Civics and character education are important elements of a young person’s education. For too long we have let “slip” the importance of both of these “subjects” or better put, way of life. Because although civics has been and can be seen as a curriculum, character education is far more effective when it becomes simply the way a school operates. The Schools of Character, run by the Character Education Partnership (CEP), is a fantastic program that celebrates great schools and school districts which have committed themselves to the 11 principles of character education. I have seen first-hand how powerful this reform strategy is and how student achievement is dramatically effected when it is implemented throughout the school/ school district.

The 11 Principles of Effective Character Education are the cornerstone of CEP’s philosophy on effective character education. Each principle outlines vital aspects of character education initiatives and offers fundamental guidance for educators and community leaders to maximize their character education outcomes.

Can we use the 11 principles to drive school reform? Thankfully hundreds of schools and now a number of school districts are doing just that. And the results are stunning. Do we need more resources to do this work? Of course! It is time consuming but dedicated teachers and staffs are also seeing the payoffs of involving the entire school or school district, and the community.

As boards of education look for ways to improve student achievement, retain good teachers, give students reason and meaning to stay in school, become active, engaged learners in their schools, setting the goal to become a school or district of character can be the engine that drives these great results.

I have an admission… I am on the CEP board of directors. And why am I on this board? Because I feel so strongly that creating a culture of trust, responsibility, accountability and caring lets children and adults know that they are in the right environment for learning. It works! It is important! I am glad that the Obama administration is acknowledging that character and civic learning matter. Charter education even may matter the most.

Here is a comment from David Feith, Assistant Op-Ed Editor at The Wall Street Journal; Chairman of the Civic Education Initiative and Editor of Teaching America: The Case for Civic Education

Any high-profile spotlight on our nation’s civic education crisis is welcome. But how dedicated is the federal government to this issue, and how sound is its thinking? There’s reason for concern on both counts.

Were civic education a priority, the Education Department might have created an Office of Civic Education so that the subject no longer languishes in an obscure sub-office within the Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools. (So suggests Tufts University’s Peter Levine in his contribution to a book I edited entitled Teaching America: The Case for Civic Education.)

Such an office might not have prevented Congress in 2011 from cutting all federal funds for civic education (which amounted to roughly $70 million per year over the past decade). But it could help direct any funds that Congress reinstates—in ways that promote innovation and competition among states, districts, charter management organizations and others. It could also tackle simpler reforms, such as expanding the civics exam of the National Assessment of Educational Progress so that data could be disaggregated state-by-state.

An even simpler way for Washington to show its seriousness: Improve the rhetoric. President Obama regularly cites the need to prepare young Americans for “college and career.” Why not add “informed citizenship” into the mantra?

Of course, that would only gesture toward the right national goal. More important is defining that goal correctly, and pursing it wisely. On these fronts, the government’s thinking is incomplete at best.

In its recently-released Road Map and Call to Action, and at the White House summit where it was unveiled, the Education Department defined civic education overwhelmingly as a matter of volunteerism and collective problem-solving. Our education system “must be gauged by how well the next generation of Americans is prepared to solve collective problems creatively and collaboratively,” says the Call to Action, adding: “Done well, civic education teaches students to communicate effectively, to work collaboratively, to ask tough questions, and to appreciate diversity.”

That’s hardly an exhaustive list—and it’s certainly not one well-tailored to our country’s circumstances. What about highlighting the need for students to understand the American political system so they’re empowered to influence it? What about conveying a sense of how radical the American notions of self-government and individual rights were in 1776—and how radical they remain today in so many places still unfree? One assumes the government doesn’t consider these matters “your grandmother’s civics,” too slow or old-fashioned for a world demanding “action civics.” But their omission is troubling.

Would-be civic-education reformers almost always focus on what might be called “supply-side” solutions: more and better teachers, more and better textbooks, more and better assessments, etc. So it is with “action civics,” service-learning and the like, which are justified by supply-side arguments about making our educational offerings more modern, interactive, “21st-century,” etc. But this supply-side focus tends to ignore the importance of the “demand side,” of cultivating in students an interest in—a demand for—civic knowledge, skills and participation. Without such interest and demand, both classroom content and service-learning outings are likelier to fall on deaf ears.

How, then, to stimulate civic demand in students? By cultivating feelings of civic empowerment, gratitude and opportunity. This is especially important in poor and minority communities, where children are often inclined to feel alienated from American civic and political life.

