Given those challenges, pollsters/analysts Steve Farkas and Ann Duffett have delivered an invaluable service in their new study “High Schools, Civics, and Citizenship: What Social Studies Teachers Think and Do,” released today (Full disclosure: The study was commissioned and published by my shop at AEI). Steve and Ann explore what our schools are teaching today about citizenship by interviewing and surveying those teachers most directly charged with educating and shaping America’s new citizens–high school teachers of history and social studies in both public and private schools.

The findings struck me as both surprising and predictable, at times reassuring but also unsettling. While teachers’ priorities and values largely reflect those of the general public, their efforts to convey that knowledge to students are falling short of their own expectations.

In marked contrast to their private counterparts, public school teachers believe that social studies is losing ground to other subject areas and that civics in particular is being neglected by their schools. Teachers appear mixed, with some notable exceptions, about what the precise content of a proper civic education should be. They emphasize notions of tolerance and rights, but are inclined to give less attention to history, facts, and key constitutional concepts such as the separation of powers.

First, the good news: I found the results quite promising when it comes to public values and how teachers view America. Teachers share what most Americans would likely regard as a vision of responsible citizenship–with 83% of the teachers surveyed seeing the U.S. as a unique country that stands for something special in the world. At the same time, 82% of survey respondents say students should be taught to “respect and appreciate their country but know its shortcomings.” For all of the concerns about anti-American sentiment in schools of education, just 1% of teachers want students to learn “that the U.S. is a fundamentally flawed country.” This sounds, to our ears, pretty much like a pitch-perfect rendition of what parents, voters, and taxpayers would hope for–schools where students learn that America is exceptional even as they learn about its failures.

Teachers working with immigrants and English Language Learners (ELL) voice a particular need to teach their students to appreciate America and its culture. Fully 82% of teachers believe it is especially important to teach foreign-born students to value the U.S. and the meaning of citizenship, and 89% of teachers working with ELL students say the same.

Second, when asked what content, skills, or knowledge are most important, teachers rank the guarantees of the Bill of Rights at the top, whereas concepts like federalism and the separation of powers and key periods like the American Founding fare less well. It appears that students are taught about those things that embody a certain spirit of America, but not about how that spirit is translated into actual governance. Similarly, only 50% of teachers thought it essential for students to know “economic principles like supply and demand” and just 36% thought it essential that they know facts and dates (like the location of the 50 states or the date of Pearl Harbor). This strikes us as a case of teachers setting a remarkably low bar for what they expect their students to be able to learn.

Third, these teachers are uniquely well-positioned to report on what students are and are not learning when it comes to citizenship. On that score, things are disconcerting. When asked whether they are “very confident” that students have mastered important content and skills, only 24% of teachers indicate that their students can identify the protections in the Bill of Rights when they graduate high school, 15% think that their students understand concepts such as federalism and the separation of powers, and 11% believe their pupils understand the basic precepts of the free market.

Fourth, private schools may actually be better at fostering citizenship and civic virtues. For all the popular assertions that private schooling cannot serve public purposes, the data suggest that public and private educators value similar things and seek to accomplish similar aims. At the same time, the nature of the private school environment appears to be more conducive to achieving these civic ends. Take this striking finding: 43% of private school teachers say that most students in their high school graduate having learned “to be tolerant of people and groups who are different from themselves” compared with just 19% of their public school counterparts. Indeed, private school teachers appear to be much more confident that their graduates are learning the things that both groups of teachers say they want students to learn.

Finally, teachers feel marginalized in the testing era. Farkas and Duffett note that 70% of social studies teachers say their subject is a lower priority because of pressure to show progress on math and language arts. More than four in ten blame No Child Left Behind for deemphasizing their subject. Of course, the reality is that No Child Left Behind has had far more of an impact on elementary and middle schools than on high schools, so it may be that teachers are merely finding the law to be a visible, convenient villain. Nonetheless, 93% of teachers express a strong preference for social studies to become a regularly assessed subject.

-Frederick Hess

(This post also appears on Rick Hess Straight Up.)

By the time youngsters reach high school in the United States, the achievement gap is immense. The average black 12th grader has the reading and writing skills of a typical white 8th grader and the math skills of a typical white 7th grader. The gap between white and Hispanic students is similar. But some remarkable inner-city schools are showing that the achievement gap can be closed, even at the middle and high school level, if poor minority kids are given the right kind of instruction.

Over the past two years, I have visited six outstanding schools. (For a list of schools, see sidebar.) All of these educational gems enroll minority youngsters from rough urban neighborhoods with initially poor to mediocre academic skills; all but one are open-admission schools that admit students mostly by lottery. Their middle school students perform as well as their white peers, and in some middle schools, minority students learn at a rate comparable to that of affluent white students in their state’s top schools. (For one impressive example, see Figure 1.) At the high school level, low-income minority students are more likely to matriculate to college than their more advantaged peers, with more than 95 percent of graduates gaining admission to college. Not surprisingly, they all have gifted, deeply committed teachers and dedicated, forceful principals. They also have rigorous academic standards, test students frequently, and carefully monitor students’ academic performance to assess where students need help. “Accountability,” for both teachers and students, is not a loaded code word but a lodestar. Students take a college-prep curriculum and are not tracked into vocational or noncollege-bound classes. Most of the schools have uniforms or a dress code, an extended school day, and three weeks of summer school.

Yet above all, these schools share a trait that has been largely ignored by education researchers: They are paternalistic institutions. By paternalistic I mean that each of the six schools is a highly prescriptive institution that teaches students not just how to think, but also how to act according to what are commonly termed traditional, middle-class values. These paternalistic schools go beyond just teaching values as abstractions: the schools tell students exactly how they are expected to behave, and their behavior is closely monitored, with real rewards for compliance and penalties for noncompliance. Unlike the often-forbidding paternalistic institutions of the past, these schools are prescriptive yet warm; teachers and principals, who sometimes serve in loco parentis, are both authoritative and caring figures. Teachers laugh with and cajole students, in addition to frequently directing them to stay on task.

The new breed of paternalistic schools appears to be the single most effective way of closing the achievement gap. No other school model or policy reform in urban secondary schools seems to come close to having such a dramatic impact on the performance of inner-city students. Done right, paternalistic schooling provides a novel way to remake inner-city education in the years ahead.

But while these “no excuses” schools have demonstrated remarkable results, the notion of reintroducing paternalism in inner-city schools is deeply at odds with the conventional wisdom of the K–12 education establishment. For a host of reasons, teachers unions, school board members, ed school professors, big-city school administrators, multicultural activists, bilingual educators, and progressive-education proponents do not embrace the idea that what might most help disadvantaged students are highly prescriptive schools that favor traditional instructional methods. And even the many parents who are foursquare in favor of what paternalistic schools do cringe at labeling the schools in those terms. In 2008, “paternalism” remains a dirty word in American culture.

Paternalism Reborn

What is paternalism and why does it have so few friends? Webster’s defines paternalism as a principle or system of governing that echoes a father’s relationship with his children. Paternalistic policies interfere with the freedom of individuals, and this interference is justified by the argument that the individuals will be better off as a result. Paternalism is controversial because it contains an element of moral arrogance, an assertion of superior competence. But in the last decade, government paternalism has enjoyed a kind of rebirth.

In a 1997 volume titled The New Paternalism, New York University professor Lawrence Mead, the leading revisionist, explored the emergence of a new breed of paternalistic policies aimed at reducing poverty, welfare dependency, and other social problems by closely supervising the poor. These paternalistic programs try to curb social problems by imposing behavioral requirements for assistance and then monitoring recipients to ensure compliance. “Misbehavior is not just punished” in paternalistic programs, writes Mead. “It is preempted by the oversight of authority figures, much as parents supervise their families.” The schools I visited are paternalistic in the very way Mead describes.

Paternalistic programs survive only because they typically enforce values that “clients already believe,” Mead notes. But many paternalistic programs remain controversial because they seek to change the lifestyles of the poor, immigrants, and minorities, rather than the lifestyles of middle-class and upper-class families. The paternalistic presumption implicit in the schools is that the poor lack the family and community support, cultural capital, and personal follow-through to live according to the middle-class values that they, too, espouse.

In the narrowest sense, all American schools are paternalistic. “Schooling virtually defines what paternalism means in a democratic society,” the political scientist James Q. Wilson has written. Elementary schools often attempt to teach values and enforce rules about how students are to behave and treat others. The truth is that hundreds of parochial and traditional public schools in the inner city are authoritarian institutions with pronounced paternalistic elements. Yet the new paternalistic schools I visited look and feel very different from these more commonplace institutions.

The most distinctive feature of new paternalistic schools is that they are fixated on curbing disorder. The emphasis springs from an understanding of urban schools that owes much to James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling’s well-known “broken windows” theory of crime reduction: the idea that disorder and even signs of disorder (e.g., the broken window left unfixed) are the fatal undoing of urban neighborhoods. That is why these schools devote inordinate attention to making sure that shirts are tucked in, bathrooms are kept clean, students speak politely, and trash is picked up.

Paternalistic schools teach character and middle-class virtues like diligence, politeness, cleanliness, and thrift. They impose detentions for tardiness and disruptive behavior in class and forbid pupils from cursing at or talking disrespectfully to teachers. But the new paternalistic schools go further than even strict Catholic schools in prescribing student conduct and minimizing signs of disorder.

Pupils are typically taught not just to walk rather than run in the hallway—they learn how to walk from class to class: silently, with a book in hand. In class, teachers constantly monitor whether students are tracking them with their eyes, whether students nod their heads to show that they listening, and if students have slouched in their seats. Amistad Academy enforces a zero-tolerance policy. Calling out in class, distracting other students, rolling your eyes at a teacher—all rather common occurrences in most middle-school classrooms—result in students being sent to a “time out” desk or losing “scholar dollars” from virtual “paychecks” that can be used to earn special privileges at school.

Teachers ceaselessly monitor student conduct and character development to assess if students are acting respectfully, developing self-discipline, displaying good manners, working hard, and taking responsibility for their actions. The SEED school even requires students to have teachers sign a note after each class assessing how the student performed on a list of 12 “responsible behaviors” and 12 “irresponsible behaviors.”

Culture Change

Paternalistic schools are culturally authoritative schools as well. Their pupils learn—and practice—how to shake hands when they are introduced to someone. At SEED and Cristo Rey, students practice sitting down to a formal place setting typical of a restaurant and learn the difference between the dinner fork and the salad fork. The new paternalistic schools thus build up the “cultural capital” of low-income students by taking them to concerts, to Shakespearean plays, on trips to Washington, D.C., and to national parks. They help students find white-collar internships, and teach them how to comport themselves in an office.

One of the distinctive features of Cristo Rey is its novel work-study program, which dispatches students one day a week to clerical jobs in downtown Chicago in accounting firms, banks, insurance companies, law firms, and offices of health-care providers. For the first time in their lives, students are surrounded by white-collar professionals who had to attend college and graduate schools as a prerequisite to landing their jobs.

At the same time that these schools reinforce middle-class mores, they also steadfastly suppress all aspects of street culture. Street slang, the use of the “n-word,” and cursing are typically barred not only in the classroom but in hallways and lunchrooms as well. Merely fraternizing with gang members can lead to expulsion. If students so much as doodle gang graffiti on a notebook or a piece of paper at Cristo Rey, they are suspended. And if they doodle a gang symbol a second time, principal Pat Garrity expels them. The school day and year are extended in part to boost academic achievement, but also to keep kids off the street and out of homes with few academic supports.

