June 2010

Interested in facts about young voters in the midterm elections?  CIRCLE has a variety of fact sheets showing youth participation in past midterm elections.

• “Youth Voter Turnout Increases in 2006“shows that the voter turnout rate among 18-to-29-year-olds increased three percentage points between 2002 and 2006 from 22 percent to 25 percent, breaking a trend in declining electoral participation in midterm elections among young people since 1982.  The fact sheet is based on data from the 1978-2006 Census Current Population Survey (CPS), November (Voting) Supplement.
• “Young Voters in the 2006 Elections” includes information about young voters’ political preferences and the issues that concerned them in the 2006 election.  This fact sheet is based on data from the 2006 National Election Pool’s National Exit Poll.
• Quick Facts About Young Voters by State: The Midterm Election Year 2006, ” Using data from the 2006 Census CPS, November Supplement, these facts sheets examine voter turnout rates from 1978-2006, turnout rates by subgroup, and partisanship (where available from theNational Election Pool, Exit Poll surveys) for all 50 states and the District of Columbia.
• “Quick Facts About Young Voters by Metropolitan Area: The Midterm Election Year 2006,”  these fact sheets analyze voter turnout rates by metropolitan area.
• “Young Urban Voters in the Midterm Election Year 2006”  presents youth voter turnout data for the 2006 midterm elections by urban, suburban, and rural areas as well as information for select metropolitan areas.

The July edition (V7.i3) of CIRCLE’s quarterly newsletter. Around the CIRCLE, can be downloaded from here. The newsletter includes a variety of articles including:

•  Federal Policy and Civic Skills
• Schoolwide Civic Intervention May  Help to Increase Community Participation Among Students of All Backgrounds
• CIRCLE’s Social Media Experiments
• State 2009 Civic Health Reports Reflect Unique Characteristics Among States
• Four Youth Organizations That are Working to Build Civic Skills

If you would like to receive a hardcopy of CIRCLE’s quarterly newsletter, please send an email to Emily Hoban Kirby at Emily.Kirby@Tufts.edu with your address.

Washington, DC: Today CIRCLE releases a new fact sheet entitled “Civic Skills and Federal Policy” (PDF). The fact sheet notes that citizens can improve their communities, the government, and the nation through active civic engagement and collaboration. To do so requires skills. Educational programs and other government-supported initiatives have been shown to enhance Americans’ civic skills and their levels of engagement. But these programs and other opportunities are scarce and unequal, often provided to people who are already the most likely to be engaged. A lack of civic learning opportunities not only inhibits Americans’ civic participation, but also has harmful consequences for their academic and economic progress.

The fact sheet will be released at a conference at the National Press Club in Washington.  Seventy people will attend, and the speakers include representatives from the United States Department of Education, the Corporation for National and Community Service, Department of Interior, Department of Justice, Environmental Protection Agency, and  Federal Transit Administration along with distinguished scholars and leaders of nonprofits.

This sample graph from the fact sheet illustrates that students from more affluent families are much more likely to experience opportunities to learn civic skill in high school.

According to a new paper by Judith Torney-Purta and Britt S.Wilkenfeld, “Civic education, especially when it is interactive and involves discussion of current issues, is an important way to develop the skills that young Americans need to succeed in the 21st Century workforce. Students who experience interactive discussion-based civic education (either by itself or in combination with lecture-based civic education) score the highest on “21st Century Competencies,” including working with others (especially in diverse groups) and knowledge of economic and political processes. Students who experience neither interactive nor lecture-based civic education have the lowest scores on all of the 21st Century competencies examined. This group, which comprises about one-quarter of all American students, shows not only low levels of knowledge but also a relatively low level of willingness to obey the law.”

The report, entitled “Paths to 21st Century Competencies through Civic Education Classrooms,” was commissioned by the American Bar Association Division for Public Education and the Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools with some involvement by CIRCLE.

• Download the executive summary (PDF) or
• Download the full report (PDF)

Suggested citation: Torney-Purta, Judith and Wilkenfeld, Britt S. (2009). “Paths to 21st Century Competencies Through Civic Education Classrooms: An Analysis of Survey Results from Ninth-Graders.” Washington, DC: Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools and American Bar Association Division for Public Education. Accessed from CIRCLE via http://www.civicyouth.org/?p=360.

Vanderbilt University Press has published Engaging Young People in Civic Life, edited by James Youniss and by Peter Levine, with a forward by former United States Representative Lee Hamilton.

This book originated in a meeting organized by CIRCLE and funded by Carnegie Corporation of New York. Many of the chapters are informed by CIRCLE-funded research projects. This is CIRCLE’s press release.