Recognizing the importance of demand creation allows us to examine what kinds of service-learning are most conducive to it. On one side of the ledger are, among other things, creative get-out-the-vote efforts, as at Harlem’s Democracy Prep Public Schools, where every election season students lead a nonpartisan “I Can’t Vote, But You Can” campaign in their neighborhoods. Then there’s the Habitat-for-Humanity school of service-learning. Building homes or community centers has obvious virtue, but to call it civic education—especially when we know that schools’ time and money for civic education is limited—is to shortchange students who need serious exposure to American history and civic life.

My organization, the Civic Education Initiative—housed at Democracy Prep Public Schools—is focused on the demand side. Launched last year by the publication of Teaching America: The Case for Civic Education, the Initiative is now developing several creative programs for implementation in schools.

In the meantime, we have formulated a simple national goal called “Challenge 2026”: By 2026, all high-school graduates should be able to pass the U.S. citizenship exam. When Newsweek gave the exam to a group of Americans last year, fewer than 40% passed. Correcting such civic illiteracy will take intense effort from Washington, but especially innovation from districts and school leaders focused on rigorous civic content and strong civic sentiment.

Pretty much everybody favors better “civics education” in our schools and colleges. Pretty much everybody who thinks about such matters is alarmed that barely a quarter of U.S. school kids were at or above the “proficient” level on the 2010 NAEP assessment of civics—and that achievement at the twelfth- grade level is slipping even though just about all students “take civics” in high school. Almost everyone has encountered ample examples of students (and adults!) who cannot answer the most rudimentary questions about how the government is organized, what “separation of powers” or “checks and balances” means, how many senators their states have (much less their names), and more.

It is, indeed, a modern platitude that “we must do something to improve Americans’ knowledge of civics and government.”

But there is a problem in civics education, a sort of dividing line, about which there is far less agreement across society. On one side, we find an emphasis on infusing kids with basic knowledge about government, an understanding of the merits (as well as the shortcomings) of American democracy, and a sense of what can still be called patriotism: the belief that this country and its values need to be defended. (Stanford’s Bill Damon does a terrific job of elaborating on this viewpoint in his recent book, Failing Liberty 101.)

On the other side, we find much greater emphasis on civic participation and activism, on voluntarism and “service learning,” and on what is often termed “collective decision making” (or problem solving) and “democratic engagement,” which often boils down into the communitarian view that issues facing society are best dealt with through group action, by people joining hands and working together rather than through the political process.

I will admit, after watching the antics of Congress, many state legislatures, and the current GOP presidential candidates, that American society would benefit from more “working together” than our elected officials have displayed of late. (And I keep recalling the late David Broder’s remark that the death of Ted Kennedy marked the passing of the last of the Senate’s great “deal makers,” willing to compromise and work across party lines to accomplish something worthwhile, even if it wasn’t everything that either party wanted.)

Still and all, schools have a special responsibility to the young people in their care, which is to be exceptionally careful about providing lessons and activities of a political nature or enlisting them in adult causes, however worthy some may deem them. And Uncle Sam has a special responsibility not to “take sides” in the big debate—or, if it does, to come down on the side of patriotism. Unfortunately, a new report out of the U.S. Department of Education, one that appears to enjoy Arne Duncan’s strong personal backing, suggests that the executive branch is tilting toward the other side.

One is reminded, without pleasure, the ruckus that President Obama stirred up with his first back-to-school address in 2009—and the controversial “lesson plan” that the Education Department prepared to accompany it.

The “democratic engagement” faction within civics education has recently re-energized—even without Mr. Duncan’s help—and is pressing hard on schools to push kids into activism. You can see a vivid example of this in a recent publication called (cutely) A Crucible Moment and billed as “a national call to action.” Although it’s primarily aimed at colleges and universities, its authors make plain that its message is meant for primary and secondary schools, too. (Those authors, however, include absolutely nobody from the K-12 world.)

The publication sets forth a quintet of “essential actions,” among which I find three at least a bit troublesome, particularly when applied to compulsory public education of impressionable children rather than the voluntary education of young adults:

1. “Advance a contemporary, comprehensive framework for civic learning—embracing U.S. and global interdependence—that includes historic and modern understandings of democratic values, capacities to engage diverse perspectives and people, and commitment to collective civic problem solving.” Global interdependence? Collective civic problem solving?
2. “Capitalize upon the interdependent responsibilities of K–12 and higher educationto foster progressively higher levels of civic knowledge, skills, examined values, and action as expectations for every student.” Values examined by whom? What sort of “action”?
3. “Expand the number of robust, generative civic partnerships and alliances, locally, nationally, and globally to address common problems, empower people to act, strengthen communities and nations, and generate new frontiers of knowledge.” What exactly are “generative civic partnerships” and who in particular is supposed to be “empowered” to do what?

