Making Civics Count: Citizenship Education for a New Generation. Edited by David E. Campbell, Meira Levinson, and Frederick M. Hess. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press, 2012. 328p. $29.95 paper.
Teaching for Dissent: Citizenship Education and Political Activism. By Sarah M. Stitzlein. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2012. 208p. $108.00 cloth.
For the past decade, concern about a crisis in civic education and engagement, especially among young people, has been rampant. In 2003, The Civic Mission of Schools report sounded a clarion call for greater attention to citizenship education in K–12 schoolsFootnote 1 and touched off a national campaign, joined by such luminaries as Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, advocating improvements in the way we educate American youth for participation in democracy. Two years later, the work of the American Political Science Association's Committee on Civic Education and Engagement culminated in the publication of Democracy at Risk, Footnote 2 which examined growing trends toward civic disengagement and proposed reforms to reinvigorate political participation in the United States. Just last year, a joint effort by the US Department of Education and the Association of American Colleges and Universities produced A Crucible Moment: College Learning and Democracy's Future, Footnote 3 once again chronicling a “civic recession” across the land and issuing a “National Call to Action” for higher education to do more to educate young citizens for democracy.
None of these high-profile efforts to respond to this “crisis” in civic education and engagement have produced major changes in national policies or practices, in part because they have not garnered the attention of a greater public, even within political science as a discipline, beyond those immediately involved in the effort. Two recent books—Making Civics Count and Teaching for Dissent—make yet another attempt to bring greater attention to the need for a more robust citizenship education, and to focus the content of this education for democratic participation.
Bringing Attention to Civic Education
In Making Civics Count, editors David E. Campbell, Meira Levinson, and Frederick M. Hess immediately reveal their objectives: “to shine a spotlight on civic education in order to help policymakers, educators, parents, and voters better understand what American youth learn about democratic engagement and to encourage us all to ask how our schools might do better” (p. 1). To achieve these objectives, they have recruited a group of authors, from a variety of disciplines (economics, education, history, political science, psychology), to address comprehensively a wide range of scholarship and practice surrounding civic education in American schools.
Richard Niemi and Peter Levine open the volume with engaging chapters that debate (with the research, as well as with each other) the current state of civic education outcomes in the United States, and what American students know and don't know about government and civics. Michael Johanek follows with an essay that uses three case studies (from Rochester, NY, rural West Virginia, and East Harlem) to examine the role organizations and institutions beyond schools have played in the history of American civic education. Meira Levinson discusses diversity as a promising but also problematic resource in education for democratic citizenship, with exceptional coverage of the various ways diversity presents itself in contemporary public schooling. In the next two chapters, James Youniss and Anna Saavedra make arguments from current research and practice about the pedagogy as well as the content of how to teach civics, ranging from classroom discussion of current events to student participation in school governance, from service learning to mock trial, and other simulation-based programs.
The volume then switches gears a bit, to explore the role of teachers and other “delivery systems” for citizenship education, vitally important elements to consider in any effort to reform the way schools educate for democracy. A chapter by Keith Barton analyzes the research on teacher attitudes and motivations to understand how teachers' images of themselves, their students, and democracy often serve as obstacles to enhancing civic education. Diana Hess and John Zola look at the effectiveness of different types of teacher professional development in stimulating higher quality citizenship education. The chapter that follows by Joseph Kahne, Jacqueline Ullman, and Ellen Middaugh explores the possibilities of digital media and online activities—particularly video games—for exposing students, particularly “civically underserved” young people, in fostering a more robust civic awareness. And David Campbell closes the volume by comparing the civic education that students receive in private and charter schools to those enrolled in traditional public schools.
As this detailed account of the different contributions to the volume illustrates, Making Civics Count offers something for all scholars and citizens who either care about how young people learn the lessons of democratic citizenship or who examine the politics of education in the United States. I found this volume to be the most comprehensive examination of the contemporary research on school-based civic education that I have seen, with the authors also pointing to related work, even earlier work of their own, for further reading. Making Civics Count successfully makes its case for us to pay greater attention to civic education, and particularly to what the authors document as highly unequal access to and opportunity for school-based citizenship education.
Still, there is something missing from this otherwise excellent volume: attention to the underlying political context that has caused civic education to be generally disregarded in public-policy debates around education reform. A chapter or two analyzing the politics of education in the United States today would have helped the reader understand why obstacles to advancing a more robust civic education currently exist, and what realistic possibilities for change might exist in light of these constraints. This would seem particularly important given that the editors' intended audience, as quoted previously, is not only scholars and educators but also “policymakers, parents, and voters.”