The prescriptive rigor and accountability of paternalistic schools extend not just to student character and conduct but to academics as well. AIPCS is one of only two middle schools in Oakland to require every 8th grader—including special ed students—to take algebra I. All KIPP Academy 8th graders complete a two-year high-school-level algebra I course and take the New York State Math A Regents exam, a high school exit exam. In 2006, an astonishing 85 percent passed it.

Paternalistic schools, in short, push all students to perform to high standards. They spell out exactly what their pupils are supposed to learn and then ride herd on them until they master it. From the first day students walk through the door, their principal and teachers envelop them in a college-going ethos, with the goal that 100 percent of students will be admitted into college. Over time, paternalistic schools create a culture of achievement that is the antithesis of street culture.

By their very nature, the new paternalistic schools for teens tend to displace a piece of parents’ traditional role in transmitting values. Most of the schools are founded on the premise that minority parents want to do the right thing but often don’t have the time or resources to keep their children from being dragged down by an unhealthy street culture. But the schools do not presume that boosting parental participation is the key to narrowing the achievement gap. Parents’ chief role at no-excuses schools is helping to steer their children through the door—paternalistic schools are typically schools of choice—and then ensuring that their children get to school on time.

Principals and teachers at these schools are surprisingly familiar with students’ personal lives. As a result, students call on teachers and principals for advice and help. Teachers are deeply devoted to their students, often answering phone queries from students late into the night, showing up before school starts to help a struggling pupil, or staying late to help tutor. A KIPP student recalls, “I needed help in math in 5th grade and called my teacher one week three times a night.” It is not uncommon for students to describe their schools as a “second home.”

What really makes this a kinder, gentler form of paternalism is that parents, typically single mothers, choose to send their children to these inner-city schools—but they are also acting under duress. They believe their neighborhood schools fail to educate students and are breeding grounds for gang strife and drugs. They are often desperate for alternatives, and are particularly excited to find a no-nonsense public school committed to readying their children for college. In this sense, paternalistic schools draw a self-selected student population. Even so, there is surprisingly little evidence that these schools are “creaming” the best and brightest minority students. At most of these schools, students are typically one to two grade levels behind their age-level peers when they arrive.

The Old Educational Paternalism

Twice before in U.S. history paternalism has held sway in schools for low-income or minority students—with very different results. The first major expansion of paternalistic schooling was the Indian boarding schools of the late 19th century, which sought to “civilize” Native Americans. The second major expansion took place when urban schools sought to acculturate the multitudes of European immigrants to American society.

From the start, Indian boarding schools proved controversial and unpopular with many parents. Agents from the Bureau of Indian Affairs rounded up Indian children—often against their parents’ will—to attend the schools. Upon their arrival, children’s hair was cut, Native American garb was replaced with school uniforms, and teachers forbade students to speak in their native tongue, often punishing students who failed to speak in English. Students with exotic or hard-to-pronounce Indian names were abruptly given Anglo surnames. Unlike the paternalistic schools of today, which seek to boost existing values among beleaguered single-parent families, Indian boarding schools sought to eradicate local culture and traditions and destroy the parent-child bond.

A more benevolent paternalism was evident early in the 20th century when urban schools took on the task of acculturating millions of Italian, Irish, and Polish immigrant children. Schools tried to “Americanize” impoverished immigrants by teaching them English and acclimating them to the schedules and expectations of city life. Most teachers and school administrators eagerly embraced the role of cultural evangelist. Teachers inspected children’s heads for lice and lectured them about hygiene and nutrition. Students were taught how to speak proper English; Anglicizing of names was common.

The ethos of Americanization was powerful, even within many immigrant slums. Time and again, when cities provided foreign-language instruction, immigrants declined to enroll in classes taught in their native tongue. Schools for immigrant children reinforced values that parents held but alone could not pass on to their children—namely, the desire that their children learn English and become Americans. On the whole, historians have judged the relatively rapid Americanization of millions of poor newcomers to be a qualified success.

In the latter half of the 20th century, paternalistic education largely disappeared from inner-city schools in the United States. For a quarter century after the controversial 1965 Moynihan report on “The Negro Family,” urban school administrators abided by an unwritten gag rule that barred candid discussion of the impact of ethnic culture and family values on academic performance. A core premise of paternalistic schools—that they can transport students out of poor communities by providing a sustained injection of middle-class values—became politically taboo. Decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court reinforced this trend beginning in the 1970s. By advancing the notion that students have the right to free speech and the right to due-process protections if they are to be suspended or expelled, the Court made it more difficult for principals and teachers to play a morally authoritative role.

Scaling Up

As Lawrence Mead has pointed out, paternalism is neither conservative nor liberal per se; in some eras of American history, liberals have pressed for paternalistic programs, while at other times conservatives have lobbied for them. At first glance, the character training and rituals of these paternalistic schools give them a decidedly traditional feel. The schools teach old-fashioned virtues, simply put. Yet these virtues—perseverance, discipline, politeness—are really the same as the “noncognitive skills” that liberal education reformers like Richard Rothstein and economists like James Heckman want inner-city schools to boost in order to raise academic achievement and compensate for low-income students’ economic and cultural deficits.

In fact, the founders of many of today’s paternalistic schools are liberals who believe that closing the pernicious achievement gulf between white and minority students is the central civil-rights issue of our century. Most of the founders and principals of the schools I visited were uneasy with having their schools described as paternalistic. “I don’t think there is a positive way to say a school is paternalistic,” Eric Adler, cofounder of the SEED School in Washington, D.C., asserted. Dave Levin, cofounder of the network of KIPP schools, shared Adler’s reservations: “To say that a school is paternalistic suggests that we are condescending, rather than serving in the role of additional parents….”

Today’s paternalistic schools are more palatable to liberals than earlier models were because their curricula for character development promote not only traditional virtues but also social activism. SEED, for example, explicitly encourages community involvement in progressive causes, as do KIPP Academy, Cristo Rey, and University Park. SEED requires students to participate in community service projects and teaches each student to “make a commitment to a life of social action.” Students are urged to reflect on their own experiences with prejudice, discrimination, and bullying.

While liberals applaud these schools for placing poor kids on the path toward college (and out of poverty), conservatives cheer them for teaching the work ethic and traditional virtues. And there is great demand for seats in paternalistic schools among inner-city parents. So why not create lots more of them? Unfortunately, the three legs of the education establishment tripod—teachers unions, the district bureaucracy, and education schools—are all unlikely to embrace key elements that make paternalistic schools work. (See sidebar, for some habits of effective urban schools.)

In paternalistic schools, principals must be able to assemble teams of teachers with a personal commitment to closing the achievement gap, teachers who are willing to work an extended school day and school year, who want to instruct teens about both traditional course matter and character development, and who will make themselves available to students as needed. But requiring teachers to work longer days and years would in most cases violate union contracts. So would allowing principals to handpick teachers (who may or may not be certified) and fire those who are not successful in the classroom. District bureaucrats, meanwhile, are loath to grant individual schools the freedom to do things differently, especially when it comes to curriculum and budget.

It would appear that education schools (and many K–12 educators trained there) bear a special animosity toward paternalism and its instructional incarnations. This is evident in their dislike of teacher-directed instruction, “drill-and-kill” memorization, rote learning, and direct instructional methods that emphasize the importance of acquiring basic facts and skills.

The Romantic educational philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (and his American heir, John Dewey) continues to prevail. Most K–12 educators (and their teachers in ed schools) believe students should be free to explore, to cultivate a love of learning, and to develop their “critical thinking” skills unencumbered by rote learning. By contrast, the new paternalistic schools are animated more by obligation than freedom. Mead argues that “the problem of poverty or underachievement is not that the poor lack freedom. The real problem is that the poor are too free.” Paternalistic schools assume that disadvantaged students do best when structure and expectations are crystal clear, rather than presuming that kids should learn to figure things out for themselves.

Were it not for the recalcitrance of the education establishment, a grand bargain might be in the offing: If inner-city schools across the nation successfully adopted a no-excuses model, perhaps conservatives would be willing to support spending increases for longer school days, an extended school year, and additional tutoring. And perhaps liberals would be willing to grant principals and teachers of these schools a great deal of autonomy, allowing these schools to circumvent state and district regulations and union contracts.

For now, the spread of paternalistic schooling is taking place on a school-by-school basis in dozens of schools, but not on a massive scale. Unlike earlier generations of exemplary inner-city schools, today’s paternalistic institutions fortunately follow replicable school models and do not depend heavily on charismatic principals whose leadership cannot be copied elsewhere. The founders of these schools are devoting substantial resources to replicating their flagship schools, but they continue to encounter obstacles both political and practical. The difficulty of funding an extended school day and year, the reluctance of districts to grant autonomy to innovative school leaders, and the flawed charter laws and union contracts that tie the hands of entrepreneurs are just some of the factors that impede the spread of paternalistic reform. These obstacles make the restructuring of inner-city schools en masse in the mold of paternalism unlikely in the near future.

Still, these entrepreneurial school founders battle on, slowly replicating their institutions across the country. It is too soon to say that all of the copycat schools will succeed. But the early results are extremely encouraging. It is possible that these schools, so radically different from traditional public schools, could one day educate not just several thousand inner-city youngsters but tens or even hundreds of thousands of students in cities across the nation. Done well, paternalistic schooling would constitute a major stride toward reducing the achievement gap and the lingering disgrace of racial inequality in urban America.

-David Whitman is a freelance journalist and former senior writer at U.S. News & World Report. This article was adapted from his forthcoming book, Sweating the Small Stuff: Inner-City Schools and the New Paternalism (Thomas B. Fordham Institute, 2008).

Many supporters of school choice argue that neighborhood assignment to public schools results not in what public school advocates celebrate but in just the opposite: schools that are less likely to contain a diverse mix of students and that are more internally segregated along racial lines than are schools of choice. In recent years, a number of empirical studies of the effects of school choice on civic values have been published. As the extent of school choice in American education continues to grow—the latest data from the Department of Education show that 26 percent of American students attended a school other than their closest neighborhood public school—it is time to take stock of the evidentiary record on whether assigned public schooling better prepares students for their responsibilities as citizens in a democracy.

Studying the Effects of Choice on Civic Values

For this review, I examine the results of 21 quantitative studies regarding the effects of school choice on seven civic values that relate to the capacity of individuals to perform as effective citizens in our representative democracy. The values, in order from the most studied to the least studied, are political tolerance, voluntarism, political knowledge, political participation, social capital, civic skills, and patriotism.

The studies are divided into two categories, based on the statistical rigor with which the investigation was conducted. To qualify for inclusion in this review, a study had to be a quantitative analysis that controlled for observed differences in the backgrounds of the students attending different schools. To be classified as rigorous, the study also had to attempt to correct for the tendency of students and families to sort themselves into different schools and school sectors based on unobserved factors, a research challenge commonly referred to as selection bias. Those studies classified as rigorous used experimental data or employed sophisticated statistical techniques that credibly adjust for the possibility of selection bias when analyzing nonexperimental data. These more-rigorous studies should be weighted more heavily in any assessment of school sector impacts.

Most of the studies included in the analysis focus on students in private schools. Only three studies present results for students in charter or magnet schools. Therefore, the results described below primarily map out the effects of private schooling on civic values.

Findings are divided into three categories. A finding is categorized as signaling a traditional public school advantage if the evidence suggests that such a schooling arrangement produced a statistically significant (at the 90 percent confidence level or better) increase in the realization of the particular civic value. A finding is classified as supporting a choice school advantage if attendance at a public or private school of choice generated a statistically significant positive effect on a civic value. Findings of no significant difference between traditional public and choice schools are classified as neutral.