Are you with me so far? But you may be thinking that this is all kind of academic and irrelevant, isn’t it, just one more pious commission report?

Well, it would be, but for one big attention-getter: Uncle Sam putting his thumb on this side of the civics-education scale.

Check out the Education Department’s brand-new official publication, Advancing Civic Learning and Engagement in Democracy: A Road Map and Call to Action. Although this thirty-pager comes out of the Department’s postsecondary wing and is, once again, meant mostly for higher education, it, too, makes no real age-specific distinctions and explicitly urges the nation’s K-12 schools to, for example, “both expand and transform their approach to civic learning and democratic engagement, rather than engage in tinkering at the margins. At no school, college, or university should students graduate with less civic literacy and engagement than when they arrived.”

Duncan himself made a pretty big deal of this at a recent White House conference where he remarked that “Unlike traditional civic education, civic learning and democratic engagement 2.0 is more ambitious and participatory than in the past. To paraphrase Justice O'Connor, the new generation of civic education initiatives move beyond your ‘grandmother's civics’ to what has been labeled ‘action civics.’"

Hmm, “action civics”?

To be sure, most of what the Department proposes to do itself in this realm is consistent either with longstanding federal practice (e.g. research, data) or with ingrained Obama-administration priorities (e.g. “public-private partnerships”). But there are policy hints that go farther, such as suggesting that the forthcoming ESEA/NCLB reauthorization should include a program to “assist states, local education agencies, and nonprofits in developing implementing, evaluating, and replicating evidence-based programs that contribute to a well-rounded education—including civics, government, economics, and history. Other disciplines included in the program could incorporate evidence-based civic learning and democratic engagement approaches—such as service-learning.”

Read that last bit again and ask yourself if this is really a proper federal role in K-12 education, keeping in mind that the kids to be affected probably cannot even name the mayor of their town or the governor of their state, nor have much idea what political parties are and how legislation gets passed (or not).

It’s well and good for the Education Department to seek a broadening of the K-12 curriculum and an overdue consolidation of too many discipline-specific curriculum-related programs into a single block grant. It’s not acceptable, however, for them to push “action civics” on our nation’s schools.

All high school students should learn civics (usually 10th grade) and U.S. history (usually 11th). But I object to mandating community service projects. Few teachers have the time or talent to design and run a service program that's truly educational.

As a volunteer, I dread the appearance of high school students fulfilling a service requirement. They go through the motions, get the check-off and vanish. Teens who truly are volunteers are excellent, though I'm not sure chopping up vegetables for a salad for the homeless teaches anything about homelessness. And not a lot about culinary arts. We used to have a girl who loved to cut up the cakes and pies for dessert. Perhaps she learned geometry.

Tthe report's insistence that college students study civics and participate in community service projects -- specifically including community college students -- annoyed me. College students should be able to concentrate their time and energy on subjects that interest them. A student who becomes a competent engineer, nurse or teacher will serve the community for a lifetime.

Community college students are much more likely to earn a credential if they set a goal and focus on achieving it. Dabblers and dalliers rarely go the distance. Furthermore, most community college students are juggling classes, work and family responsibilities. Many of them know about poverty from first-hand experience. These students need another hoop to jump through like they need a hole in the head.

There are times when I wonder if ed reform has gotten “too cool for school.” Mere learning is now passé; a well-paying job is the true 21st century diploma. Civics and things like the Arts are no longer “must haves” but “nice to haves”; soon they will become “not haves”; and if we allow it, they will be “never haves” for many students in many public schools. This progression seems to me antithetical to the future health of our children and of our society.

It’s easy to see how we’ve arrived at this point. But continuing to equate education with job training is not serving us well today, nor will it serve us well tomorrow. Though we all rail against it, we really are narrowing the curriculum—and not because of testing or because laws tell us to; we are choosing to narrow it through our own panicked narrow-minded choices.

