing this test will actually reduce the amount of civics our young people study and remember.

The federal citizenship test consists of 100 multiple-choice questions; individuals see a random sample of 10. The easiest way to prepare for it is to memorize the 100 right answers. When you see the key word “amendment,” you remember to choose “27.”

I argue against this test as a tool for improving civics. But the idea is well-intentioned and may do good if it prompts a discussion about what our kids should learn and how we should test them. Civics doesn’t get a lot of attention; those of us who try to raise its profile are rarely successful. This year’s debate about the citizenship test in high schools may have brought more visibility to the topic than anything that’s happened in all the years I’ve been involved with civics. In my Fox News piece, I ask readers to consider what a better assessment would look like. If legislators and other leaders ask themselves that question, we may see better policies–and then we should thank the proponents of the citizenship test for prompting this conversation.

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I have an op-ed in Politico today that begins:

It is time to try lowering the voting age to 17 nationwide. Takoma Park, Maryland, has done it. Iowa, too, for caucuses. Scotland went down to age 16 for its recent independence referendum. Evidence suggests it will boost informed participation in our democracy over time.

Supportive research is collected on the CIRCLE website. At 11:35 today, I’ll be live on WBAL (in Baltimore or on the web) talking about the idea with Clarence M. Mitchell, IV.

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USA Today’s editorial board has an editorial today supporting the recent laws in Arizona and North Dakota that require students to pass the federal test designed for naturalizing citizens. The board acknowledges, “Some questions are easy or trivial. But many about voting, the First Amendment, states’ rights and the Supreme Court offer jumping-off points for enticing discussions about current events. In the hands of a good teacher, they can make students realize how much the American system of government affects their lives. The test can provide a floor on civics learning. It doesn’t have to set the ceiling.”

To their credit, the board gave me equal space for an “opposing view.” I argue, “Requiring students to pass the citizenship exam will reduce both the amount and the quality of civic education in our schools.” I conclude:

The citizenship exam requires, for instance, that you know that “27” is the correct answer when you’re asked how many constitutional amendments have been passed. You don’t need to understand reasons for or against those amendments, or have any sense of why they were important.

A month after students pass this test, they will forget the number 27. But they might retain the message that being a good citizen is a matter of memorizing some random information. That seems like an excellent way to turn people off.

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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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(Amtrak between NYC and Boston) Here are opening remarks I gave today at a Ford Foundation convening on Educating for Democracy:

I have attended many meetings on civic education over the past 20 years. This one looks much more exciting than almost all of them, for two major reasons: the range of people who have come here today, and the seriousness of the main discussion topics.

Civic education is not a matter of consensus. It is not one uniform movement. It is—and it ought to be—a field of diversity and disagreement, just like our democracy itself.

Some in our field are concerned primarily with ensuring that young people understand the basic structure of the U.S. government as it is enshrined in the Constitution and its amendments. They argue that our republic deserves respect and support, and they fear that the system will weaken unless students are taught to understand and appreciate it. They tend to emphasize the founding era and the national level of government and want to foster an appreciative attitude toward the political system and a sense of unity about our history and principles.

Other advocates are concerned primarily with empowering young people to participate in civic life, with an emphasis on civic action, most of which takes place at the local level. From this “Action Civics” perspective, it may be worthwhile to gain some understanding of the U.S. Constitution (for instance, students should know that speech enjoys constitutional protection), but it may be just as important to investigate local social conditions or to know who exercises real power in the community. Besides, those who favor “Action Civics” tend to value a critical stance toward the existing political system, and they often call for instruction that emphasizes the value of diversity, localism, criticism, and action, not patriotism and unity and an understanding of core political documents and principles.

Those are just two philosophical orientations toward civic education. Many more exist.
People in this field also differ in the kinds of civic activity that we imagine as the successful outcomes of civic education. Are we looking for voting and participation on juries? Or social movements that challenge the justice system?

Are we hoping for voluntary service in communities? Following and discussing news produced by major professional news outlets? Or creating news and opinion?

Do we want to develop relatively small numbers of ethical and effective leaders in all communities, or get the average student to a higher level of civic knowledge?

Maybe most people in this room would say “All of the above,” but the list suggests a range of emphases and core concerns.

We also differ in where we see the most valuable forms of civic education occurring. Some would cite a mandatory civics class in middle school or high school. It reaches most kids in most states, lays an essential foundation of knowledge, and gives the students the benefits of trained and dedicated adult educators. Others would rather be almost anywhere except a 7th grade civics class. They may see the most important venues for civic education as grassroots community organizations, or church basements, or Twitter.

If you gave people involved in civic education the opportunity to ask all American kids to read just one item today, I’ll bet the nominations for that reading assignment would range from a pie chart of the federal budget to Elie Wiesel’s Night, from the “Mayflower Compact” to this hour’s Tweets with the “BlackLivesMatter” hashtag—and many, many more.

The purpose of today’s meeting is not to resolve these differences and reach consensus.

I’d actually like to repeat that: The purpose of today’s meeting is not to resolve these differences and reach consensus.

That will not happen with so many people and so little time. I don’t even think we want it to happen, because a robust effort to engage our young people in civic life must be diverse, heterogeneous, contested, and even competitive among different approaches and ideals.