As can be seen in Figures 1a and 1b, the 59 findings from existing studies suggest that the effect of private schooling or school choice on civic values is most often neutral or positive. Among the group of more-rigorous studies, 12 findings indicate statistically significant positive effects of school choice or private schooling on civic values and 10 suggest neutral results (see Figure 1). Only one finding from the rigorous evaluations indicates that traditional public schooling arrangements enhance a civic value.

The studies that employ only basic adjustments for likely self-selection paint an even rosier picture of the positive effects of school choice on civic values (see Figure 1). Of the 36 findings, 21 indicated a school choice advantage in promoting preparation for citizenship. Thirteen neutral results appear in this collection of analyses, and two findings show benefits from traditional public schooling. The reader is cautioned not to draw strong conclusions from these studies, however, since they employed only rudimentary methods for addressing the problem of selection bias. We now consider the specific civic values that appear to be affected by school choice arrangements.

Studies of Political Tolerance

Democratic citizenship requires that we respect the rights of others, even if we profoundly disagree with their opinions. The most commonly used method of measuring such political tolerance first asks respondents to either think of their least-liked political group or select one from a list that includes such groups as the Ku Klux Klan, American Nazis, the religious right, and gay activists. It then asks whether respondents would permit members of the disliked group to exercise constitutional rights such as making a public speech, running for political office, and teaching in the public schools. Other studies simply ask respondents whether they would permit various activities from a group with whom they disagree, without first asking them to choose their least-liked group. In either case, responses are aggregated into a tolerance scale.

With one exception, the findings regarding the effect of school choice on political tolerance are confined to the neutral-to-positive range. Eleven findings—five of them from the more-rigorous studies—indicate that school choice increases political tolerance. For example, one experimental voucher study in Washington, D.C., found that nearly one-half of the students who switched to a private school said they would permit a member of their disliked group to live in their neighborhood, compared with just over one-quarter of the students in the public school control group. Three studies that used sophisticated nonexperimental techniques to control for selection bias also found positive effects of choice arrangements on political tolerance. These studies were of 8th-grade students in Dallas–Fort Worth attending private secular and nonevangelical religious private schools, 8th-grade students in private secular schools in New York City, and Massachusetts students attending secular private schools.

The more-rigorous studies produced eight findings that school choice arrangements neither increase nor decrease political tolerance. For example, three experimental studies found neutral results of school vouchers on the political tolerance of middle-school students, in the Washington program after three years, a Dayton program after two years, and a San Francisco program after two years.

Six of eight findings from the less-rigorous studies of the effects of school choice on political tolerance indicate a school choice advantage. Three studies concluded that secular private schools have a positive effect on political tolerance. One analysis reported that Catholic schooling boosted tolerance. Another study found that religious schools in general increase the political tolerance of their students. A third report concluded that private schooling of any type improves political tolerance among Latinos.

An observational study by Jay Greene and his colleagues reported no effect of school type on the political tolerance of Texas adults, and David Campbell’s analysis of the National Household Education Survey (NHES) found that students in traditional public schools had higher levels of political tolerance than students in non-Catholic religious schools.

Studies of Voluntarism

The ideal citizen not only tolerates dissent but also actively serves the community. With one exception, studies regarding the extent to which private schooling or school choice affects the likelihood that students or parents will volunteer their time in community enterprises range from neutral to positive.

Four voluntarism findings emerged from rigorous studies, with three of them favoring school choice. The study of 8th graders in New York City and Dallas–Fort Worth found that private school students are 21 percent more likely to volunteer—and dedicate more hours to community service—than comparable public school students. A study using just the sample of 8th graders in New York City found that private schooling promotes volunteer activity if the students attend religious private schools. A third rigorous study looked at the effects of school choice on the likelihood of parents volunteering in New York City and the New Jersey suburbs and found that parents in school choice districts are about 6 percent more likely to volunteer than are comparable parents in nonchoice districts. Finally, students in private secular schools in New York City are nearly 17 percent less likely to volunteer than comparable public school students, a finding that favors traditional public schooling arrangements.

Studies of voluntarism employing less-rigorous statistical methods produced 10 findings; half favor school choice, whereas the other half report no effects of school type. The findings in support of school choice show higher voluntarism among students in religious schools, parents of students in religious schools, parents who home school, students in any type of private school, and students in public charter schools. Other studies reported that voluntarism rates were similar between the students in secular private, non-Catholic religious, and magnet schools and their peers in traditional public schools. Two studies reported similar rates of volunteering between the parents of students in secular private and traditional public schools.

Studies of Political Knowledge

Presumably, democratic citizens will be more active and effective in public forums to the extent they are knowledgeable about politics and current events. Researchers typically measure political knowledge by administering brief civics quizzes of 3 to 10 items pertaining to central features of the U.S. Constitution as well as contemporary public figures. Five studies produced nine findings regarding the effect of school choice on political knowledge. Only three of these findings are from rigorous studies. R. Kenneth Godwin and Frank Kemerer, in their analysis of students in schools in New York City and Dallas–Fort Worth, found that choice students scored higher than traditional public school students on political knowledge regardless of whether they attended private schools in general or evangelical private schools in particular. The only experimental study of school choice and political knowledge found no significant difference in average political knowledge levels between recipients of vouchers and comparable students in public schools.

Three studies that employed basic statistical methods report six findings regarding the effect of school choice on political knowledge, two showing a choice school advantage. Richard Niemi and his colleagues drew on the NHES data to conclude that private schooling increases political knowledge. David Campbell’s more fine-grained analysis of the same data reported that only Catholic private schools demonstrated a clear political knowledge advantage. Campbell found that students in non-Catholic religious, secular private, and public choice schools all evidenced political knowledge levels that were comparable to students in traditional public schools. In the earliest known empirical study of the effect of school choice on civic values, James Coleman and Thomas Hoffer concluded that students in Catholic and public schools were similar in their average levels of political knowledge.

Studies of Political Participation, Social Capital, Civic Skills, and Patriotism

Beyond being tolerant, community minded, and well informed, we also expect well-trained citizens to be politically active possessors of social capital with civic skills who are loyal to their country. Unfortunately, relatively few studies have queried the extent to which school choice arrangements foster such attributes. One rigorous study, by Thomas Dee, concluded that Catholic schooling increases voter turnout as adults. Jay Greene and his colleagues conducted less-sophisticated studies that found that Latinos who received all of their K–12 education in private schools were 16 percent more likely to say they voted in the last presidential election than comparable Latinos who were educated exclusively in public schools. They also reported that Texas adults who were educated at least partly in private schools were 9 percent more likely to have voted recently, all else being equal. An observational study by Christian Smith and David Sikkink found that parents who enroll their children in private religious schools or who home school them are more politically active than are otherwise comparable parents who enroll their children in public schools. Parents of students in private secular schools do not differ significantly from public school parents in political participation.

Two rigorous studies reported findings regarding the effects of school choice on social capital, typically defined as a close connection with one’s community via social networks, group norms, and cooperation for mutual benefit. Mark Schneider and his colleagues concluded that the responsibility to choose their child’s school increases the social capital of parents. Paul Peterson and David Campbell reported no difference in the levels of social capital between voucher users and control group members in their experimental analysis of the Children’s Scholarship Fund.

In the first study of education and social capital, Coleman and Hoffer employed basic statistical methods and found that Catholic schooling was associated with higher levels of social capital. Greene and his colleagues replicated those results on a national sample of Latino adults.

No experimental studies have been conducted on the effects of school choice on civic skills or patriotism. Two studies that applied basic statistical methods to the 1996 NHES data generated diverse findings regarding the effect of school choice on civic skills. The survey asked students, During this school year, have you done any of the following things in any class at your school: Written a letter to someone you did not know? Given a speech or an oral report? Taken part in a debate or discussion in which you had to persuade others about your point of view? Students in private high schools were more likely to have engaged in these three activities than comparable students in public high schools, according to one study. The second study found that students in Catholic schools scored slightly higher than comparable students in assigned public schools. No significant differences in civic skills were uncovered between students in assigned public schools and comparable students in non-Catholic religious or secular private schools.

An observational study of patriotism employed an index that includes five questions about students’ visceral attachment to their country and its symbols (such as the flag and the Pledge of Allegiance). New York City 8th graders in private schools scored somewhat lower on patriotism, on average, than comparable students in public schools. One weakness of this analysis is the patriotism scale employed, which could be interpreted as a measure of national chauvinism or jingoism.

The Catholic Schooling Effect

Several prominent scholars have claimed that Catholic schooling may be largely responsible for the generally positive school choice effects on civic values. Would the likely effects of choice on political tolerance, voluntarism, and other democratic values disappear or turn negative with Catholic schools out of the picture? Figure 2 excludes all results based on comparisons between public and Catholic school populations or that focus exclusively on the experiences of Latinos (who, if privately schooled, predominantly attend Catholic schools). Study groups identified simply as “private religious” are considered Catholic and excluded for purposes of this analysis, since most religious private schools in the U.S. are Catholic. Twenty-two results showing a school choice advantage remain, suggesting that secular private schooling enhances political tolerance, that charter schooling increases voluntarism, and that education at an evangelical private school increases political knowledge. Twenty findings indicate that school choice has no clear effect, positive or negative, when schools other than Catholic schools are chosen.

Three findings showing a traditional public school advantage remain, suggesting that evangelical Protestant schools reduce political tolerance, that secular private schools decrease voluntarism, and that private schooling of any sort may diminish a particularly passionate form of patriotism. As all the negative effects shown in Figure 1 also appear here, it seems non-Catholic schools of choice are responsible for the few negative effects of choice arrangements on civic values observed here. However, non-Catholic schools of choice also appear to generate many positive outcomes regarding democratic values. These results suggest that the expansion of school choice is more likely to enhance than diminish the civic values of our next generation of citizens, even if none of the new choosers end up in communitarian-infused Catholic schools.

Discussion

All of the studies reviewed draw on data either about the various school sectors as they existed in the 1980s and 1990s or from modestly sized school choice experiments. The demographic composition of the various school sectors and the independent effects of private schooling and school choice on the civic values reviewed here would likely change somewhat under a complete or even larger-scale school choice regime. One should therefore be cautious in drawing strong conclusions from the empirical record to date on school choice and civic values.

The empirical picture regarding the effects of school choice on civic values raises some concerns. The lone study on fostering patriotism indicates that public schools may hold an advantage over schools of choice. In one study of voluntarism, attending private secular schools apparently reduced the likelihood of volunteering. Attending an evangelical Protestant school was found to decrease political tolerance in one study and increase political knowledge in another, causing scholars such as Stephen Macedo to worry that such schools may produce young adults who are strongly equipped to act politically on their intolerance. The Madrassa schools of radical Islam remind us that private schools of choice can serve to undermine democratic values. It would seem reasonable to require some minimal oversight and regulatory constraints on private schools that accept public monies, such as prohibitions against teaching hate. As important as these concerns are, the record to date suggests that civic values tend to be enhanced, or at least not harmed, by the exercise of school choice.

What aspects of choice schools generate these modestly positive civic values outcomes? No direct evidence yet exists regarding the specific conditions or practices of choice schools relative to traditional public schools that would explain this pattern of results. One theory is that schools of choice foster strong education communities typified by regular parental involvement and a concern for the welfare of all members. Yet several other plausible explanations also deserve attention. Teachers in private schools may be freer to infuse instruction with moral values and discuss controversial issues than public school teachers. Students who regularly encounter value-based claims and perspectives may become more tolerant of people with value-based positions that differ from their own. They also may feel more motivated to volunteer for activities that seek to bring about social and political change.