We have chosen to squeeze out Civics, which usually falls under the more general school subject of Social Studies, most of all. No law requires that we do this. I talk to teachers all over the country about what they think they can't do and what they think they can't teach. True, there is pressure to raise student achievement in reading, math, and science. But teaching those subjects using more effective techniques would solve those challenges and leave plenty of time left in the day for many other things, Civics among them.

But using better techniques is not what most educators choose to do, and so the education we provide for our children does indeed become narrower, so too do our children’s chances for future success. Children need more and varied knowledge, not less. Coming generations of school attendees will have more jobs and more careers than those who have come before them. I’ve had 5 or 6 careers myself, and maybe 10-12 different jobs since getting my BA. Government figures suggest that citizens of the future can expect even greater vocational variety.

The closer we are to the future, the more accurately we can predict it. But making decisions a generation or two ahead of time invites large errors. In the absence of predictions we can trust, and in the presence of trends we can foresee, we should opt for the least risky plan that produces a meaningful result, and re-evaluate that plan frequently at regular intervals. Rather than taking 10-20 years to create what we hope will be the ultimate end-to-end K-to-career solution, we need to think and act with more agility in order to reduce risk and to better prepare ourselves to deal with the likelihood of error-prone long-range planning.

Our education system needs to move iteratively in short “sprints”. Then, with good empirical measurement, we must plan the next “sprint”, add more incremental functionality, measure again, refactor as required, and avoid building up decades of systemic “debt” created by choices made out of expediency rather than efficacy, choices like narrowing the curriculum that we will pay for many times over when we are eventually forced to correct for errors committed and unaddressed.

As the saying goes: “The only thing certain is change” Most of what we know about what kids will need for their futures is that much of it will be different than what they’ve needed in the past and that it will change even more rapidly than it is changing today. As such, we must be extremely careful about large-scale standardization and how it may make it harder for us to prepare individual learners for the individual and increasingly dynamic lives they will be living. To this end, Civics seem to me an essential element of the education menu. What better way might there be to learn about how our country works—and doesn't—and how to make one's way within it?

A month ago, I began learning yet another new job. It’s very hard, but I’m getting the hang of it. I show up early, I work late, I study on my free time to make up for the many things I didn’t learn in school and couldn’t have learned in school because they were, at that time, inconceivable to most of our society. Even if I had known way back then exactly what I would have needed to know now, I don’t think programs would have existed to teach it to me. The same is true today only to a greater degree. Kids need to learn more things in more ways in order to be prepared for a more uncertain future.

Even as recently as a year ago, I could not have predicted having the good fortune to be able to do the work I am doing now—but at least, this close to my current employment situation, formal education in my new job would have been readily available. Thirty years ago, there were no formal programs I could have drawn on for preparation. When I was 5 or 15, there were few, if any, educational programs that could have prepared me well for what I was doing at 25 or 30, let alone right now when I am in my 40s.

At what point in my life could I have predicted tackling careers as diverse as being a writer, musician, technologist, entrepreneur, graphic designer, or educator? And even if I had been aware of the likelihood of each of these things, and the programs I needed were available to me, how could I have crammed in all the coursework needed to be, as we love to say now, “career-ready.” It was better, I think, that I was given a good general education with little pretense as to which career path I might follow.

It’s hard to be “career-ready” when we don’t know which career to be ready for. And when we know that most of us will have multiple careers, it seems shortsighted to create a system bent on slotting kids into narrow lanes of possibility.

I have a BA in English so it’s not surprising that I’ve had a lot of extra learning to do on my own in preparation for most of the jobs and careers I’ve had in my life. In fact, even to be a professional writer, I have had to unlearn much of what I learned about how to write in school from many acclaimed teachers in a top-notch department at a reasonably respected university. In order to be successful in the world, I had to learn an entirely different approach, one that continues to evolve as rapidly as do new forms of text-based media and globally distributed workflows.

There was, nor could there ever be, any set of curricula, standards, tests, teachers, programs, or schools that could have prepared me for even two or three of my careers by the time I graduated from college, let alone the next few careers I’ll probably have to tackle in the future. And I was a pretty good student. Because of the breadth of my education, I feel I am in a much better position today to assess career challenges than the current crop of youngsters coming up who face a much more tumultuous and unpredictable global economy and have less experience upon which to draw.

So why, using our current approaches, do we think we can craft a heavily standardized and narrowly implemented K-12 education system that will prepare future citizens for the world of work they will be entering? The day children start kindergarten, we can predict with little certainty what the world of work will look like when they earn a high school diploma or a post-secondary degree. The idea that “education is job training” smacks of naive crystal ball gazing.

