CIRCLE, the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning & Engagement, focuses on young people in the United States, especially those who are marginalized or disadvantaged in political life. CIRCLE's scholarly research informs policy and practice for healthier youth development and a better democracy.
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Places with more climate change protests were found to have modest increases in youth voter registration, per recent research by CIRCLE at Tufts University.
The 2020 election not only saw a significant increase in youth voter turnout, but also prompted more young people to become active in social movements. However, continued growth will require additional support in the form of resources and collaboration, researchers found.
Half of people under 30 voted in last year's election — up from 39 percent in 2016, according to research from the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University. And more than a quarter of Americans ages 18-24 reported participating in at least one march or protest last year — a big jump from just 5 percent of young people in 2016.
The rise in both youth activism and youth voter turnout in 2020 led CIRCLE researchers to examine how the two trends connect. They found that young people who participated in social movement organizations gained more knowledge about the electoral process and voting rights.
For the first part of its research, which was mostly qualitative, CIRCLE identified and studied five social movement organizations, focused on climate change and gun violence issues, that were geographically and racially diverse: Sunrise Movement, Youth Climate Action Team, March for Our Lives, GoodKids MadCity and Palmetto Youth Movement.
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Although some of the people involved in these groups believe that voting alone is not sufficient to effect change, they do largely agree that voting is extremely important.
More than half of people who participated in these organizations said they learned a lot about how government elections affect their community, how to impact government policy and how to educate voters. A majority of young people also reported they learned a lot or a moderate amount about voting rights, how to get involved in local elections, how to help others register to vote and how to persuade people to vote.
While young people became more civically engaged last year, they also faced a number of challenges, including the Covid-19 pandemic and a national reckoning on racial injustice.
"Amidst these reiterative crises of health, social isolation, economic downturn and systemic racism, the young people in our study displayed outstanding resilience, mobilizing quickly to meet the needs of their communities and developing new solidarity practices," the CIRCLE researchers wrote in the report, released last week.
However, despite their resiliency, young activists still reported high rates of burnout, limited funding and complexities in organizational structure. To mitigate these issues, CIRCLE researchers offered several recommendations to voter engagement groups led by older people, funders and other organizations that collaborate with young people.
For voter engagement organizations, researchers recommended continuing collaborations with youth-led groups and amplifying their work, while also exploring new partnerships. Funders are encouraged to make more long-term investments to help with sustainability. And other organizations should look for ways to integrate "get out the vote" efforts with other issues, as well as offer leadership development opportunities for young people.
The second part of CIRCLE's study used quantitative analyses to show the links between youth voter turnout and youth activism. Researchers found a sizable increase in protest participation during Donald Trump's presidency, with a sharp spike in 2018. However, protest accessibility was not the same across the country. Young people in the Deep South and Great Plains had to drive on average more than 75 miles to the nearest in-person protest.
Simply having a protest did not have a measurable effect on voter registration, researchers found. Places where there were more protests about climate change did see modestly high rates of youth voter registration, though.
However, following the killing of George Floyd by police and the nationwide protests that ensued, voter registration among 18- and 19-year-olds saw a modest, but significant uptick.
To better tap into protests as a means for getting young people to the polls, CIRCLE researchers recommend organizers facilitate voter registration efforts and follow up with participants about voting in upcoming elections. Researchers also noted that many young activists may already be likely to vote, so organizers should partner with schools to target individuals who are less engaged with politics.
Voter turnout was up across the board last year, despite the pandemic's impact on the election, and Asian Americans played a key role in bolstering civic engagement.
An analysis, released last week by the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University, found that young Asian Americans had one of the largest increases in voter participation last year of any racial or ethnic group.
Despite a lack of outreach from political campaigns, young Asian American voters were still highly motivated to turn out at the polls by concerns about the coronavirus and racial injustice, the research found.
Roughly 47 percent of Asian American voters under 30 cast a ballot in last year's election, according to CIRCLE's analysis. This turnout was higher than young Black voters (43 percent), but slightly lower than Latino youth (48 percent). White voters had the highest youth turnout at 61 percent.