The most intriguing explanation, in my opinion, for the apparent school choice advantage in promoting civic values is a generally higher level of order and discipline in schools of choice. Public charter schools and private schools tend to be more well-ordered education institutions than neighborhood public schools, especially in urban environments. A well-ordered and nonthreatening education environment likely contributes to students’ feelings of security and confidence. Such feelings might be a necessary precondition for young people to develop a willingness to tolerate potentially disruptive political ideas and political groups and to venture out into the community to promote social causes, an idea suggested by Alan Peshkin in his case study of a Christian fundamentalist school. There is a clear theoretical justification for linking a well-ordered education environment with stronger civic values, and I hope that future studies will explore this possibility.

Other aspects of schooling might also promote higher levels of civic values among students, be they in assigned public schools or schools of choice. Effective instruction itself likely promotes civic values, as better-educated citizens tend to be more knowledgeable about politics, more tolerant, and more active in their communities. Some preliminary studies suggest that students are more likely to embrace civic values as adults if they had the opportunity to participate in student governance or voluntary activities as students, or at least witnessed adults who modeled proper civic behaviors in their schools. There is less empirical support for curricular interventions aimed at boosting civic values. Civics classes appear to increase civic values such as tolerance only modestly, and only if they are customized to focus explicitly on that particular value. There is no evidence that taking a required civics course in junior high or senior high school, in and of itself, enhances civic values.

In summary, the empirical studies to date counter the claims of school choice opponents that private schooling inherently and inevitably undermines the fostering of civic values. The statistical record suggests that private schooling and school choice often enhance the realization of the civic values that are central to a well-functioning democracy. This seems to be the case particularly among ethnic minorities (such as Latinos) in places with great ethnic diversity (such as New York City and Texas), and when Catholic schools are the schools of choice. Choice programs targeted to such constituencies seem to hold the greatest promise of enhancing the civic values of the next generation of American citizens.

Patrick J. Wolf is professor of education reform and 21st century chair in school choice at the University of Arkansas College of Education and Health Professions.

A complete list of the studies used to generate the above findings is provided here.

We have a crisis of character all across America. …the good news is that we know what to do about it: get back to the core values of our American heritage in our homes, our schools, our businesses, our government, and indeed in each of our daily lives.

Two decades later, it is time to ask, What are the successes of the character education movement? What do best practices look like? This essay explores these questions through the study of character education in six schools. Over the course of two months, I visited each of the selected schools to learn about the program in place—why it was initiated and by whom; what roles faculty, staff, and parents play; what the key program elements are; what the results are and how they are measured; and what obstacles the program faces. I selected programs in schools of various sizes, types, grade levels, and locations. The six sites include a suburban public school district and a small-town elementary school, a private religious school and a private secular school, an alternative public high school and a charter school. Each had been designated a National School of Character by the Character Education Partnership (CEP).

Each year since 1998, the CEP has identified several National Schools of Character through a juried process. The award recognizes schools and school districts that have improved the “behavior and learning of their students through character education.” CEP has also developed quality standards to aid schools in evaluating character education programs and curricula. National Schools of Character exemplify CEP’s Eleven Principles, among them defining “‘character’ comprehensively to include thinking, feeling, and behavior”; implementing “a meaningful and challenging academic curriculum that respects all learners, develops their character, and helps them to succeed”; providing “students with opportunities for moral action”; and using “a comprehensive, intentional, proactive, and effective approach to character development.” CEP describes character education not as an “add-on” to the curriculum, but as “a different way of teaching; it is a comprehensive approach that promotes core values in all phases of school life and permeates the entire school culture.”

Though they differ in many ways, the six schools share the critical elements of a comprehensive program in character education. Pedagogy is guided by a set of core values or virtues. The schools provide abundant opportunities for moral discourse about complex, contested matters and moral action through both organized community service and in-school conduct. Later, I will draw some conclusions, but first let’s hear their stories.

Educating Citizens: Hudson Public Schools (Hudson, Massachusetts)

“Education is about helping young people feel they can make a difference in the world. The purpose of public education is to create a public in which a democracy can thrive. Character education is a key vehicle to both goals.” The citizenship program in the Hudson schools reflects this vision of Superintendent Sheldon H. Berman, former head of Educators for Social Responsibility. Located in a suburb of Worcester, Massachusetts, the Hudson district educates 2,750 students in four elementary schools, a middle school, and a high school. The district serves an increasingly diverse population, 30 percent of whom are immigrants from Brazil and the Azores.

Dr. Berman and the faculty worked together to develop a character education program in part to prevent disciplinary problems. A citizen group conducted a comprehensive community survey to discern what residents expected of their school. Discussion in the community and in the school led to consensus around three core goals: empathy, ethics, and service. The character education program was built slowly, with broad input, and with attention to faculty development and participation.

The Hudson effort implements age-appropriate strategies at every class level. In pre-K–5 classes, faculty use a program from Educators for Social Responsibility called Adventures in Peacemaking, among others. Second Step is a violence prevention program for grades pre-K to 9 developed by the Committee for Children. Thirty lessons at each elementary grade level help students develop empathy and learn anger management and conflict resolution skills. Ninth-grade history and English classes feature ethics-based civics instruction with a focus on the Holocaust. More than 85 percent of students are involved in service learning: kindergartners connect with a local food pantry, 1st graders interact with local senior citizens, and high-school students work on environmental issues.

In Brian Daniels’s senior ethics course, students cover the waterfront of current issues including affirmative action, assisted suicide, abortion, homosexuality, and a range of political topics. Daniels uses a Socratic process in addressing each topic, and students are forced to deal with their own and their generation’s inclinations toward relativism and individualism. Students learn to confront difference, take and defend positions, and practice civility.

Character education is embedded in the district’s stated goals and criteria for hiring new faculty. Teachers are highly invested through a continuing series of faculty initiatives. Superintendent Berman teaches courses for the faculty covering central pedagogical elements of the program and Mary H. McCarthy provides overall coordination. Parents are involved in  the Family Character Education Council.

Building Social Skills: The Somers Elementary School (Somers, Connecticut)

The 21 members of Rebecca Leiphart’s 4th-grade class gather for their morning meeting. In the first round of conversation, students exchange compliments for constructive social conduct such as reaching out to another student or always saying hello. The conversation shifts to expressions of regret by individual students: the failure to return something borrowed, not standing up for a classmate. The third part of the meeting is devoted to problem solving. A boy complains that other students are pushing him out of his seat on the bus. Class members offer advice. Each student addresses others by name, takes a turn speaking, is attentive to each speaker, and expresses thanks for the compliment or counsel. Ms. Leiphart notes that the class will return to this discussion at its next meeting to see whether or not progress has been made.

Located in northern Connecticut, the Somers Elementary School serves 750 students in kindergarten through 5th grade in a community that is increasing in economic, ethnic, and cultural diversity. Ms. Leiphart’s morning meeting is part of the school’s character education program, initiated in 1995 and motivated by the merger of three schools into one, out of concern for the social skills of the students and in response to the post-Columbine awareness that schools should give greater consideration to students’ social needs.

Principal Debra Adamczyk helped establish the character education program. Maureen Winseck, school psychologist, and Pat Clark, media specialist, provided leadership in implementation. The school identified five character goals on which to concentrate: cooperation, assert oneself positively, take responsibility, empathize, and show self-respect (CARES). The Social Skills Committee, a broadly representative group formed to give direction to the program, developed an activities guide that includes both homegrown and external vendor materials and implementation strategies to assist in developing social skills, promoting positive interaction, and integrating social skills into academic studies. Content elements include readings about Rosa Parks, Maya Angelou, and others, and the book Voices of Hope, about everyday heroes. Class exercises focus on particular virtues and social skills. Peer activities are a prominent program component. Upperclass students are trained in a pedagogy called Friendship Groups.

A parents’ newsletter and web site, workshops for parents on social skills strategies, and parent volunteer and mentoring activities create significant buy-in for the program. Parents receive regular reports on attendance, academic achievement, and discipline, which are discussed at regularly scheduled family conferences that include students in the 4th and 5th grades.

Grounded in the Classics: The Montrose School (Natick, Massachusetts)

Soon after the school day begins at the Montrose School, students gather for an enrichment period. They may attend morning Mass or assemble in a quiet room for reading and reflection.

Students commute from 35 area towns to this college-preparatory day school, established in 1979 by parents who were unhappy with the direction of both the Boston-area public and Catholic diocesan schools. They wanted a school that centered on the Catholic faith and the liberal arts, as expressed in the school’s mission statement, “a Montrose education challenges each student to cultivate intellect and character, leadership and service, faith and reason.” The school enrolls 135 girls in grades 6–12; 75 percent are Catholic. The school director, Karen Bohlin, is a leading teacher-scholar in the character education movement and was previously the director of the Center for the Advancement of Ethics and Character at Boston University.

In addition to core studies in English, math, science, history, languages, and the fine arts, students take a required sequence in religion and philosophy: 6th-grade students study the Apostles’ Creed and the saints; in the 7th grade, they focus on the Church and the Ten Commandments; 8th graders conduct an overview of the Bible and the Sacraments; 9th-grade students study the Old Testament, the Apologetics, and C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity; the 10th-grade focus is the New Testament and Church history; 11th grade introduces metaphysics and ethics; and the 12th-grade course features the philosophy and social teachings of the Catholic Church. Juniors and seniors spend time on texts by Aristotle, Plato, St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and others.

The study of character is embedded in the broader curriculum. Courses in literature feature classic works, and history classes pick up on such challenging topics as the Holocaust and civil rights. Each week, homeroom teachers lead a discussion of character issues including friendship, conflict resolution, and being in control of one’s emotions. A student club focuses on service learning opportunities, and many classes include service dimensions.

School assemblies feature outside speakers on socially significant issues. On the Monday of my visit, a physician from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and the Harvard Medical School spoke about end-of-life issues. After the assembly, students gathered in homerooms for faculty-led discussions on the speaker’s presentation. Montrose students are successful participants in a local Martin Luther King Jr. essay contest as well as an annual national conference on ethics and culture at the University of Notre Dame. For six consecutive years, Montrose students have been the only high school presenters at the Notre Dame conference, with the most recent papers discussing how the arts may reduce the allure of television and the influence of music on teen culture.

Student advisement is a key function of each faculty member. As one student explained, “It’s my advisor who challenges me to put virtue into practice. She’s the person I can talk to and get advice from; she knows when I am just being too proud; she helps me to know myself better.”

Comprehensiveness: Montclair Kimberley Academy (Montclair, New Jersey)

In Ralph Pacifico’s kindergarten physical-education class at Montclair, students form a circle around a multicolored parachute. Each panel of the parachute represents a character expectation. The students recite each goal and then explain, in their own words, what the goal means to them. Then, in an exercise in teamwork, they move the huge parachute around the room.

The school’s motto, Knowledge, Vision, Integrity, has shaped the academic and character goals of Montclair Kimberley throughout its history. As students move into the upper grades, their ownership of the character goals is demonstrated in student government, community service, the honor system, and athletics.

Montclair Kimberley Academy dates to 1878. Current enrollment in the pre-kindergarten through 12th grades exceeds 1,000 students from 80 communities across northern New Jersey. Former headmaster Peter Greer arrived in 1992 and soon after convened a group of teachers, staff, parents, and alumni to write a guiding statement for the school’s character education program. “Our Common Purpose” articulates the school’s aspirations. Greek philosophy shaped the framework, and the seven virtues set forth in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics—respect, friendship, responsibility, confidence, temperance, fairness, and being informed—became the character expectations for the academy. The school added an eighth expectation, honesty, in 2004 in connection with the reformulation of the academy’s honor code. The story of Gyges’s ring from Plato’s Republic provides the touchstone for the curriculum.