We do hope that by bringing together a reasonably diverse range of perspectives and approaches we can help everyone understand that diversity. Each person here today should learn more about the points of agreement and disagreement and reflect on where you stand as individuals and organizations.

We are also hoping that you will leave today having seen new opportunities for your own involvement—opportunities to support the forms and venues and purposes that resonate most with you. We are hoping to display the powerful and exciting diversity of civic education.

Along the way, we also plan to explore three serious, difficult, challenging topics that confront everyone in the field. Each challenge will get a session to itself, but the day may do more to define and clarify the problems than to resolve them.

The first challenge is inequality. Our educational and political systems are profoundly unequal. They offer unequal opportunities to learn and to participate. How can we provide more equal civic education under those circumstances?

By the way, civics is not only a victim of deep social inequality but potentially part of the solution. We may be able to give youth the tools they need to run the country more equitably when they take it over, which they will in the 21st century. We also know that certain well-designed civic engagement programs help the individual kids who participate in them to flourish in our current society—to do better in school and life.

So inequality is the first topic. The second is polarization. The US political system is deeply polarized ideologically, and the American people are, too. That context makes civic education more difficult, because every classroom discussion, textbook adoption, or comment by a teacher is a potential flashpoint. Even the word “democracy” (as the name for what we are trying to teach) is now politically divisive in a way that was not true in the 1980s.

At the same time, civic education may contribute to addressing the challenges of polarization, if we can help young people learn to handle disagreement better than we older people do.

The final problem is scale. It is clear that many smallish programs work. They are great for the students who participate. It is also clear that our best classroom civics teachers have huge benefits for their own students. But it is much less clear how we can dramatically increase the scope and scale of such opportunities so that we reach all of our kids.

Some of the most obvious tools for increasing scale, such as tests and mandatory courses, are problematic. Either we already have these policies in place and they don’t seem to work, or they are politically untenable, or we have reason to doubt their potential. Yet we cannot be satisfied with excellent civic education as a sporadic, largely voluntary affair. We must take it to scale, even if no single strategy for accomplishing that will work on its own.

In my opinion, if we could make progress on inequality, polarization, and scale, we would move a long way forward. That would not only be a victory for civic education but for American democracy. I do not expect that everyone gathered here today will come to agree on one strategy for addressing these three challenging topics. That is not only unrealistic; it might actually be a little bit creepy. We should count it as a success if we have invited people here today who favor a range of strategies and disagree in part.

I can’t wait for the conversation to begin.

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(Arlington, VA) It would be nice to know whether civic knowledge–defined in any way you choose–has been rising or falling. But I don’t think we know the trend at all.

Public survey data don’t help much. The questions that pollsters have repeated over time are ones like “Who is the Vice President?” That is an important correlate of voting and news interest, but it doesn’t reliably measure general knowledge or changes in knowledge. After all, responses to that question would rise if the current VP became more prominent.

The best official source is the federal NAEP Civic Assessment, which I am in Virginia to help plan and have been involved with since 2008. I cannot emphasize enough how dedicated and careful the NAEP’s staff and contractors are. They make every decision with extreme scrupulousness. That includes all the decisions–large and small–that contribute to making each iteration of the NAEP as comparable as possible to previous years. And therefore, I don’t think anyone could produce more reliable trend lines than these (taken from the NAEP Civics Report Card):

The asterisks mark changes that are statistically significant in the sense that there is a very small chance (less than 5%) that the changes were due to random variation in who took the test.

But there are reasons to be wary of these as trend lines:

• Connecting the dots with straight lines suggests that American kids’ knowledge followed that path over time. But we really just have three measures taken at three moments over 12 years. The actual trend could have bounced up and down over that time.
• Civics involves understanding the world around you. The world changed from ’98 t0 2010. NAEP generally tries to the keep its constructs and even some of its questions identical over time, in order to preserve the validity of the trend. But the same construct (e.g., “petitioning the government”) meant something very different under Clinton than it does under Obama.
• Despite Herculean efforts to measure whether each test is comparable to the previous one, that process introduces error that is not measured by the statistical significance test.
• The population of kids in k-12 schools has changed dramatically in that timeframe. For instance, more students are reaching 12th grade.
• NAEP is not, and does not pretend to be, a comprehensive assessment of civic knowledge. For instance, it omits current events (in part because the assessment takes three years to design and field). NAEP scores could remain flat even if knowledge of current events soared–or plummeted.

Overall, I think we can guess that American kids’ civic knowledge has been pretty flat since the 1990s. Even rougher comparisons to the earlier Civics NAEPs suggest that knowledge has been pretty flat since the 1970s. Dramatic changes would likely have been noticed. But I don’t think we can reliably say that knowledge has ticked up or down. For that, we would need much more regular assessments.

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(Arlington, VA) I am here for a meeting on the NAEP–the National Assessment on Education Progress. Meanwhile, Scott Warren of Generation Citizen and I have an op-ed in The Hill calling on Congress to remember civics when they revisit the Elementary and Secondary Education Bill. We begin:

With a new Congress in power and the Obama administration looking for issues that have a chance for bipartisan support, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has called to replace the landmark No Child Left Behind education law. The proposed new law would focus on quality universal preschool education, better support for teachers, and a reform of assessment standards. As the administration works with Congress on the largest change to education policy in the last 14 years, it should emphasize another initiative in the rewrite: reviving effective civics education and ensuring that our students are learning the core tenets of active citizenship.

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