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Education Week
Can Education
Produce More Civically Engaged Students? You Bet, Study Finds
By Stephen Sawchuk
May 9, 2018 8:31 PM
U.S. public schools were founded on the principle that there is a
common good in acquiring the knowledge and skills to be effective
citizens. But despite that belief—or perhaps because it's so ingrained
in our thinking about schools—there just isn't a lot of empirical
research to back it up.
Now, a new study shows that students who enrolled in a Democracy Prep
charter school, which places a specific emphasis on citizenship and
voting, had much higher rates of registering to vote and actually
voting than a control group of students.
Put another way: Yes, schools absolutely can influence students' later
civic engagement.
In fact, the schools studied increased the voting registration rates of
its students by 16 percentage points and voting rates by 12 percentage
points in the 2016 election. (Before, registration rates were in the 40
percent range and voting rates in the 20 percent range.)
"They've shown schooling is able to produce a very large positive
impact on civic participation, and so there are things any
school—public, charter or private could potentially learn from them,"
said Brian Gill, a senior fellow at the research and evaluation firm
Mathematica Policy Research, which conducted the study. "And if we
could scale up some of these practices, there's a potential impact in
civic participation across the country."
The research used New York's randomized charter lottery rules to study
the impact of being offered a spot in a Democracy Prep school and
enrolling in one. The team of researchers collected information on more
than 1,000 students who were entered in the lottery for a spot in one
of Democracy Prep's New York City schools between 2007-08 and 2015-16,
and who were at least 18 years old by the 2016 election.
Then it compared civic-engagement patterns for those students who were
offered a spot with those who were not, and from that data derived the
effect of those students who actually enrolled in a Democracy Prep
school.
What's Democracy Prep's emphasis?
Democracy Prep, a network of schools that began in New York City but
now runs schools in Camden, N.J., the District of Columbia, Baton
Rouge, La., and Las Vegas, puts a specific premium on civics
education, both through coursework and through activities; students at
all ages participate in voter-registration drives. More in this
Chalkbeat story and an American Enterprise Institute publication.
Democracy Prep runs 22 schools in all.
What does this mean for civics education in general?
It's good news, because there aren't that many studies on civics
education overall. And most of the effect sizes, while positive, are
pretty small, as the researchers make clear in the study. (The
exception is graduating from high school, which seems to have a larger
boost on voting.)
It's not as clear how to take these findings and translate them into
other school settings, though, because the study didn't include the
qualitative, on-the-ground research that provide insights into the
nitty-gritty, day-to-day steps the schools take to infuse learning with
civics lessons.
Is there anything notable about the results being located at a charter
school?
It's interesting that the study concerns a charter school. Although
they are public, such schools are allowed to operate independent from
many school district rules and regulations and often are managed by a
private entity like a nonprofit rather than a publicly elected school
board. In other words, a schooling arrangement that critics claim is
less democratic nevertheless can produce results that presumably do
build democracy.
For research wonks only: The study is also notable for using a Bayesian
analysis to characterize its findings. This means situating the results
within previously published literature on the impact of schooling on
citizenship. (The initial, nonadjusted findings suggested voter
registration and voting rates could be as much as 24 percent points
higher.)
There's a push on in research circles to do these analyses to mitigate
the effects of errors in statistical analyses, and to counter
"publication bias," which refers to the tendency of journals to publish
only studies with results rather than those with no effects.
Read this and other articles at Education Week
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