The Core Works Program, developed by the faculty, includes 60 readings representing the greatest works in Western and non-Western literature plus masterpieces in the arts. Curricula tie the material to the character goals and are tailored to each class level. Charlotte’s Web is the first core work for 1st graders, 7th graders study The Cow-Tail Switch and Other West African Stories, while upperclass students delve into such masters as Dante, Confucius, and Plato.

Responsive Classroom guides the character education program in the pre-K though elementary grades. The goal is to identify and cultivate character goals in all aspects of the students’ experience both inside and outside of the classroom. During morning meeting, students identify, study, and practice the virtues and engage in community building.

The key, says new headmaster Thomas Nammack, is that “the school is working on character education in many ways, on many levels, all at the same time.” Moreover, he adds, “we strive to give our students a sense of what is possible in the task of mastering their own fates, and we seek to equip them to become independent practitioners of humane behavior.”

Freedom and Accountability: Malcolm Shabazz City High School (Madison, Wisconsin)

For most Shabazz students, the traditional high school was an uncomfortable straitjacket; 92 percent say they were “bored” in their previous high school. Shabazz is one of the oldest alternative schools in the nation, established in 1971 to educate Madison students whose circumstances, attitudes, and conduct are often not conducive to successful academic work in a traditional school setting. The school serves a diverse student population of 140 in grades 9–12. Its mission is to create a learning environment free of discrimination and harassment and to strengthen the connection between the students and their community.

Shabazz students must commit to the academic expectations of the school and give assurance, in writing, that they will observe nonharassment, alcohol and other drug, and attendance policies. These expectations are upfront, concrete, and strictly enforced. At the same time, the school does not have a dress code, has few standard academic requirements, and provides many nontraditional learning opportunities. At the end of each course, students reflect on 10 or 12 key questions. Faculty members, in turn, develop their own essays to evaluate each student. If the student meets all of the required course goals and 70 to 80 percent of the optional goals, he or she passes the course.

Four pillars shape character education at the Malcolm Shabazz High School. First, there are the explicit expectations. Second, all entering students take “The Shabazz Experience” in which they explore the school’s mission and the life of Malcolm Shabazz, better know as Malcolm X. A third pillar is Mirrors of Discrimination. One premise of this class is that America is not a “melting pot” but a “salad bowl,” where “the races and cultures of our society remain distinct and unique even though we all live together in the same big ‘bowl.’” Readings include an essay about World War II German patriot Martin Niemoeler, Howard Zinn’s You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train, and Beverly Tatum’s Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? The fourth pillar is service learning. Retired social worker Jane Kavaloski was a key architect of the Shabazz program, and research she initiated established a positive connection between service learning and both student motivation and learning. Projects include volunteer work in the American South, Latin America, poverty zones of American cities, neighborhood schools, and environmentally vulnerable areas. Project Green Team is a coordinated set of courses in which students earn physical education and science credits for their work on stream ecology and fly-fishing. In Equity in Computer Access, instructor Tina Murray works with her students to recycle discarded computers for use by students, families, or institutions that cannot afford to purchase one.

Intentional Design: Community of Peace Academy (St. Paul, Minnesota)

Sarah Zosel’s 10th graders are studying world religions. In class, short video clips feature spokespersons for the Buddhist and Native American religions. Zosel asks students to identify the points of emphasis in each religion. An Asian student mentions the Buddhist emphasis on tolerance and peace, adding, “There is so much more to life than sex, television, clothes, and money and all that stuff.” Zosel reiterates the key questions that religions try to answer: How should we live? Why do people suffer? What happens when I die? Once a week the class has a class meeting or, as they call it, a “circle talk” in which students raise issues they face at school or in their personal lives or discuss current events.

Community of Peace Academy (CPA) was established as a charter school and is sponsored by the St. Paul Public School District. Seventy percent of the 550 students in grades K through 12 are Hmong and 20 percent are African American; 70 percent come from homes in which English is the second language; most are poor. On rare occasions, weekend neighborhood gang activities reverberate in school hallways on Monday morning (as they did on the day of my visit).

Community Peace Academy was designed around three components: caring relationships (community), a strong ethical focus (peace), and seriousness about academic achievement (academy). The founder and head of CPA is Dr. Karen J. Rusthoven, who got her start as an educator in the 1960s. Inspired by the idealism of that decade, she believes education is the key to resolving economic and social disparities. Her vision for CPA: “At Community of Peace Academy, our desired outcome is to educate the whole person—mind, body and will—for peace, justice, freedom, compassion, wholeness and fullness of life for all.”

Faculty serve as exemplars and motivators, attending to student needs, while respectful of the moral and intellectual freedom of each student. Relatively small classes—16 in grades K and 1, and 24 in other grades—permit faculty to give close attention to each student’s progress. Rusthoven and the CPA faculty adopted many established best practices, including a peacemaking curriculum for the primary grades developed by Growing Communities for Peace; PeaceBuilders, a conflict prevention program; the Heartwood series of readings in ethics for grades K–6, which features seven ethical principles; and the Responsive Classroom, which encourages students to take responsibility for their learning and moral conduct. Ninth graders take an ethics class focusing on care for self, others, and learning. Tenth graders study world religions, and juniors enroll in a PeaceBuilders course, which includes a vision quest retreat and a personal service project. CPA is developing a course for seniors that will involve significant engagement in a community project.

Measuring Success

These six character education programs share key features, many of which are explicit in the CEP criteria. The programs are comprehensive, encompassing all school activities, engaging all members of the faculty and staff, and including all grade levels. At each site, there is clarity and transparency about goals and values. Character education was initially the vision of a school principal or superintendent. Program fit in hiring and subsequent evaluation of faculty is a priority. Adequate and appropriately led and supported opportunities for faculty and curriculum development are critical components. Parent support and engagement is another common thread.

Variation across the sites is evident in stated program objectives, curricular content, and pedagogy as well as in the school culture, the student population, and the community. Program goals range from the citizenship objectives of the Hudson schools to the social action agenda of Shabazz to the moral and intellectual reflection of Montrose. The schools draw content from sources as disparate as religious works, literary classics, contemporary novels, and social commentary. As a Catholic school, Montrose can tie character education directly to a religious tradition. While this facilitates the program, results in the other schools demonstrate that religious affiliation is not a prerequisite for success. Two of the six sites—Somers Elementary and the Hudson district—are public schools to which students are assigned, while the other four are schools of choice. I observed no obvious effects of this difference on program outcomes.

Program assessment, a work in progress in most of the schools, reflects similar variety. Much of the research cited by the schools focuses on such objectives as improved discipline, campus climate, social attitudes, and community engagement. Some evaluations limit measures to those that are relatively easy to track, such as improved attendance or reduced incidents of violence and cheating. Others seek to tie character education to broader outcomes, including improved academic achievement:

•  In Hudson, enthusiasm from the community for the character education program and other district initiatives is one measure of success; others are SAT scores that exceed national and state averages and the percentage of graduates (79 percent) who pursue postsecondary education.

•  Somers Elementary School faculty report less classroom bullying than before the program was initiated, more time in class for academic work, and strong family support.

• Veteran teachers at Montclair Kimberley Academy speak of the positive difference the program has made in campus climate and student conduct, including a decline in the incidence of student cheating.

•  All Montrose graduates matriculate to four-year colleges, many of which are among the best in the nation. While exit interviews with each graduate provide Montrose School director Dr. Karen Bohlin with feedback on all aspects of the student experience, she identified the need for a more comprehensive assessment program.

•  Ninety-three percent of Shabazz students graduate from high school, and 74 percent pursue postsecondary education. Incoming students had a 40 percent truancy rate at their former schools, while at Shabazz the truancy rate is 16 percent. Both students and parents give Shabazz approval ratings that are much higher than those other district schools receive.

•  Of the six, Community Peace Academy devotes the most energy and resources to program assessment. Qualitative and quantitative exercises measure everything from academic performance to campus climate. Teachers, parents, students, and graduates are part of the assessment process, which includes character education goals. The data are positive with respect to those goals. Eighty-two percent of sophomores met or exceeded the state standard on the 2003 Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment in math, and 84 percent met or exceeded similar standards in reading. No other public or charter high school in the state with similar percentages of low-income and ESL students even approached these rates. The assessment data provide the basis for an annual review of the school’s programs which, in turn, leads to an improvement plan for the following year.

While both advocates and critics call for more comprehensive research on the effects of character education strategies, a growing body of research data appears to support the experiences of the schools studied. The Journal of Moral Education has been around for a while, and an increasing number of its articles address the effectiveness of character education strategies with quantitative methodologies. The first issues of the Journal of Character Education have made their appearance with similar content. The publications of CIRCLE, The Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning & Engagement, and CASEL, the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning, are also contributing to the inquiry.

Public and political emphasis on academic achievement and accountability has led both program leaders and education researchers to explore the relationship between the affective goals of character education and academic achievement. The What Works Clearinghouse, part of the federal government’s Institute of Education Sciences, released in September 2006 its review of 55 studies of character education programs, which looked at “student outcomes related to positive character development, prosocial behavior, and academic performance.”

Marvin W. Berkowitz and Melinda C. Bier, both of the University of Missouri-St. Louis, reviewed 78 studies and identified 33 programs that researchers deemed effective with respect to both affective and academic goals. Peacebuilders and Second Step were among the programs they studied. They conclude that “effective character education supports and enhances the academic goals of schools: good character promotes learning.”

CASEL president Roger P. Weissberg and Joseph Durlak, a Loyola University psychologist, reviewed 300 studies and found that, compared with nonparticipants, students participating in programs aimed at improving the social and emotional learning environment in schools “have significantly better attendance records; their classroom behavior is more constructive and less often disruptive; they like school more; and they have better grade point averages. They are also less likely to be suspended or otherwise disciplined.” Participants scored at least 10 points higher in achievement tests than students who did not participate.

So far, character education programs that are carefully designed and implemented appear to be succeeding. Undeterred by philosophical disputes on the one hand and the preoccupation with academic achievement on the other, character education finds its strength at the grass roots, in those individual schools and communities where teachers, administrators, and citizens initiate programs designed to improve civility and citizenship—legitimate goals in their own right. If research continues to show that comprehensive character education has positive effects on student achievement as well, then the movement may in time gain more robust political and financial support from education policymakers.

Paul J. Dovre is president emeritus of Concordia College, Moorhead, Minnesota, and was a visiting scholar with the Program on Education Policy and Governance at the Kennedy School of Government in 2005–06.

What is civic virtue, and how does it relate to civic knowledge and civic skills? I define civic knowledge as an understanding of true facts and concepts about public affairs, such as the history, structure, and functions of government, the nature of democratic politics, and the ideals of citizenship. Civic skill is the ability to deploy knowledge in the pursuit of political goals-actions such as voting, protesting, petitioning, and debating. Civic virtues integrate such knowledge and skill with proper civic motivations or attitudes, such as respect for the democratic process, love for the nation, and concern for the common good.

Ideally, it would seem that civic education ought to promote appropriate virtues, not merely knowledge and skills, because without a virtuous motivation, knowledge and skills lack moral worth. After all, civic knowledge and skills routinely support all manner of immoral political conduct-including the use of deception, manipulation, and coercion-all the way to a traitorous betrayal of the nation to its enemies. Yet if civic schooling attempts to inculcate civic virtue, it can lead to the subordination of knowledge to civic uplift. So it is best for public schools to focus on what they do best: the inculcation of knowledge and skills.

