Education Week - March 11, 2020 - 10

| CITIZEN Z: Q&A

An Author's Advice on Growing Young Voters
Conversation with

John Holbein
Researcher,
University of Virginia

W hen students turn 18, they are on

the cusp of another performance
gap that should grab education
leaders' attention: the voting gap.
The youngest voters are 30
percentage points less likely to vote
than older voters. Schools can play a
critical role in closing this gap.
In a new book, "Making Young
Voters: Converting Civic Attitudes
into Civic Action," out last month,
researchers John Holbein of
the University of Virginia and
D. Sunshine Hillygus of Duke
University make a compelling case
that the reason young people fail
to vote is not because they don't
care about politics or policy, but
because they lack the skills and
confidence to translate their ideals
into action. Moreover, they say,
some key changes to how teachers
and education leaders approach
civics education could go a long
way towards strengthening and
expanding the next generation
of young voters.
Holbein spoke with
Education Week about what the
research shows about improving
civics and helping K-12 students
prepare to be active voters.


-SARAH D. SPARKS

It was pretty shocking to see that most civics classes in the
United States have had absolutely no effect on students'
later voting. (See chart, this page.) Has civics just become
less effective in encouraging young people to become
active citizens than it was in the past?

If you go back all the way to the student cohort that graduated in
1950 ... when you look at individual students who took more civics
classes in high school, they were no more likely to vote as they became
eligible to do so than students who didn't take civics. I think that's
kind of profound. In our minds we had this idea that there was this
time when civics was so much better and really, there was no golden
age of civics education.

Do Civics Classes
Encourage Voting?
Requiring students to take an additional civics class
to graduate does little to make key groups of young
people more likely to vote, according to a new
study of state social studies requirements and voter
turnout data in the National Study of Learning,
Voting, and Engagement at Tufts University.
18-29

You and Hillygus argue that courses have focused too much
on teaching civics facts and history, which has not been
shown to change behavior. Why do you think American
civics education has focused so overwhelmingly on the
cognitive side?

I think the No Child Left Behind performance accountability
plays a role. Schools have gotten used to [fact-focused instruction]
being the structure of math and reading programs. But I also think-
and there's some evidence from our qualitative interviews with
civics teachers-that this is the go-to approach to avoid controversial
topics. Right? A lot of civics teachers told us in our interviews
that they were terrified of some parents coming and complaining
to principals, school boards, [or] superintendents about them
discussing climate change or gun policy or you know, name any
contemporary political debate. And so they sort of felt safer in this
realm of teaching historical things, teaching things that you could
memorize and regurgitate on a bubble-sheet civics exam. I think
that's really a thing.

18-24
White
All minority
Black
Hispanic
Male
Female
-0.1

0.0

0.1

Probability of Voting After One Class
SOURCE: John Holbein, D. Sunshine HIllygus, Making Young Voters

In the book you talk about the 2016 election as a
"Sputnik moment" for civics education. What did you
mean by that?

We've definitely seen a change since 2016. The election, the
Parkland [school] shooting, the March for Our Lives movements as
well. We were doing our interviews in 2017, late 2016, and we were
hearing this bubbling of discontent among civics teachers. Like
we've all gotten to this point where we're kind of dissatisfied with
civics and we're concerned about the current state of the world. And
I think there's just really an opportunity, right? Civics isn't for the
most part engaging and leveraging this type of energy [from student
interest in politics], but there is an appetite for change. ...There's a
real groundswell of interest in doing civics differently and I think
there's a real dissatisfaction with this sort of bubble-sheet civics that
we've seen for a long time. I haven't seen that manifesting in new
policy yet for large-scale changes to civics, but definitely, it's wanted
by teachers.
How can schools engage students in civics without
imposing activities in a way that might turn them off?

I think it's fair to worry about compelling people to do things.
There've been a couple of studies that have looked at various, mostly
localized programs like Democracy Prep charter schools...about
getting students out and volunteering in the community as a part
of their broader curriculum. And those have shown a positive effect
for requiring civic engagement. And I've also done some work on
compulsory voting in Brazil. ...Some people worried that compelling
young people to vote would have a negative impact on their civic
motivation, their engagement in other forms of civic participation.
And we don't actually find that that's the case. There's, there's no
backfiring going on there. So I would say it's a viable thing to have as
part of their education that students be engaged in their communities.
You mention a number of examples of potentially more
effective ways to teach civics. For example, Democracy
Prep charters structure their entire schools around civic
engagement. But what can schools do without a total
overhaul?

It doesn't need to be the case that schools need to be either a
Democracy Prep school or nothing. They can encourage young
10 | EDUCATION WEEK | March 11, 2020 | www.edweek.org

people to register [to vote] and help them practice going through what
is a new and an intimidating process for them. The First-Time Voter
program [a separate program from Democracy Prep] was a one-time
demonstration in classrooms, just a little bit less than an hour long,
giving young people the practical knowledge that they needed to vote.
It involved a voting demonstration; talking to [students] about the
importance of voting to contemporary issues; really focusing on the
practical nuts and bolts about voting itself. So that was like a one-time
demonstration and there were some significant positive benefits that
came from that. So, I think the lesson learned there is that anything
that schools do to move towards applied, practical distillation of the
experience, that's going to help.
We hear a lot about young people just not caring enough
to get involved civically, but your interviews with students
suggested sometimes the opposite was happening:
Students decided not to vote because they worried they
didn't know enough to make a good decision and were
afraid of making a mistake. Is that common?

Yeah. So, we were really interested by that finding as well. Young
people seem to think they need to know more than they actually
need to know when picking politics, whereas older voters seem to
not lack that confidence. I think there's something to be said about
experience, right? Older citizens are like, 'Oh yeah, I know how that
works. I know what that process looks like.' For young people, it's just
intimidating and kind of scary, especially for many of them growing
up in households that don't talk about politics and don't hear about
contemporary politics in their schools very much. The idea of being
plunged into the deep end of voting was kind of intimidating.
There is a certain piece of confidence and self efficacy that needs
to be a part of a civics curriculum because this lack of confidence is
really striking to us. I can imagine a world where schools are giving
young people the opportunity to overcome some of these fears: 'Oh,
I know how a voting booth works, we've done that in class;' or 'Oh, I
know what's going on in politics [in this referendum] because in class
we read these newspaper articles ...' I don't think you can actually
fill the entire [civics] gap this way. But I think there is a certain
piece of confidence and self-efficacy that needs to be a part of civics
curriculum because this lack of confidence is really striking to us. n
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