In Chicago, 17-year-olds were permitted to vote in the March primary election. Chicago is a hotbed of excellent youth civic engagement groups, and they came together to register high school students and encourage them to vote. In the coalition were frequent partners of ours, including the Constitutional Rights Foundation Chicago and the Mikva Challenge. The result of their work–and students’ own enthusiasm–was a youth turnout rate of 15%. That doesn’t sound very impressive until you learn that students beat their elders in a low-turnout primary. The same thing happened in Takoma Park, MD last year.

I have advocated lowering the voting age to 17, and our Commission on Youth Voting and Civic Knowledge recommends considering that policy. While kids are still in school, they can be taught about the voting process and the governmental system before they vote. Most are still at home at 17 and connected to family and neighborhood networks that encourage voting. A year later, many have moved away for the first time into age-segregated youth zones–college dorms or apartments populated by young workers–where turnout is low. This matters because voting is habitual. Mark Franklin even argues that making 18 the age of eligibility permanently lowered turnout in many industrialized democracies. I certainly wouldn’t raise the age, but I would strongly consider lowering it by one year.

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(Durham, NC) For about a year, I have been assisting a task force called “the Power of Democracy” that formed in California under the active leadership of the state’s Chief Justice, Tani Cantil-Sakauye. Members have been thoughtful and dogged about promoting civic learning and civic engagement in their state, working with their state education agency, the legislature, the judiciary, and key nongovernmental organizations, discussing significant policy changes, giving awards, holding public meetings, and otherwise drawing attention to civic education. I am optimistic that real improvements will come in California.

I’m able to write all this now because the Power of Democracy has a new public face in the form of an excellent website. If you explore it, you’ll see a new article by the leader of the California Chamber of Commerce arguing that business needs better civic education; the “six promising practices” of civics (which originated at CIRCLE) used as their definition of what works; and my own analysis of California’s current civic ed. policies. But the most promising aspect of the project is the strong team that has come together to advocate for civic education in a way that emphasizes equity in opportunities and civic action as the desired outcome.

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From the CIRCLE homepage today:

Young people in the United States are starkly divided in how they use their leisure time. Some exclusively pursue their artistic or athletic passions and eschew other types of activities. Others spend their time on academic clubs, perhaps “building their resume” with an eye toward applying to selective universities. Still others are mostly disengaged from extracurriculars and other organized activities, either because they are working for pay or because they would rather informally hang out with friends. This variation, and the “clusters” of like-minded students that it creates, can partially be attributed to personal preference. However, it also reflects troubling gaps based on widening social disparities.

In our most recent working paper, “Harry, Hermione, Ron and Neville– Portraits of American Teenagers’ Extracurricular Involvement, and Implications for Educational Interventions,” CIRCLE Deputy Director Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg analyzes these trends in how contemporary American teens spend their leisure time, with particular consideration to how socioeconomic class affects students’ involvement in organized activities their schools or communities.

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Earlier this week, we released CIRCLE Working Paper #80 by Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg: “Harry, Hermione, Ron, and Neville – Portraits of American Teenagers’ Extracurricular Involvement, and Implications for Educational Interventions.” Kei uses cluster analysis to divide all American high school seniors into six groups, depending on their extracurricular activities. Each group has strikingly different social class backgrounds and divergent prospects for academic success and civic engagement after high school.

Extracurricular activities provide crucial opportunities to learn skills, develop networks, and explore passions. We must invest in opportunities for the roughly 35% of American high school seniors who are largely left out of after-school activities. (And that is an underestimate, because Kei assesses only those students who have stayed in school until 12th grade.)

Following in the tradition of an excellent 2001 paper that associated groups of real American teenagers with characters from the movie “The Breakfast Club,”* Kei identifies each cluster of American teens with a different character from the Harry Potter series. This is partly a mnemonic, but it also makes the point that characters are complex and trajectories are changeable. If we called 16% of American youth “slackers” (because they do not report being involved in anything constructive out of school) that would present a unidimensional image and suggest that they are irretrievably lost to civic society. But by associating them with the Weasley Twins, Kei reminds us that they have complex and varied characters and are subject to change.

* Barber, B. L., Eccles, J. S., & Stone, M. R. (2001). Whatever happened to the jock, the brain, and the princess? Young adult pathways linked to adolescent activity involvement and social identity. Journal of Adolescent Research, 19(5), 429-455

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(Logan Airport) This article is newly out and publicly available:

Peter Levine, “Teaching the Deeper Aspects of Civic Education,” The Standard (National Association of State Boards of Education), March 24, 2014, pp. 37-39.

It is my best effort at a 3-page argument for policymakers and advocates, describing what we should want young people to learn, what obstacles stand in the way of satisfactory outcomes, and what policy changes would help.