Schools might well encourage participation in community and life. But educators are not content with these modest contributions to the practice of citizenship.

Civic Education or Civic Schooling?

For the past half-century, political scientists have been seeking to answer some basic questions about the nature of civic education. For instance, where do citizens acquire their knowledge, skills, and virtues? What role do schools-in particular, high-school civics courses-play in that acquisition? Studies focusing on the learning of civic competence or skills find, not surprisingly, that these skills are mainly acquired not by children in schools, but by adults in churches, labor unions, civic organizations, and workplaces. According to these researchers, schools foster skills not by directly teaching civics, but by encouraging students to volunteer in extracurricular organizations and to participate in student government.

Even if civic skills are not acquired in schools, surely civic knowledge and civic attitudes might be. After all, there is a longstanding consensus among researchers that an individual’s knowledge and attitudes are best predicted by his or her years of schooling. After surveying a huge body of literature about the role of education in political socialization, political scientists M. Kent Jennings and Richard Niemi reported a broad consensus that interest in politics, the possession of political skills, political participation, and support for the liberal democratic creed all increase with years of schooling.

However, there is no agreement on how to explain the simple correlation between civic virtue and educational attainment. It certainly does not appear that more education by itself automatically produces more political activity. Americans receive more schooling today than they did 50 years ago, but they are also less likely to vote or otherwise participate in politics or civic life.

Many studies find that schooling, by fostering greater verbal and cognitive sophistication, indirectly fosters greater civic knowledge and political tolerance. But what of more direct efforts at civic education, such as the civics courses that most states require public schools to teach? Do such courses, which advocates of civic education strongly support, foster desirable knowledge, attitudes, and conduct? The answer appears to be no: among other studies, influential research by Jennings and Kenneth Langton found that the high-school civics curriculum had little effect on any aspect of civic values. “Our findings,” they wrote, “certainly do not support the thinking of those who look to the civics curriculum in American high schools as even a minor source of political socialization.”

These and other studies have created a lasting professional consensus that, in general, the scholastic curriculum has some effects on the civic knowledge of students, but little or no effect on their civic values. Civics courses in particular appear to have little effect on civic knowledge and even less on civic values. Admittedly, Niemi and Jane Junn modify this consensus in their major new study, Civic Education: What Makes Students Learn. They researched the effects of different kinds of civics courses on students’ civic knowledge and attitudes, hypothesizing that certain kinds of teaching methods might significantly add or subtract from learning about politics. They found that, although the civics curriculum had much less effect on civic knowledge and values than did the home environment, civics courses did make some difference. Those that did the best job of enhancing civic knowledge were those that covered a wide variety of topics and discussed current events. However, as with earlier studies, Niemi and Junn found that civics courses had virtually no effect on attitudes. Indeed, while the earlier Langton and Jennings study focused on civic attitudes and the more recent Niemi and Junn study focused on civic knowledge, both studies converge on the qualified conclusion that civics courses have some small effect on students’ knowledge but virtually none on attitudes.

Civic Virtue or Intellectual Virtue?

Curiously, leading contemporary advocates of civic education in schools, such as the philosophers Amy Gutmann and Stephen Macedo, admit that it is ineffective. Their support for civic education lies with the conviction that schooling would lack any compelling moral purpose without it. It is no accident, then, that advocates share a fundamental assumption: that purely academic education lacks an inherent moral dimension, since it is concerned only with the acquisition of skills and information. If this is true-if academic education is merely about the three R’s-then we might well ask: Why should any society make a fundamental and expensive public commitment to common schools?

If academic education intrinsically lacked a compelling moral purpose, I would agree that our students need a compensatory moral education-and an education in civic virtues might well be the most feasible in a pluralistic democracy. But, as every good teacher knows, learning mere information and skills cannot be the aim of academic education. Divorced from a virtuous orientation toward truth, information and skills are simply resources and tools that can be put into the service of sophistry, manipulation, and domination. Only when the acquisition of information and skills is combined with a proper desire for true knowledge do we begin to acquire intellectual virtue, which may be defined as the conscientious pursuit of truth.

My developmental hierarchy of the intellectual virtues begins with the virtues of intellectual carefulness, such as single-mindedness, thoroughness, accuracy, and perseverance. Having acquired these virtues in elementary school, students must then learn how to resist the temptations to false beliefs by acquiring the virtues of intellectual humility, intellectual courage, and intellectual impartiality. Finally, adults ought to strive for coherence in what they know and for coherence between their knowledge and their other pursuits by acquiring the virtues of intellectual integrity and, ultimately, wisdom. The philosopher John Dewey thought that the aim of academic pedagogy was the inculcation of certain traits in students, among them open-mindedness, single-mindedness, sincerity, breadth of outlook, thoroughness, and responsibility. Dewey insisted that these academic or intellectual virtues “are moral traits.” In other words, academic education is itself a kind of moral education.

But what happens when schools commit themselves to civic education as well? One finds the answer in both the history and the ideas of civic education: the academic pursuit of knowledge will be corrupted if truth-seeking is subordinated to some civic agenda. The history of civic education in the United States is a cautionary tale indeed. Many advocates of civic education invoke the prestige of Thomas Jefferson, who was a pioneer in using common schools for republican civic education. What these advocates fail to notice, however, is how Jefferson’s commitment to civic education corrupted his intellectual integrity.

Jefferson’s initial vision of his proposed University of Virginia reflected his lifelong commitment to intellectual freedom. “This institution,” he wrote, “will be based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind. For here we are not afraid to follow the truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.” But Jefferson could not bear the thought of students at his university being exposed to and corrupted by politically incorrect ideas. Thus, in order to protect them from the seductive Toryism of David Hume, Jefferson spent two decades promoting the publication of a censored, plagiarized, and falsified but politically correct edition of Hume’s History of England. When he could find no partners in this intellectual crime, he enlisted James Madison’s support as a fellow member of the university’s board of overseers in drafting regulations aimed at suppressing political heresy.

Jefferson and Madison succeeded in passing a resolution to “provide that none [of the principles of government] shall be inculcated which are incompatible with those on which the Constitutions of this state, and of the U.S. were genuinely based, in the common opinion.” Moreover, Jefferson came to agree with Madison’s argument that “the most effectual safeguard against heretical intrusions into the School of politics, will be an able & orthodox Professor.” To this end, Jefferson and later Madison worked to ensure that only those professors who espoused a strict construction of the U.S. Constitution and the doctrine of states’ rights would be appointed to the school of politics. Jefferson’s passion for civic education in republican virtue led him to abandon his commitment to intellectual freedom at his beloved university. That such a champion of intellectual freedom should attempt to whitewash, censor, and suppress what he called “heresy” powerfully illustrates the poisonous consequences of using schools as instruments of civic education.

Textbook Cases

It should come as no surprise that in order to teach civic values, American textbook writers have systematically sanitized, distorted, and falsified history, literature, and social studies in order to inculcate racism, nationalism, Social Darwinism, anti-intellectualism, and every manner of religious, cultural, and class-based bigotry. An early text from 1796 warned of the danger posed by the importation of French ideas and persons: “Let America beware of infidelity, which is the most dangerous enemy that she has to contend with at present.” The author went on to teach that Native Americans lack all science, culture, and religion, that “the beavers exceed the Indians, ten-fold, in the construction of their homes and public works.” Later, in the wake of large-scale Irish immigration, school texts began slandering Roman Catholicism, describing it as an anti-Christian form of paganism and idolatry. One spelling text asked: “Is papacy at variance with paganism?” After 1870, religious bigotry gave way to racial bigotry; all non-Anglo Saxon peoples were described as permanently inferior due to their intellectual, moral, and physical degeneracy. Beginning in 1917, many states forbade any public school lessons that might be disloyal to the United States, including the teaching of the German language.

Today, in many states, creationism is taught in place of biology and geology because of the perceived moral dangers of Darwinism. Many states also sanitize American history in order to foster fealty to the American way: the Texas Education Code provides that “textbooks should promote democracy, patriotism, and the free enterprise system.” The New York Board of Regents was found to have falsified, on moral grounds, most of the literary texts used in its exams; here classic literature was bowdlerized in the interests of political correctness. Systematic studies of current social studies and history textbooks find extensive evidence of American history’s being distorted in order to highlight previously neglected contributions as well as the victimization of women and minorities. In response to the traditionally rosy and uplifting versions of American greatness designed to instill patriotism, we now find dark and brutal narratives of American imperialism and racism designed to covertly instill multicultural tolerance.

What again and again proves fatal to the pursuit of knowledge is the conviction that civic virtue is more important than truth. Indeed, some leading contemporary advocates of civic education frankly admit the need to sanitize and falsify history. For instance, University of Maryland scholar William Galston, a policy advisor in the Clinton administration, writes, “Rigorous historical research will almost certainly vindicate complex-revisionist’ accounts of key figures in American history. Civic education, however, requires a more noble, moralizing history: a pantheon of heroes, who confer legitimacy on central institutions and constitute worthy objects of emulation.”

Both conservative and progressive civic educators routinely subordinate the quest for truth to a preferred agenda for civic uplift. In English courses, literature is selected not on the grounds of its beauty, renown, or usefulness for teaching prose style, but because it presents desirable moral lessons, such as how boys love to cook. Soviet education deployed the same techniques: “Before the Revolution, Russia had 1,000 tractors; now, thanks to Comrade Stalin, we have 250,000 tractors. How many more tractors do we have under developed socialism?”

Civic education poses a profound threat not only to the integrity of the curriculum but also to the integrity of pedagogical techniques. Much of what is known as “progressive” educational pedagogy-teaching that attempts to respond to the spontaneous curiosity of the student-has long been advocated on moral and civic grounds as much as on academic grounds. Progressive techniques, these educators argue, are egalitarian, democratic, tolerant, and caring, and they foster autonomy. John Dewey, in particular, championed many progressive pedagogical innovations because he thought they turned classrooms into laboratories of democracy. Critics of progressivism have wondered why these methods are widely adopted without much empirical evidence of their effectiveness. But the passion for progressivism, like the passion for civic education more broadly, does not rest on the conviction that it is effective but on the conviction that it is morally desirable. Civic educators are often quite frank about the need to subordinate not only truth but also academic achievement to the imperatives of civic virtue.

The Moral Purpose of Schooling

The obvious objection to my claim that academic education is itself a kind of moral education is to point out that the information and skills acquired in school are just as easily put in the service of sophistry as in the service of truth-seeking. But this view of academic education misrepresents the actual point of scholastic education, which is to acquire information and skills in the context of a love for genuine knowledge. In other words, good math, history, science, and English teachers do not attempt to arm students with morally neutral resources and weapons and then hope for the best. Good teachers fuse the acquisition of information and skill to a growing desire for genuine knowledge. In other words, proper academic education does not seek merely to provide the means for whatever ends might be chosen by the student; proper academic education encompasses both the means and the end. John Dewey saw this clearly: “The knowledge of dynamite of a safecracker may be identical in verbal form with that of a chemist; in fact, it is different, for it is knit into connection with different aims and habits, and thus has a different import.”

The aim of academic education is the acquisition of those traits of character, such as thoroughness, accuracy, perseverance, intellectual humility, and intellectual courage, that make us conscientious in the pursuit of true knowledge. Our relationship with these academic virtues is fundamentally different from our relationship with our capacities and skills. We can use or misuse them, like any resource or tool; we recognize a kind of “distance” between ourselves and our skills. Virtues, however, are not capacities but qualities or aspects of persons: virtues cannot be misused because they cannot be used at all. Virtues define who we are; they are not things to be used. Academic education aims not only to equip us with new resources and skills, but also to transform us: from people who have a curiosity for knowledge, but who are credulous and prone to false beliefs, into persons who love and can reliably acquire genuine knowledge. Academic education is as deep, transformative, and virtuous as any other kind of moral education.

