Madison County Youth in Public Service

The story of Madison County Youth in Public Service demonstrates the ways an emerging sense of civic and political efficacy can contribute to students' civic and political commitments. As part of a Jefferson High School government course, students in this program worked in small groups with various government agencies on community-based projects. These internships required that small groups of students work on public service projects in their county's administrative offices. One group, for example, studied the feasibility of curbside recycling. They conducted phone interviews of 150 residents, undertook a cost analysis, and examined maps of the city's population density to determine which parts of the city should be served in this way. These students examined charts of projected housing growth to estimate growth in trash and its cost and environmental implications. Another group identified jobs that prisoners incarcerated for less than 90 days could perform and analyzed the cost and impact of similar programs in other localities. Other students helped to develop a five-year plan for the fire and rescue department.

In all of these projects, students were responsible for interacting with government agencies, writing reports, and presenting findings. The students' considerable successes were aided by a great deal of administrative footwork beforehand. For each of the projects, the school district's instructional supervisor coordinated contacts at the appropriate government agencies, worked with those agencies to structure appropriate and engaging projects, and found liaisons who were excited about working with students. In short, Madison County Youth in Public Service was structured for success—designed so that students succeeded in what they set out to do.

And succeed they did. The group of students organizing the recycling drive wrote an editorial based on their analysis that was published in their local newspaper. Making the case for improved funding for the fire and rescue department, one group of students calculated the number of minutes it would take for fire trucks to reach the widely disparate elementary schools in their rural district. Their calculations were publicized and the community responded with interest. Another group made a presentation about their efforts on behalf of the community to the county's Board of Supervisors.

Consistently, when discussing their experiences in this program, students expressed satisfaction with all they had accomplished and with the recognition they received for these accomplishments. As one student explained, “I thought it was just going to be another project. You know, we do some research, it gets written down and we leave and it gets put on the shelf somewhere. But, this [curbside recycling] is … really going to happen.” A different student told us, “I didn't realize this was going to be as big as what it is. I mean, we've been in the newspaper … four times.” And another student reported, “I didn't expect it to have such an impact. I thought it would be one of those classes where we all talk about it and … they'd nod and smile, [but] we really had an effect on what is happening.”

The Madison County program provided numerous opportunities for students to learn skills and to be exposed to information that, in addition to their accomplishments, enhanced their sense of political efficacy. For example, when high school students needed to make their presentation to their county's Board of Supervisors, each group worked with their teacher and with their field site supervisor to plan their presentation. They got tips on how to make their brief presentations interesting, on how to generate visual aids with computer software, and on how to insure that their primary message was communicated.

Perhaps most important from the standpoint of civic involvement, students linked their sense of efficacy (stemming from their emerging sense of capacity and from the impact of their work) to their desire for continued civic participation. For example, Eddie noted, “I didn't realize we had as much influence as we did. One person can really make a change in the community.” When we asked him whether this changed the way he thought about being a citizen, he replied that, after the experience with local government agencies, he thought that,

Other students expressed similar satisfaction from what they accomplished as well as commitments to remain engaged in civic affairs in the future.

Our quantitative data was consistent with what we heard during interviews and saw during site visits. As detailed in Table 1, there were statistically significant changes in pre/post-Likert scale scores on several of our measures. In fact, we found a significant increase in all three measures related to efficacy: civic efficacy, leadership efficacy, and students' sense that they had the knowledge and social capital needed to effectively promote community development.³

These gains were matched by increases in reports of personal responsibility to help others and a marginally significant commitment to community involvement.⁴

Youth Action

Youth Action provides an interesting contrast to the Youth in Public Service program. The program, part of a district-wide collaborative effort, was created by the teachers at Woodrow Wilson High School.⁵

One class enrolled “Academy” students who were considered to be at risk of dropping out while another worked with students preparing for advanced placement (AP) exams. The Academy classes are populated primarily but not exclusively by African-American, Latino, and Asian-American students while the AP classes enroll mostly but not exclusively European-American and Asian-American students. Students chose their own projects based on discussions in class, readings, and research about problems facing their communities. One group of students investigated the lack of access to adequate health care for women and sought to get the city Board of Supervisors to allocate funds to erect a new women's health center in an under-served area. Another group sought to challenge a State Senate bill that could put students and their parents in jail for truancy and try juveniles as adults for certain crimes. Other groups investigated child labor practices and bias in standardized testing. In addition to work in the community, students also participated in three “summits” where they publicly presented their projects and what they accomplished.