When choosing how to vote last year, most Asian youth opted to mail their ballot (46 percent) or return it via drop box (21 percent). The remaining third chose to vote in person either early or on Election Day. Their preference for voting by mail may be tied to population centers: Nearly one-half of all Asian Americans live in the western U.S., where more states proactively mailed voters absentee ballots.
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Asian Americans are the fastest growing racial or ethnic group in the United States, according to the Pew Research Center. Over the last two decades, the country's Asian population has nearly doubled to more than 23 million, accounting for 7 percent of the overall population.
As a result, voting rights advocates see Asian Americans as an increasingly crucial voting bloc. Last year, Asian voters of all ages reached a record high turnout of 60 percent.
However, political campaigns for both major parties have continued to miss opportunities to connect with these voters. According to CIRCLE's research, young Asian Americans reported lower levels of contact by political campaigns than any other young people of color.
Just 43 percent of Asian youth reported that they were contacted by Joe Biden's campaign or the Democratic Party ahead of the 2020 election, compared to 61 percent of Black youth, 55 percent of Latino youth and 46 percent of white youth.
Outreach from Donald Trump's campaign or the Republican Party was even more sparse, with just 25 percent of Asian youth reporting contact. In comparison, the GOP reached out to one-third of white, Black and Latino youth voters.
Instead, Asian youth reported higher levels of informal civic engagement among their friends and family members. Despite the diversity of languages spoken by Asian Americans, fewer than 50 counties in the U.S. are required under the Voting Rights Act to provide bilingual voting assistance. So this peer-to-peer outreach "provides an opportunity for young Asian Americans to make a difference in their communities," CIRCLE's report found.
At a time of extreme political polarization, a bold and comprehensive proposal reimagining civic education shows a path toward a healthier American democracy.
The "Roadmap to Educating for American Democracy," released Tuesday, provides guidance to national, state, local and tribal leaders on how to strengthen K-12 history and civic education practices and standards. This roadmap is the culmination of 18 months of collaboration by more than 300 scholars, educators and practitioners from a variety of ideological, demographic and professional backgrounds.
For decades, the public education system has failed to adequately prepare adolescents to be informed and engaged citizens. But this roadmap aims to change that by ushering in a renewed focus and investment in civic education.
When this project started in October 2019, "our constitutional democracy was not in good shape," said Paul Carrese, founding director of the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership at Arizona State University and one of the project leaders. "Now we are all pretty convinced that our constitutional democracy is in peril."
"America's current state of polarization and civic dysfunction is the byproduct of our failure to invest in civic education for many decades," he said. "We've forgotten how to listen to each other, how to reasonably disagree on issues and why these civic virtues matter."
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The federal government spends on average just 5 cents per student every year on civic education, compared to $50 per student on STEM curriculum, according to the 36-page report. And fewer than a quarter of eighth graders are considered proficient in civics by the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
"Just as we invested in STEM education in response to the Cold War, the Sputnik moment, and the economic challenges of globalization, now in response to our dysfunction and failures of governance we need an equivalent scale of investment for civic learning," the report says.
At this stage, costs for the proposals have not been estimated.
"While EAD anticipates that funding would be needed from states, the federal government and/or philanthropy to support implementation of the EAD approach at the state and local levels, EAD has not developed or provided budget targets," said Peter Levine, an associate dean and professor of citizenship and public affairs at Tufts University's Tisch College and one of the project leaders. "Rather, those behind the initiative want to prompt the conversation about what it will take to prioritize and invest in history and civics education."
This roadmap is designed to provide the country's 60 million K-12 students with high-quality civic learning opportunities, to supply 100,000 schools with the learning resources they need to be "civic ready" and to train 1 million teachers in these subjects by 2030.
Educating for American Democracy is not a national curriculum or a mandate, but rather a starting point and framework for state, local and tribal educators to further develop lesson plans and curricula. The roadmap underscores the importance of exploring America's plural, yet shared, history through an honest accounting that acknowledges both the good and the bad.
Favoring depth over breadth, the roadmap includes seven themes, with no particular hierarchy: Civic Participation, Our Changing Landscapes, We the People, A New Government and Constitution, Institutional and Social Transformation, A People in the World, and A People With Contemporary Debates and Possibilities.
Rather than a list of facts or historical events, the themes are focused on questions that inspire and encourage students to become more engaged citizens.