Grounding Education for Citizenship in Dissent and the Humanities
Sarah Stitzlein's Teaching for Dissent seems to fill this gap, and provides a specific focus for citizenship education, urging that schools do more to teach dissent. Using a historical understanding of how dissent was viewed by the founding generation and the pragmatists of the Progressive era to inform her argument, Stitzlein makes a compelling case for viewing dissent as a distinctive element in the citizenship education of all children. Particularly useful in this opening section of Teaching for Dissent is her development of dissent as a “positive right,” one that makes schools “responsible for … cultivating a student's ability to invoke it” (p. 90). She moves the reader beyond an understanding of the right of dissent—simply requiring schools and the state to tolerate and not to interfere with the student's right to disagree—to one that entitles students to develop the knowledge and skills involved in making dissent.
Where Stitzlein's book differs from Making Civics Count is not only in its focus on dissent as a particularly important form of civic activity in a democracy—one that necessitates a particular emphasis in schools—but also her lengthy discussion of the barriers that currently present themselves for a dissent-centered curriculum. She effectively documents features of the American political and educational landscape that make it difficult to advocate teaching for dissent, from ideological concerns on both left and right about civic education in general to specific constraints in the “prescribed” and “hidden” curriculum that work toward consensus and conformity and against dissent. In addition, Stitzlein shows how educational policy reforms—including the emphasis on testing and standards—and attitudes by and about teachers work alongside the curriculum to stifle dissent in schools.
Stitzlein concludes with a chapter that outlines what a citizenship education for dissent might look like, focusing more on the humanities than on the social sciences. She argues forcefully that the humanities, with their emphasis on “multiple perspectives” and “dialogue,” can empower “students who might otherwise have been quieted or overlooked [to] grow in their sense of selfhood and, ultimately, their sense of being an agent in the world,” allowing them “to become effective dissenters who can fight for justice for themselves or marginalized people” (p. 174). This capacity, in addition to the decreased attention paid to social studies in schools, and the turn toward more knowledge- and rote-based instruction in subjects such as government and civics, causes her to call for a dissent-conscious humanities curriculum—in history, language arts, and philosophy. While Stitzlein's ideal curriculum for teaching dissent may have difficulty overcoming many of the constraints she herself chronicles earlier in the book, it still offers a model for discussion, grounded in a convincing rationale for seeing dissent as more than a negative right to be tolerated.
Strategies to Address the Civics Gap
The attention brought by these two volumes is not enough, as awareness and calls for action must be combined with concrete strategies to achieve political change. In fact, this is where many recent efforts have failed. Since the publication of The Civic Mission of Schools in 2003, and the subsequent “campaign” to implement the goals of this report,Footnote 4 one strategy has been to promote a set of “promising approaches” or practices in civic education, which research has shown to make a difference in increasing students' civic knowledge and motivation to participate in public life. Advocates of this approach have encouraged schools to adopt one or more of these practices, ranging from more direct and extensive teaching of civics, history, law, and democracy to integrating service learning and other experiential pedagogies into the curriculum to encouraging student participation in school governance. Stitzlein's focus on integrating the right to and capacities for dissent into a civics curriculum and the Youniss and Saavedra chapters in Making Civics Count mentioned above are examples of this strategy.
In practice, there have been real barriers to adopting this approach. Given the current educational-policy climate around standards and accountability (although some of this is eroding), civic education initiatives have been seen as a luxury, especially when we consider that educational assessment regimes have focused exclusively on literacy and mathematics, more recently, on science not on civics or even on social studies more broadly. Specific democratic civic learning outcomes are rarely mentioned in state educational standards, and when they are, they are rarely tied to the critical accountability measures afforded other subject matter. Recently, the Obama administration announced that the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) exams for fourth and twelfth graders in civics, history, and geography would be indefinitely postponed, due to sequestration budget cuts. Cutting these tests is an indication of the government's priorities, something heard loud and clear at the local level. In most K–12 schools, both administrators and teachers report that success in civic education is “not what we are judged on” and as a result, time taken away from the areas on which they are judged has been hard to justify.Footnote 5
Another strategy has been to connect workforce development goals—something against which educators are increasingly judged—with those of civic engagement. The argument has been made that the “new basic skills” of the workforce, a combination of “hard skills” (e.g., high level literacy and numeracy plus the technical skills required of a particular job) and “soft skills” like problem solving, effective listening and oral communication, and working effectively in diverse teams or groups are quite compatible with the development of “civic skills” as part of a student's education for democratic participation. Thus, it is possible to embed questions about a student's competency and civic responsibilities within career preparation. In practice, very little overlap has occurred, in part due to resistance among some educators, particularly in higher education, to any “workforce training” imperatives,Footnote 6 and also due to the narrowness of perspective among those primarily concerned with workforce training.