Students' experiences working on these community-based activities were uneven. Some students were engaged in in-depth projects that were powerful; others were engaged in projects that were badly thwarted. Their problems stemmed from two related dynamics. First, none of the government, school, and community agencies was prepared beforehand to expect contact from the students. Consequently, when students sought to investigate issues they frequently were turned away, ignored, or, in the students' words, “not taken seriously.” In addition—and more important for our purposes here—the projects students pursued challenged the status quo. While students in Madison County worked with city officials on projects, those in Youth Action criticized and sought to change various governmental and educational policies and programs from outside the system. Not surprisingly, Youth Action students encountered resistance.

Both qualitative and quantitative data regarding the students' frustrating experiences indicate that these experiences decreased their commitment to future civic involvement. In interviews, students reported high levels of frustration and a growing sense of hopelessness. They expressed a diminished sense of efficacy related to community improvement and questioned whether it is their responsibility to try. One student recalled her frustration this way:

This sense of frustration was widespread. In response to other interview and in-class reflection questions such as “What did you learn from these activities?” other students answered “If you go out into the community and try to do good, someone will pull you down,” “Basically, they were wasting our time and theirs too,” and “it's hard to get anyone to listen to you.”

In most cases, the survey results, as shown in Table 2, were consistent with the interview data, reflecting the frustration students experienced in connection with their community-based activities. Numerous measures of students' orientation toward civic participation and community engagement declined. For example, students reported a sizable (−.50) and statistically significant decline when asked to indicate their level of agreement with the statement, “I want to become an effective leader in my community.” Students' sense of leadership efficacy also declined significantly. In addition, students' sense of personal responsibility to help others declined markedly and there were marginally significant declines in their commitment to community involvement and in their desire to work for justice.⁶

These declines occurred despite the careful work of the teachers involved in Youth Action to develop classroom curriculum in which students would emerge ready to work to improve society as active leaders and citizens.

Thus, while efficacious experiences promoted civic commitment among Madison County students, frustrating experiences resulted in diminished self-confidence and diminished commitment to future civic involvement in Youth Action students.

The Difference between Internal and External Political Efficacy

Those who study attitudes toward political engagement draw a significant distinction between internal and external political efficacy (Balch 1974). Internal political efficacy refers to a person's sense of his or her own ability to participate effectively in the political process. People with high degrees of internal political efficacy believe they are capable when it comes to civic affairs. Measures of external political efficacy, on the other hand, reflect perceptions of governmental and institutional responsiveness to citizens' needs and demands.

Although findings are not uniform, internal political efficacy has generally been found to have a positive relationship to political activity and the closer the alignment of a specified measure of efficacy to the form of activity, the stronger the relationship (Wollman and Stouder 1991). Measures of external efficacy, on the other hand, have not exhibited a consistent relationship to activity. Indeed, Shingles (1981) and others have found high internal political efficacy and low external political efficacy prompted political activity among African Americans (see also Ennis and Schrener 1987; Harris 1999). Feeling both personal competence and that government is not responsive to the needs of African-American citizens prompted many African Americans to participate in political affairs (often through activities such as litigation and protest) to bring about more just laws and increased government awareness and action.

Implications for Civic Education

In many cases, it seems reasonable to structure curriculum to promote students' sense of internal efficacy—their sense of personal competence. This goal might be pursued by developing that competence (and recognition of that competence) through a variety of both experiential and traditional educational activities.