"A history question would be, 'Who are we, the people of the United States, and how has the nation's population changed over time?' But a civics thematic question would be, 'Why is constitutional democracy dependent on the idea of the people?'" explained Levine.
The next steps are to curate the project's website to include thousands of examples of instructional resources and to work with state officials and civil society partners on implementation.
The Roadmap to Educating for American Democracy was funded with $1.1 million in grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Department of Education. The project was driven by a team of experts from iCivics, Harvard University, Arizona State University and Tufts University's Tisch College of Civic Life and Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement.
"Raising all students well above proficiency will require significantly more time in the classroom, better prepared teachers and improved curricula," writes Solomont.
Solomont is retiring this spring after seven years as dean of the Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts University. He was ambassador to Spain and Andorra during the Obama administration.
A violent insurrection, fueled by hate and littered with the symbols of white supremacy, is more than a "wake-up call." It's a fire alarm.
Our democratic ideals, already fragile and inequitably realized, seemed impossibly distant in the past several weeks. The inauguration was a tonic, a sign that "democracy has prevailed" as President Biden eloquently put it, but it should not obscure the reality that the road before us will not be smooth.
As we examine the myriad causes and explore what's ahead, one response, among many others, must be a hard look at the state of civic education in this country. Congress can help lead this effort, starting with the passage of the Educating for Democracy Act.
We have not for many years — or perhaps ever — invested sufficiently in the civic health and education of our citizenry. The reasons are complex and varied: competing priorities, politicization and hyperpolarization, and the relative disinvestment in public education and higher education overall. But the fact is that over the course of nearly six decades, the prioritization of a few subjects (STEM and English language arts, especially) has led to a neglect of American history and civics. Where some gains have been made in high-quality civic education, they've been too often co-curricular, inequitably distributed and mostly available to white and otherwise privileged students.
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Our expectations for what students should learn have been set far too low. It is one thing to teach that there are three branches of government and what each one does. It is more ambitious to expect every young American to know how to select good information, to reason with people who may disagree about complex problems, to influence a range of institutions effectively — and to uphold the core values of our republic.
But that is what our constitutional democracy demands.
Far too many students have not been empowered to meet even our currently low expectations. For the past 20 years, scores have remained flat on the only reliable national measure of student attainment in civics and history, the National Assessments of Educational Progress. Barely a quarter of students are able to demonstrate a basic proficiency in these subjects, which are so critical to our nation's future.
Raising all students well above proficiency will require significantly more time in the classroom, better prepared teachers and improved curricula. But they can't do it alone. Attaining these goals will require money.
The federal government now annually invests roughly $54 for every student on STEM education. By contrast, the investment in American history and civics is a paltry 5 cents. But the answer is not less funding for STEM or other subjects. The answer is a well-resourced public education system that educates for democracy.
One important first would be legislation given a high priority in Congress and signed soon by President Biden. The Educating for Democracy Act enjoys bipartisan support and was filed in the last Congress by a pair of prominent House members, Democrat Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut and Republican Tom Cole of Oklahoma, along with a pair of prominent senators, Democrat Chris Coons of Delaware and Republican John Cornyn of Texas. The bill calls for a federal investment of approximately 35 percent of the current federal investment in STEM education.
Effective, innovative, student-centered instruction in American history and civics is essential to the future of our democracy. It can help bridge divides, increase equity, and promote media literacy in a vastly changed information landscape. And more and more, it is also essential to our national security.
The legislation does not mandate a national curriculum or a particular instructional approach. Those decisions are quite properly left to states and local school districts. They would receive funding to strengthen and improve their approach to civic and history education. Nonprofit organizations would compete to develop improved curricula, instructional models and other programs. Colleges and universities would get help to prepare future elementary and secondary school teachers.
A generation ago, Americans awoke to the reality that the Soviet Union had succeeded in launching a satellite into space — the oft-recalled "Sputnik moment" when, among other things, America committed itself to teaching and leading in science and engineering. Today, as we continue to struggle with the assault on the Capitol, and reckon with the reality that the threat comes from within our own borders, perhaps we are on the verge of the next such awakening.
And perhaps this time, America will commit itself to teaching history and civics. Enacting the Educating for Democracy Act would give our teachers, students and communities the tools we need to begin to do just that.