Once we see that the conscientious pursuit of knowledge is the inherent moral purpose of schooling, we will not be surprised by the absence of any agreement about which civic virtues ought to be taught in schools. I strongly value a commitment to human rights, the rule of law, public service, and a love of country, but I don’t see what these noble virtues have to do with pursuing knowledge of physics, French, English, chemistry, history, and math. No catalog of civic virtues can be shown to be a prerequisite of academic excellence, a part of such excellence, or its product. The simple truth is that one can be a paragon of academic virtue and a lousy citizen. Many great scholars, scientists, and educators have notoriously lacked the civic virtues by being resident aliens, cosmopolitans, or epicureans. Trying to decide which civic virtues to teach in schools is like trying to decide which sports or which crafts to teach: since none of these is intrinsically related to academic education, there are no academic grounds for deciding these matters.

Because civic education, like driver or consumer education, lacks an intrinsic relation to the academic curriculum, it quickly comes to be regarded by teachers and students as ancillary and irrelevant. The ancillary nature of civics courses may help to explain why such courses are so ineffective. To overcome their irrelevance, many advocates insist that civic education be incorporated into the core academic curriculum, so that English, history, and social studies courses impart lessons in civic virtue. But here we become impaled on the fundamental dilemma of civic education: if we teach civic virtue in a way that respects the integrity of the academic curriculum, civics becomes ancillary and irrelevant; but if we attempt to incorporate civic education into the academic subjects, we inevitably subvert the inherent moral aim of those subjects by subordinating the pursuit of truth to civic uplift.

Indeed, there may be something paradoxical and self-defeating about the whole project of teaching civic virtue in schools. Political scientists Niemi and Junn speculate that civic education might be ineffective largely because it is so whitewashed. In the attempt to promote patriotism, our civics courses, they observe, present a “Pollyannaish view of politics that is fostered by the avoidance of reference to partisan politics and other differences of opinion.” So instead of a nasty contest between interest groups, we get “how a bill becomes law”-a presentation of civics cleansed of all politics as well as of all possible interest. They also decry the Whiggish distortions of American history, in which the “problems” of the past (such as racism and oppression) are invariably “solved” in the present. Niemi and Junn worry that these attempts to inculcate civic trust may actually backfire by creating greater political cynicism. Political theorist Christopher Eisgruber similarly observes of the attempt to inculcate values through an academic course: “How would students react to such a course? My suspicion is that any student old enough to understand such a course would also be old enough to recognize it as propaganda-and to resent it for that reason.”

The Barbarism of Civic Virtue

Schools, especially public schools, have an indispensable role in civic education. Public schools must impart accurate information about the history, structure, functions, and ideals of our democratic institutions. Given how little Americans know about their government and politics, even civic education that is focused merely on civic knowledge faces formidable challenges. In addition, schools might well encourage participation in student government and in community and civic life. But our civic educators are not content with these modest contributions to the practice of American citizenship; they insist that public schools must attempt to teach the proper moral attitudes required for civic virtue. Nevertheless, it is precisely the attempt to teach full civic virtue that has consistently proved to be both ineffective and subversive of genuine academic schooling.
Since public schools are regulated and funded through democratic politics, they seem to be the ideal locale for education aimed at democratic citizenship. At the same time, however, public schools depend on a widespread civic trust: families send their children to common schools with the expectation that no one gets to impose his or her own sectarian religious or moral values at school. However, liberal and conservative civic educators cannot agree on proper civic virtues, turning our public schools into just another front in the culture wars. Thus, inherently partisan civic education undermines the trust necessary for vibrant common schools. Moreover, even if we could all agree about the proper civic virtues, the very attempt to inculcate them undermines the integrity of the academic curriculum. The quest for truth is quickly subordinated to civic uplift when teachers see their role as fostering certain civic dispositions in their students.

I believe there is much wider agreement concerning the intellectual virtues than there is regarding the civic and other moral virtues. However, one might well ask: What about the heated disagreements over how to teach reading and math, American history, science (evolution or creationism?), and health and sexuality? Aren’t the intellectual parts of the curriculum just as contentious as civics courses? That there are bitter disputes over how and what to teach in the academic curriculum is undeniable. But these arguments are fundamentally moral, not academic, in character.

Let’s consider them in turn. Progressive educators reject the practice of drilling phonics and multiplication tables on moral and civic grounds; they argue that these methods are undemocratic. These debates are driven by contrasting moral visions of the proper authority of teachers and the proper docility of students. Traditionalists accuse progressivists of fomenting anarchy, while progressivists accuse traditionalists of fomenting authoritarianism. These debates are very rarely academic debates concerning the efficacy of whole-language or phonics instruction as revealed in experimental studies. Debates over whether public schools should teach creationism or Darwinian evolution are also fundamentally moral. Many advocates of creationism argue that teaching Darwinian evolution undermines Christian faith and morals. Darwinians argue that creationism is not about science at all, but a religious and moral doctrine masquerading as science. The controversies over sex education are also transparently moral in nature: no one is arguing over the scientific facts about reproductive biology; they are arguing about competing moral visions of proper sexual conduct. These debates, far from suggesting that the intellectual curriculum is just as controversial as the moral, merely illustrate the poisonous effects of subordinating knowledge to moral uplift. In the context of our highly moralistic culture, every debate about knowledge is twisted into a debate about morality, just as every debate about art is twisted into a debate about the moral message of the artist.

The essential aim of schooling is not the mastery of a historically specific body of knowledge, but the acquisition of the dispositions that make us conscientious in the pursuit of knowledge. Perseverance, thoroughness, accuracy, intellectual honesty, intellectual courage, and intellectual impartiality are the preconditions for all conscientious pursuit of knowledge. The content of schooling will always evolve, but the essential aim of schooling remains constant. To say that these intellectual virtues are the essential aim of schooling does not imply that they are the only proper aim of schooling. Some moral virtues in students, such as temperance, courage, honesty, fairness, and friendship, might well be prerequisites for their acquisition of intellectual virtues. And some moral vices in teachers, such as bigotry, sexism, favoritism, or cruelty, might undermine the acquisition of the intellectual virtues by students. Some kinds of moral education are prerequisites for intellectual virtue, some are its parts, and some are its product. An education in the intellectual virtues is not a substitute for a moral education; it is an academically principled way to focus moral education in schools. Schools properly aim at making us good students, not good citizens or good persons.

-James B. Murphy is a professor of government at Dartmouth College. This essay is adapted from a forthcoming article in the journal Social Philosophy and Policy.

Today 40 state constitutions explicitly refer to the need for an informed electorate; 13 of them, according to a 2003 Carnegie Corporation report, “state that the central purpose of their educational system is to promote good citizenship, democracy, and free government.”

The problem is, despite Jefferson and the good intentions of state constitutions, we still don’t know exactly how schools are supposed to nurture this enlightened civic engagement. Most young people simply don’t vote, violating the first commandment of civic duty.

In the 1972 presidential election, when the ink was barely dry on the Twenty-Sixth Amendment (lowering the voting age to 18), only 52 percent of those aged 18-24 showed up at the polls (see Figure 1). Twenty-eight years later, in the closest presidential race in modern history, youth turnout, having fallen steadily over the years, reached a new low of 36 percent. Despite unprecedented efforts to mobilize younger voters for the 2004 presidential election, the turnout rate in the 18-24 age range was still only 45 percent-higher than in 2000, but nonetheless just at the average through the 1970s and 1980s. In future years, it is likely that voter turnout overall will continue to decline given the current trajectory of civic engagement among the youngest members of the electorate.

If America’s schools have a mandate to prepare young people for a lifetime of active citizenship, the evidence seems to suggest that schools are failing. But why? What can be done?

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What Brings People to the Polling Booth

To understand why some people vote while others do not, one must concede the obvious fact that the outcome of an election seldom turns on the vote of any one person. Influencing the outcome of an election is thus not by itself a good reason to take the time to vote. Though many nonvoters say they do not go to the polls because their vote does not count, research shows that this is an excuse, not a characteristic that distinguishes them from voters.

Those who vote, in fact, do so because of a sense of civic responsibility, not because they believe their votes will change an outcome. In their 1995 study of civic involvement, political scientists Sidney Verba, Kay Schlozman, and Henry Brady asked politically active Americans why they engage in an array of civic and political activities. An overwhelming majority reported doing so because they feel it is their duty. This is only the most recent and comprehensive of studies that, since the 1950s, have found a clear connection between a sense of civic obligation and political participation.

This means that voting has roots in communal life. It is an individual action taken for reasons that go beyond the immediate interests of the individual voter. Communally, voting is an indicator of a government’s legitimacy. What, after all, distinguishes a democracy from all other forms of governance if not the vote? As voter turnout climbs, the legitimacy of the republican enterprise is enhanced. Indeed, many commentators interpreted the higher-than-expected turnout for the January 2005 Iraqi vote as an indication of the new government’s legitimacy.

Apparently, then, those who vote have an intuitive sense of the legitimizing power of the vote. Do they learn it at home? In their community? Or perhaps in school? The fact is, until now, it wasn’t clear-not even for Americans.

Schools and Civic Obligation

Researchers looking for links between school and voting habits in the United States have typically focused on the impact of the school’s civics curriculum. Despite assiduous efforts, however, they have usually found no discernible relationship. In 1998, Richard Niemi and Jane Junn, in summarizing the research, concluded that the conventional wisdom among political scientists is that civics classes have no effect on young people’s political engagement. Some scholars, a group that includes Niemi and Junn, have tried to challenge that conclusion, but they can do no better than show that children who take civic classes do marginally better on civics tests while they are actually enrolled in civics classes than students who are not enrolled in the same classes. Not a particularly remarkable finding, and not one that sheds much light on the influence of schools on civic engagement.

A much more promising line of inquiry is to ask how experience in a school community inculcates an appreciation for the value of civic engagement. And that branch of inquiry has borne some fruit.

If people are voting because of a sense of duty, then it is reasonable to wonder where these civic norms come from and how they are communicated to individuals. It makes sense to inquire about the strength of norms within the community and the effect of those collective norms on an individual. As Stephen Knack, now a senior economist at the World Bank, explained in a 1992 essay, “Civic Norms, Social Sanctions, and Voter Turnout,” even people with a weak personal sense of obligation have a greater likelihood of voting in a place that is populated with duty-bound compatriots. They do this, as Knack points out, because “someone with a low sense of civic obligation may nonetheless vote to avoid displeasing a friend or relative with a stronger sense of duty.” What matters, then, is not just whether a given individual has a strong sense of duty, but also whether that individual is surrounded by others with that commitment.

Knack’s analysis owes much to the work of the celebrated sociologist James Coleman, who was among the first to use the concept of social capital in a systematic way. The norms within a community that facilitate cooperation, Coleman showed, pay dividends for the community as a whole. In a 1987 essay, “Norms as Social Capital,” Coleman noted that people act in accordance with norms to avoid social sanctions-a disapproving look, a raised eyebrow, the whispered label of “shirker”-as well as to earn approval. Such social rewards and punishments, he suggests, are internalized by the individual and become part of that person’s own ethic, which then redounds to the benefit of others.

Since adolescence is a particularly important period of life for the adoption of norms, schools can be expected to be an especially important incubator of norms of civic participation. This is why Coleman centered his work on social capital in schools. And if he is correct, we should find a link between strong civic norms at school and engagement in the political process, in both the present and the future. In short, the civic norms at your high school should affect whether you vote.