In the forward, Hamilton writes, “I can think of no task more important for the future of American democracy than teaching young people about our system of government and encouraging them to get involved in politics and community service. … Engaging Young People in Civic Life is tough-minded, data-driven, and unsentimental. It is full of concrete policy proposals for schools, municipalities, service programs, and political parties. It offers all the appropriate scholarly caveats and qualifications. But at its heart, it is a plea to revive American democracy by offering all our young people the civic opportunities they want and so richly deserve.”

Table of Contents

Foreword - Lee Hamilton

Introduction. Policy for Youth Civic Engagement - Peter Levine and James Youniss

Part I. Youth and Schools

Chapter 1. A “Younger Americans Act”: An Old Idea for a New Era - James Youniss and Peter Levine

Chapter 2. Democracy for Some: The Civic Opportunity Gap in High School - Joseph Kahne and Ellen Middaugh

Chapter 3. Principles That Promote Discussion of Controversial Political Issues - Diana Hess

Part II. Political Environments: Neighborhoods and Cities

Chapter 4. Policies for Civic Engagement Beyond the Schoolyard - James G. Gimpel and Shanna Pearson-Merkowitz

Chapter 5. Civic Participation and Development in Urban Adolescents - Daniel Hart and Ben Kirshner

Chapter 6. City Government As Enabler of Youth Civic Engagement: Policy Design and Implications - Carmen Sirianni and Diana Marginean Schor

Chapter 7. Local Political Parties and Young Voters: Context, Resources, and Policy Innovation - Daniel M. Shea

Part III. Policy Models from Other Nations

Chapter 8. Youth Electoral Participation in Canada and Scandinavia - Henry Milner

Chapter 9. Civic Education in Europe: Perspectives from the Netherlands, Belgium, and France - Marc Hooghe and Ellen Claes

Chapter 10. Strengthening Education for Citizenship and Democracy in the UK - David Kerr and Elizabeth Cleaver

Conclusion. The Way Forward - Peter Levine and James Youniss

April 2009

This slideshow summarizes CIRCLE’s research to date on non-college youth. (Scroll over to reveal navigation buttons, or use right arrow to advance.)

January 2009

The Winter edition of CIRCLE’s quarterly newsletter, Around the CIRCLE, can be downloaded from here.  The newsletter includes a variety of articles including:

-  Has “No Child Left Behind” Narrowed School Curricula?
-  CIRCLE Designs and Analyzes the 2008 Civic Health Index
-  A Closer Look at the 2008 Youth Vote

If you would like to receive a hard copy of CIRCLE’s quarterly newsletter, please send an email to Emily Hoban Kirby at Emily.Kirby@Tufts.edu with your address.

Young voters favor Obama over McCain by 66% to 32%

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For Immediate Release
November 3, 2008

Contact: David Roscow, 703-276-2772 x21 or Sarah Shugars, 617-627-2029

Media Alert/2008 Youth Voter Data
Exit Polls to Show Only Youth Share of Voters
CIRCLE to estimate Youth Turnout Early Wednesday, Nov. 5

Conference Call-in Press Briefing to Discuss 2008 Youth Vote, 2 PM ET, Nov. 5
To RSVP please call David Roscow at 703-276-2772 x21 or email dave@tricomassociates.com

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CIRCLE designed and analyzed the 2008 Civic Health Index Poll for the National Conference on Citizenship (NCoC), with input from the NCoC and its Civic Indicators Working Group. The survey was conducted in July by Peter D. Hart Research Associates with national samples of 1,000 respondents interviewed by telephone and 1000 surveyed online, plus large samples in Ohio, Florida, and California. It was released today at the National Archives. Read the CIRCLE press release or the whole report as a PDF.

The survey provides a wealth of information about Americans’ civic participation. Citizens are heavily engaged in political activities during the 2008 campaign, but many do not anticipate taking action on issues raised during the campaign after the election is over. The survey did, however, find strong and bipartisan support for policies that would institutionalize civic engagement between elections:

• 87% favored expanding national and community service programs so that every young American would have a chance to serve full-time for a year
• 80% favored holding a national deliberation on a major policy issue and requiring Congress to hold hearings on the results
• 76% would like service-learning to be required of all high school students
• 67% would strengthen civic education by requiring new tests

Finally, the survey collected Americans’ reactions to key words used to promote civic engagement, such as “citizenship,” “service,” “democracy,” and “community organizing.” The results demonstrate that all these words and phrases are problematic if our goal is to promote active involvement in democracy. For example, although “community organizing” has been discussed as a controversial phrase since the Republican convention, we find that most Americans either do not know what it means or associate it with benign, helping behavior.