Structuring curriculum so as to promote students' sense of external efficacy, however, may be problematic. African Americans and Latinos, for example, have tended to have a lower sense of external political efficacy than do their White counterparts (see Niemi and Junn 1998; Abramson 1983). Such results likely reflect the fact that government and community institutions are less responsive to African Americans and Latinos than to European Americans. The appropriate response, therefore, is to increase government responsiveness—not to try and convince a disempowered group that mainstream institutions want to respond to their concerns. To do otherwise is to alter indicators of a healthy democracy without challenging the underlying ills.⁷

What makes attention to broad notions of efficacy as a goal particularly complex, therefore, is that curricular strategies that deal sensibly with external efficacy may not promote internal efficacy (Youth Action students may have learned valuable lessons about external efficacy, but their sense of internal efficacy suffered). Conversely, curriculum that attends primarily to internal efficacy may not help students consider issues related to external efficacy (Madison County students may have gained a greater sense of internal efficacy, but they did not consider many issues related to external efficacy). We elaborate on these dynamics below.

Revisiting the Evidence⁸

Since, as we noted earlier, our study was not designed to examine the differential significance of internal and external efficacy, our survey measures of civic and leadership efficacy blended attention to internal and external efficacy—though our measure of leadership efficacy focused primarily on internal efficacy. Our interviews, however, contained much rich detail about students' changing perceptions of both internal and external efficacy. Given this limitation, we view our findings as suggestive, but far from definitive. Clearly, more in depth and focused attention to these issues would be valuable.

The Youth Action projects engaged high stakes problems that students found difficult to solve. While many school-based programs might have students clean up a nearby park or collect clothing or food for a local charity, the Youth Action students were engaged in ambitious projects that sought to expose structural injustices, sometimes forgoing more typical and bounded projects that do less to challenge existing power structures. Whether to support a publicly funded health care center for women or how to investigate bias in standardized tests, for example, are controversial and unresolved social policy questions. In addition, students were trying to mobilize for change on their own—rather than by working with an organization (governmental or otherwise) that was a legitimate player in the given context. Not surprisingly, when their efforts failed to illicit a meaningful response—let alone a change in policy—students' desire to participate in political and civic endeavors declined, as did their sense of leadership efficacy (a measure which emphasizes internal efficacy).

At the same time, however, that these experiences may have diminished students' sense of internal efficacy and thus undermined their commitment to civic action, they also appear to have sparked valuable insights related to questions of external efficacy. Kira reported, for example:

In interviews and in class, students expressed an often-realistic assessment of how difficult it is to accomplish meaningful and, at times, controversial tasks. And, interviews and observations reveal that students were deeply engaged in these activities and that most took them very seriously. For example, Tony observed that

When asked what it would take to get a women's health center built, Kira responded, “You'd have to change a lot of people's minds about stuff and organize…. You'd have to fight for it.”

In addition, analysis of the survey data reveals important distinctions as well. For example, the scale measuring interest in politics showed no change. However, if we consider three of its items (see Table 3) we find movement in opposing directions. Two items related to political action (“interest in voting” and “interest in working on a campaign”) showed statistically significant declines of 0.38 and 0.31, respectively. At the same time, students reported a dramatic (+1.00) and statistically significant (p < .01) increase in “talking about politics and political issues.” In fact, this was the largest pre/post change of any item across all the programs we studied. Thus, the curriculum appears to have diminished students' sense of internal efficacy and, as a result, to have diminished their interest in related political activity, but not their overall interest in politics. Indeed, their interest in politically charged concerns and debates increased substantially.

The Madison County Youth in Public Service curriculum offers lessons in this regard as well. While both qualitative and quantitative data indicate that these students showed impressive gains in their sense of civic and leadership efficacy, their interest in political discussion remained constant (see Table 1). We did not find evidence in student interviews, our observations, or our analysis of survey data that student projects examined ideological and political issues related to interest groups and the political process, the causes of poverty, different groups' access to health care, or the fairness of different systems of taxation (even though two projects focused on issues related to health care and taxation). Students focused on particular programs and policies and aimed for technocratic/value neutral analysis.