Yet another strategy involves focusing on teachers. A number of studies have shown that teacher intentionality and pedagogy have the greatest impact on whether civic outcomes are achieved.Footnote 7 Instead of attempting to influence and enhance civic content in or through the curriculum, proponents of this approach argue that we should work directly with teachers to get them to incorporate civic learning outcomes into their work, and to employ “democratic pedagogies” more conducive to education for citizenship. Chapters on the motivations and perceptions of teachers in both of these volumes suggest, however, that the current body of teachers and pre-service teacher education programs will make it difficult to advance a “teacher-centered strategy” of democratic civic education.
Is There a Role for Political Scientists in This Debate?
While these two books may not produce immediate strategic or policy success, taken together they at least bring attention to the importance of citizenship education as a crucial component of democratic politics and public policy. This seems to be a particularly cogent issue for political scientists. Since its inception, the American Political Science Association has regarded education for civic engagement to be critical, in part because it directly affects what we as political scientists do, what we teach, and the political participation we research. And over the past two decades, APSA has actively promoted initiatives linking the association with education for active citizenship. In addition to the work of the APSA Committee on Civic Education and Engagement—formed originally as a Task Force on Civic Education in 1996—mentioned at the beginning of this essay, a number of efforts, begun largely under the leadership of Sheilah Mann, former APSA Director of Education and Professional Development, have been part of the APSA's recent legacy in civic engagement.
With cooperation from APSA and participation by political scientists across the discipline, Experiencing Citizenship: Concepts and Models for Service-Learning in Political Science was produced in 1997, one of the initial volumes to be published in the American Association of Higher Education's “Service-Learning in the Disciplines” series.Footnote 8 In 2000, Mann collaborated with John Patrick to edit a volume, Education for Civic Engagement in Democracy, published by the ERIC Clearinghouse for Social Science Education.Footnote 9 This volume brought together research evidence regarding youth civic disengagement with “promising practices for civic education” designed to “counter student cynicism and lack of information … about political processes and public officials.” That same year, APSA launched a Service Learning in Political Science webpage, produced a special issue of PS with the same title, and initiated a series of workshops and panels at annual and regional meetings, part of an effort to involve disciplinary associations in civic engagement, funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts and Campus Compact. And earlier this year, the association published Teaching Civic Engagement: From Student to Active Citizen, an edited volume that ranges from theoretical treatises on the connections between political science as a discipline and civic engagement as a goal of higher education, to more practical narratives of how to incorporate civic and political engagement into courses from all the subfields of the discipline.Footnote 10
With all of these recent efforts we might conclude that political scientists are at the forefront of a movement to invigorate K–16 citizen education policies and practices. Actually, the discipline's role has been marginal at best. Only a few of the 16 authors represented in the two volumes reviewed here identify as political scientists. And while a handful of political scientists have reached out to K–12 civic educators, through avenues such as the Advanced Placement curriculum and exam, the overarching emphasis on political science research has kept the discipline at its core from moving in this direction. The authors of a volume that emerged from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching's effort to feature undergraduate civic education programs concluded the following about our discipline's affinity for teaching aimed at political engagement:
Political science or government departments may seem to be the obvious home for programs addressing students' political development. The focus that has dominated political science for the past half-century, however, is the objective, often mathematically driven study of political institutions and behavior rather than more normative goals or applied work of educating for citizenship.Footnote 11
While there doesn't appear to be much ground for hope, either on the strategic/policy front or within political science as a discipline, these two volumes leave me somewhat hopeful. Between the multidisciplinary academic research approach of Making Civics Count and the philosophical and historical arguments for why citizenship education is important in Teaching for Dissent, this growing field of civic education and engagement now has two powerful scholarly resources to go along with the proclamations issued in the past decade. Moreover, pockets of hope continue to exist within APSA, which is not monolithically oriented toward “positivistic” research. In addition to the initiatives mentioned earlier, the annual Teaching and Learning Conference—now in its second decade—regularly features presentations and workshops on civic education and engagement. And Perspectives on Politics continues to promote a broad approach to political science, with special attention to questions of democracy and civic education such as the ones raised here. Still, it remains to be seen whether these important efforts awaken an interest in citizen education across the discipline of political science or among policymakers and the public..