Data

Although well-known for many years, these ideas have not been put to a careful empirical test, in part because few surveys of students contain detailed contextual information about their school community and track the students into adulthood. Fortunately, the University of Michigan’s pioneering Youth Studies Series (YSS) does both. The YSS began in 1965, when a representative sample of the nation’s high-school seniors and their parents were interviewed. These students were part of a panel, which means that they were surveyed again in later years-1973 and 1982. (Because the first wave of data was collected in 1965, just as the Voting Rights Act was beginning to be implemented and while many African-Americans were still deprived of the vote, I limit my analysis to whites only.)

Information was also gathered in 1965 from roughly 125 students from each sample member’s high-school class. These students answered a similar, but shorter, version of the questionnaire given to students who were in the panel. For every question asked of these additional students, average measures for their high schools can be calculated independent of the panel member’s own qualities. For example, the answers will show whether an individual student intends to attend college, and the aggregation of the entire school sample can give an estimate of the percentage of students within that school who plan on going to college.

My analysis of these data proceeds in three stages. First, I examine whether the civic norms in a high school in 1965 affected whether adolescents anticipated being politically engaged as adults. Second, I test whether the civic norms in the schools individuals attended in 1965 affected their likelihood of voting in the 1980 presidential election. In both cases, my central hypothesis is that the stronger the school’s civic climate, as measured by the strength of a school’s communal belief in voting, the greater the degree of electoral engagement for any of the school’s individual students, regardless of their own personal sense of civic duty. Having confirmed the independent influence of civic norms within a school, I turn finally to exploring conditions that facilitate their development.

Each stage of the analysis hinges on the availability of a reliable indicator of civic norms. The YSS makes it possible to gauge the civic norms within a high school with a question that asked students, “What three things about a person are most important in showing that he is a good citizen?” Students were asked to choose from a list of six options that included religious involvement, adherence to the law, a sense of privatism (or minding one’s own business), not considering oneself better than others, being proud of one’s country, and, most important for this study, voting in elections. The beauty of this measure is that it relies on the students’ initiative to identify voting as a component of good citizenship and avoids the problem of having everyone reflexively endorse voting as a normative expectation. As a result, the percentage of students in each high school who endorse voting as a component of good citizenship varies widely, ranging from 46 to 85 percent (with an average of 70 percent) across the 77 schools in the sample. I will refer to the percentage of students in each school who link voting with good citizenship as the school’s civic climate.

Anticipating Engagement

I begin by testing whether the strength of a school’s civic climate affected its students’ anticipation of being engaged in politics later in life. Specifically, students in the sample were asked, “Looking ahead to the time when you are on your own, what about actual participation in public affairs and politics? How active do you think you will be in these matters?” In response, they had three choices: not very active, somewhat active, very active. It is likely that, to an adolescent, this question is really asking, “Do you think people should be engaged?” Or, perhaps more accurately, “Do you think people like you should be engaged?”

In testing whether adolescents attending schools with a strong civic climate were more likely to envision themselves as active citizens, I control for differences in a wide variety of individual and contextual factors that could also affect anticipated engagement. These factors include, for the individual, the level of education the student planned to attain, the level of education the student’s parents attained, the length of time the student had lived in the community, and gender. I also control for differences in the average level of education attained by the parents of other students in the school, the average length of time that its students have lived in their community, and the political diversity within the school population (as measured by differences in self-reported major-party affiliation).

Perhaps most critically, I also take into account whether each individual endorsed voting as a sign of good citizenship. In other words, my analysis isolates the effect of being surrounded by others who see voting as a component of good citizenship regardless of the individual’s own expressed sense of civic duty. As expected, adolescents who reported that good citizens exercise their right to vote also reported that they anticipate being publicly engaged on reaching adulthood. All else being equal, endorsing voting as a mark of good citizenship boosted anticipated engagement by about one-eighth of a standard deviation-a slightly larger impact than resulted from an increase in parents’ education of one standard deviation.

Yet even when taking into account the individual’s own sense of responsibility, the school’s civic climate had its own impact on how students plan to live their political lives. Impressively, attending the school with the strongest civic climate (where 85 percent of students listed voting as a component of good citizenship) rather than the school with the weakest civic climate (where 46 percent chose voting) increased anticipated participation by a quarter of a standard deviation, or by about twice the effect of the individual student’s having listed voting as a component of good citizenship.

Meeting Expectations?

That more students in a school with a strong civic climate anticipate being engaged in politics is surely a good thing, but, of course, teenagers do not always live up to even their own expectations. Does the civic climate of one’s high school also affect the likelihood of turning out to vote in the years following high school?

To address this question, I use data from the second round of YSS follow-up interviews, conducted in 1982, which asked the study’s participants to report on whether they voted in the 1980 presidential election. This election occurred roughly 15 years following the panel members’ graduation from high school, when most were in their early 30s. The overall voter turnout that year, roughly 55 percent, was fairly typical for elections after 1968.

In examining the impact of the school’s civic climate, it is again important to take into account other factors, focusing this time on those most likely to influence the respondent’s decision to vote. At the individual level, this includes education, marital status, gender, and length of residence in the community-all factors, past research has shown, that have a bearing on turnout. And since the home is also a critical factor in a person’s civic development, I control for three measures of the engagement level of the student’s parents as of 1965, including whether the parents voted in the 1964 presidential election. Finally, I again take into account whether the individual respondent endorsed voting as an essential component of good citizenship in answering the question used to gauge the school’s civic climate in 1965.

I also control for several characteristics of the respondent’s high school, including the average level of education attained by the parents of other students in the school, average residential stability, average level of anticipated participation, and partisan diversity within the school environment. Of course, for the purpose of testing the impact of civic norms, the most significant school-level variable is its civic climate: the percentage of students who viewed voting as an obligation of citizenship.

As in the case of students’ anticipated participation, the civic climate of the school has a clear impact. People who in 1965 attended a school where students saw voting as a civic duty were far more likely to vote 15 years later. All else being equal, a typical individual who attended the school with the largest percentage of students identifying voting as a component of good citizenship was 14 percentage points more likely to vote than the person who attended schools with the lowest percentage of students identifying voting as a civic duty. By way of comparison, having a college degree increased the likelihood of voting by 18 percentage points. An individual who attended a school with a civic climate one standard deviation above the mean school in the sample was about 7 percentage points more likely to vote than a similar individual attending a school with a civic climate one standard deviation below the mean (see Figure 2). Meanwhile, the partisan diversity of an individual’s school had no impact whatsoever on later turnout-a finding that is important to keep in mind when interpreting the results presented later in the story.

After accounting for the school’s civic climate, the fact that an individual student identified voting as a civic duty in high school also has no effect on voting later in life. However, had I not measured the effect of the school’s civic climate, I likely would have concluded that an individual’s attitudes toward voting as an adolescent were quite important. In doing so, I would have attributed to the individual what was in fact a consequence of the environment in which he or she was educated.

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A Civic Norms Nursery

Finding that communal civic norms in high school lead to voter turnout years later leads naturally to the question of what conditions facilitate the incubation and nurturing of those collective norms within a school. Myriad possibilities present themselves, most of which are beyond the scope of these data to test. The findings of scholars who study social capital, however, suggest one possibility that can be tested: homogeneity-whether racial, religious, or economic-seems to foster social capital. Or, to put it more provocatively, diversity may diminish the social cohesiveness necessary to sustain strong civic norms.

With this in mind, I examine how diversity influences the civic climate of a high school, focusing on three distinct dimensions of that diversity: racial, religious, and partisan. Although most research to date on the effects of diversity has focused on demographic characteristics like race and religion, there is good reason to think that political diversity may be even more important-especially with regard to norms about voting. Recall that the theoretical link between cohesiveness and social capital is that of widely shared values. Those shared values constitute a cultural outlook that research shows is often expressed through political party affiliation. Partisanship, then, provides a particularly good proxy for shared values, even though high-school students are unlikely to identify each other by partisan labels.

As hypothesized, I find that the more politically homogeneous the high school, the stronger the norm linking voting with good citizenship (see Figure 3). This is true even after taking into account two other factors that might be expected to affect a school’s civic climate; namely, the mean level of education attained by students’ parents and the average length of time that students have lived in their community. The impact of political homogeneity on civic climate is about the same as that of the average parents’ education, which is noteworthy given that education and the status it confers has long been recognized as a major facilitator of social norms generally and of civic engagement specifically. Only political diversity adversely affects schools’ civic climate; neither religious nor racial diversity has effect.

Conclusion

The bottom line of this analysis is that the civic climate in high school has a great impact on voter turnout at least 15 years following graduation. What matters is that an adolescent’s community, defined in this case as the high school, is populated with a high percentage of peers who express their belief that voting is an indicator of good citizenship. In fact, after accounting for the civic climate of an individual’s high school, an individual’s own belief that voting is a civic duty does not have an impact on voting as an adult. Individuals do not act, nor are they acted on, in isolation. Rather, norms are inculcated within communities, such as the family, the neighborhood, and the school. And those norms reach into the future.

I also found that cohesive schools, including those with a homogeneous political composition, foster civic norms. This is clearly an explosive finding: diversity, at least along a political dimension, dampens civic norms. A naive reading of this result might suggest that the cure for America’s civic ills lies in crafting clusters of political homogeneity, with conservatives shunted off to their schools and liberals to theirs. Such an inference would be dead wrong. Recall that political cohesiveness had no discernible effect on adolescents’ later voting patterns after the civic climate within the school was taken into account. And surely there are many factors apart from political diversity that can influence civic norms.

A more sensible conclusion to draw is that any school-based reform aiming to enhance voter turnout among the rising generation should focus on ways to foster a strong civic climate. The importance of political cohesiveness provides a clue to how to do this. Political cohesiveness is merely an indicator of values held in common within a community. A promising course of action to strengthen a school’s civic climate, therefore, is to identify ways to foster a sense of commonality among a school’s students.

For this to happen, legislators, educators, parents, and the public must recognize that the civic dimension of our education system deserves more than lip service, but should be subject to the same scrutiny as other education outcomes. Schools will take civic education seriously only when policymakers and parents begin to scrutinize the civic experiences provided by their schools as closely as they currently monitor academic standards. I echo political theorist Stephen Macedo’s lament: “Given the centrality of civic purposes to public schools it is ironic that studies of -effective schools’ pay so little attention to civic ends.” We need to learn what works and then make it possible for our schools to do it.

But is it realistic to expect today’s schools, beleaguered as many of them are, to add the promotion of civic duty to their long list of responsibilities? I believe that it is, and that an unlikely model can be found in the way American schools have in recent decades come to embrace tolerance for diversity as a preeminent value. This respect for differences has not come about through a particular class that students take, nor is it restricted to a select few who participate in a specific program. It has become part of the modern public school’s culture, quietly and consistently reinforced by teachers and administrators. It has, in other words, become a norm.

Tolerance for diversity is a noble objective, and America’s educators should be applauded for having successfully integrated it into the education of today’s students. However, while tolerance is necessary for a vibrant democratic culture, it is not sufficient. Turnout among the youngest voters has declined, even as they have grown more tolerant; plainly, a sense of civic duty is also needed. So let’s consider the way tolerance has become a norm as a template for a renewed focus on encouraging a sense of civic duty among today’s adolescents. Our schools need to reemphasize America’s shared civic culture, not to replace but to complement encouraging tolerance. Let educators do for unum what they have done for pluribus.

-David E. Campbell is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame. Article funded by a grant from the John M. Templeton Foundation.