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Today, CIRCLE releases case studies of three significant state-level reforms for civic education. We chose them because they reflect very different approaches to improving civics (or any other major topic) through state legislation:

• In Florida, the Justice Sandra Day O’Connor Civics Education Act passed in 2010, mandating a high-stakes standardized test in civics.
• In Hawaii, a required “Participation in Democracy” course places a strong emphasis on experiential education; the requirement was passed in 2006 and an effort to repeal it was defeated.
• In Tennessee, recent legislation mandates project-based civics assessments at the middle and high school levels.

It’s too early to say which reform “works,” in the sense of generating the best outcomes for students, but the CIRCLE studies reveal some of the pros and cons of each strategy.

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Here are five key points for anyone who promotes service as a means to improve the success of low-income young people.

1. Teenagers who participate in community service have much better academic and psycho-social outcomes than their peers.

Sources: Alberto Dávila and Marie T. Mora, “An Assessment of Civic Engagement and Educational Attainment” (Medford, MA: Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, 2007); Christopher Spera, Robin Ghertner, Anthony Nerino, and Adrienne DiTommaso, Volunteering as a Pathway to Employment: Does Volunteering Increase Odds of Finding a Job for the Out of Work? (Washington, DC: Corporation for National and Community Service, Office of Research and Evaluation, 2013); Dawn Anderson-Butcher, W. Sean Newsome, Theresa M. Ferrari, “Participation in Boys & Girls Clubs and Relationships to Youth Outcomes,” Journal of Community Psychology, vol. 31, No. 1 (2003), pp. 39–55; Jennifer A. Fredericks and Jacquelynne S. Eccles, “Is Extracurricular Participation Associated with Beneficial Outcomes? Concurrent and Longitudinal Relations,” Developmental Psychology, vol. 42, no. 4 (2006), pp. 698-713.

Caveat: These correlations do not prove causation. Teenagers who serve may have personality traits or positive influences from peers, families, institutions, and communities that also explain why they succeed academically. Besides, service clubs and programs have other features (apart from service) that may explain their benefits.

2. At risk-youth enrolled in certain programs that involve service see substantial improvements in academic and economic outcomes

Sources: CIRCLE, “Pathways into Leadership: A Study of YouthBuild Graduates” (Medford: MA, CIRCLE, 2012); Megan Millenky, Dan Bloom, Sara Muller-Ravett, and Joseph Broadus, Staying on Course: Three-Year Results of the National Guard Youth ChalleNGe Evaluation (New York: MDRC, 2011); Constance Flanagan & Peter Levine, “Youth Civic Engagement During the Transition to Adulthood,” in Mary Waters, Gordon Berlin, and Frank Furstenberg (eds.), Transition to Adulthood (Princeton/Brookings: The Future of Children), vol. 20, no. 1, Spring 2010, pp. 159-180.

Caveats: These programs always have other aspects besides service (e.g., caring adults; academic coursework, sometimes residential living). Also, the evaluation methods leave some uncertainty about causation.

3. Service programs have characteristics that resemble the 21st Century workplace. Therefore, they should prepare students for success in the job market.

Sources: Reed W. Larson and Rachel M. Angus, “Adolescents’ Development of Skills for Agency in Youth Programs: Learning to Think Strategically,” Child Development, vol. 82, issue 1, pp. 277–294; Peter Levine, “Jobs, Jobs, Jobs: The Economic Impact of Public Work in America’s Colleges and Universities,” in Harry C. Boyte (ed.), Democracy’s Education: A Symposium on Power, Public Work, and the Meaning of Citizenship (Vanderbilt University Press, in press)

Caveats: Service programs vary in the degree to which they impart valuable skills and habits. Other factors besides skills and habits affect success in the job market. Students may actually obtain valuable skills but not be able to demonstrate those skills to potential employers.

4. There is some evidence that hiring managers see volunteering as relevant experience to consider when making employment decisions.

Sources: CareerBuilder Study Reveals Surprising Factors that Play a Part in Determining Who Gets Hired,” August 28, 2013; Deloitte, “2013 Volunteer IMPACT Survey.”

Caveats: These are based on surveys of managers, who may say they want to hire volunteers even though volunteering does not actually matter.

5. Communities with more civic engagement have much better economic, educational, and social outcomes than similar communities with less engagement.

Sources: Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg, Chaeyoon Lim & Peter Levine, “Civic Health and Unemployment II: The Case Builds,” National Conference on Citizenship: Washington, DC, 2012; Robert D. Putnam, “Community-Based Social Capital and Educational Performance,” in Diane Ravitch and Joseph P. Viteritti (eds.), Making Good Citizens: Education and Civil Society (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 58-95; Robert J. Sampson, Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Sean Safford, Why the Garden Club Couldn’t Save Youngstown (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009); Peter Levine, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For: The Promise of Civic Renewal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013)

Caveats: In these studies, volunteering per se does not predict economic success. Other civic engagement variables–e.g., the number of nonprofits per capita; the density of civic networks; or “collective efficacy”–are the predictors. Also, we do not know whether increasing the civic engagement of (some) youth would boost their communities’ civic engagement in a lasting way.

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