Learning is, of necessity, a lifetime pursuit. Work is an increasingly dynamic aspect of modern life. K-12 and post-secondary education must begin to reflect these realities. Bringing in more Civics, Geography, History, more content in general— is absolutely essential.

We do not live in the age of Sputnik and the era of Eisenhower. We reached the Moon; the Wall fell; we’re all “jacked in” to the Internet. We must resist our nostalgia for simpler times, and the temptation to codify a narrowly-focused minimum competency education system, and recognize in our political and practical choices the dynamism of the way work works today and the way it is likely to work in future.

Americans are growing increasingly separated by income and educational attainment and we are seeing the adverse consequences of this inequality. Our politics has also become polarized to the point where elected officials seem utterly incapable of tackling our country’s most urgent problems. At the same time, our children are growing up in a country more diverse than ever before, in a globalized world where the distances between countries has been cut to nanoseconds, and where we need strong leaders to solve the growing challenges facing our nation.

It’s time for new a type of civic learning that prepares our children not only to succeed academically, but that also positions them to become engaged citizens and future leaders. In the classroom, this means involving students in discussions of current events, encouraging diverse opinions, and teaching students the skills to deliberate and listen rather than dig in and retreat from controversy. It means exploring difficult topics from all angles and then going out into the community to see how policy choices play out on the ground. It means empowering students to understand why things are the way they are and how political levers and the tools of citizenship can be used to make change.

Outside the classroom, the beauty of programs like AmeriCorps is that they engage young people in working together to solve problems in very tangible ways. Whether by tutoring low-performing children in an urban public school, assisting at a community health clinic, or restoring fragile pieces of the environment, young people take responsibility for solving problems and learn that they have the capacity to be part of the solution. This builds a sense of self-efficacy and responsibility that can last a lifetime.

Another benefit of service programs is that they put young people in communities vastly different from those they are accustomed to and allow them to work side-by-side with peers and community members who they might never have encountered in their normal lives. Not only can this exposure break down stereotypes and misconceptions, but working together in diverse settings lays the foundation for understanding the type of world these young people will encounter for the rest of their lives.

Our politics are dysfunctional and our country’s people are growing apart at the very time when we most need to come together. There has never been a time when civics learning is more badly needed. All it takes is one generation of children to dramatically reshape our citizenry – one generation that has grown up knowing how to talk to one another and work together, and who have experienced the power of being part of the solution.

The Obama Administration wants to have it both ways. First they push plans that will increase the focus on reading and math scores, which will predictably narrow the curriculum even more than it is already. Then they complain that civics has been pushed off the plate. It's like someone painting himself into a corner, then complaining that there's no mess-free way to get out.

Because of its narrow focus on reading and math scores, No Child Left Behind has undeniably pushed civics education aside--along with so many other valuable pursuits like social studies, science, art, music, phys ed and recess.

President Obama’s push for active civics learning suggests an appreciation that students need to be encouraged to value their own ideas and agency and to be prepared to participate actively in a democracy. But he seems to have overlooked one of the most tragic outcomes of NCLB-style learning. As educator and author Deborah Meier put it, “By shifting the locus of authority to outside bodies, [the push for greater standardization] undermines the capacity of schools to instruct by example in the qualities of mind that schools in a democracy should be fostering in kids–responsibility for one’s own ideas, tolerance for the ideas of others, and a capacity to negotiate differences.”

Of course, our students would benefit from more (or any) attention to civics and more active learning in civics and subjects across the board, but that’s not the likely outcome of the route being paved by current efforts to “reform” NCLB. After all, neither the administration nor Congress is trying to scale back NCLB’s annual testing in math and reading as the key measures of student achievement and school quality.

Worse, the administration’s push, through Race to the Top and the NCLB waiver program, for teacher evaluations based on student test results is certain to increase the focus on these results. This could lead to standardized testing in civics. Unfortunately, based on our experience with the reading and math exams, this will leave our schools mired in narrow, rote learning of civics. This will be most true for students in schools with the least resources and greatest challenges. These are the students who, in a better system, could be learning to take an active role in solving the problems that cripple their communities, problems they know all too well. Sadly, the route we are on is likely to cement in place a system that is poorly suited to develop citizens who will participate in and strengthen our democracy in the decades to come.