It’s been a year since Columbia University re-established an on-campus Naval ROTC program. In the latest edition of Columbia’s The Blue and White, student Naomi Sharp gives a progress report. Thus far, she notes, the program has flown under the radar, attracting little attention, positive or negative, but “a quiet beginning to the program has its benefits.”

In our latest policy brief, Ashbrook Center fellow David Tucker and musician Nathan Tucker consider the place of music in our civic culture. The authors note how American civic music has changed over time, becoming less religious, less programmatic, and more sentimental. In describing the evolution of American music, they touch on a range of styles and genres, from jazz to the American musical to Aaron Copland’s civic music to the folk music of the Sixties to the gangster rap of Tupac Shakur.

In the Atlantic, Colin Daileda writes about the challenges the military faces in accessing minority officers—and how the return of big city ROTC can help. Daileda follows the progress of new ROTC units at schools affiliated with the City University of New York (CUNY) and notes how their success could lead to a more diverse officer corps.

In Philanthropy Magazine, Naomi Schaefer Riley writes about philanthropic efforts to strengthen civic learning in American schools. Riley highlights programs by the Gilder Lehrman Institute, the Bill of Rights Institute, and What So Proudly We Hail by AEI’s own Leon R. Kass and his wife Amy.

We’ve noted before that many social studies teachers favor accountability for their subjects. Our survey, High Schools, Civics, and Citizenship: What Social Studies Teachers Think and Do, found that more than nine out of ten teachers want social studies to become part of their state’s set of standards and testing. Now, Texas educators are protesting changes to the state’s accountability system that could marginalize social studies.

The National Conference on Citizenship (NCoC) has recently launched its second annual Civic Data Challenge, a national competition to transform raw data on the nation’s civic health into applications and visualizations that can be used by community leaders and engaged citizens. Because the applications are meant to be of use in actual communities, each entry must have a community partner to ensure that the product is meeting a real community need. This year, the challenge has been divided into three phases: ideation, creation, and implementation.

Earlier this week, the Hudson Institute released a new study by John Fonte and Althea Nagai looking at political and patriotic assimilation by naturalized citizens. Comparing the answers given in a survey by naturalized Americans with those of native-born citizens, Fonte and Nagai found that there exists a substantial gap between the two groups of citizens in their patriotic attachment and civic knowledge.

In The Atlantic, Robert Pondiscio, executive director of CitizenshipFirst, suggests that a ground-floor civics standard that must be met by all graduating students from high school is in order—and that the US Citizenship Test is just the place to start. Writing shortly after the release of his white paper for the Pioneer Institute (coauthored with Gilbert T. Sewall and Sandra Stotsky)—“Shortchanging the Future: The Crisis of History and Civics in American Schools”—Pondiscio laments the crisis in civic education and civic knowledge today, but thinks that setting a modest standard like the Citizenship Test would be more helpful than establishing more high-stakes testing or overhauling state standards.

For our latest case study in the “Teaching Citizenship in Charter Schools” series, Richard Lee Colvin, an education journalist and author of Tilting the Windmills: School Reform, San Diego, and America’s Race to Reform Public Education (out this month from Harvard Education Press), profiles the César Chávez Public Charter Schools for Public Policy in Washington, DC. The mission of the charter network—which has four schools located in the nation’s capital and serves 1,4000 students, nearly all of whom are African Americans or Latinos from low-income families—is to “empower students by helping them both succeed in college and learn to use their knowledge of government, public policy, and effective advocacy techniques to become ‘civic leaders committed to bettering our communities, country, and world.’”

Over at the National Conference on Citizenship (NCoC), Diana Aviv, President and CEO of the Independent Sector, a network of philanthropic and nonprofit organizations, provides an update on volunteering in America. “The generous act of volunteering in America,” she writes, “is as vast and varied as the country itself. Some 64 million Americans—roughly one-fifth of our population—engaged in a formal volunteer activity during the past year. The UK-based Charities Aid Foundation’s 2011 World Giving Index ranked the U.S. first in ‘giving,’ as measured by three behaviors: helping a stranger, volunteering time, and giving money.”

In an effort to better understand the skills that student-veterans bring with them to college, a group of New Jersey educators attended a week-long Marine Corps Educators Boot Camp at Paris Island, South Carolina. Many of the participants of the program were high school guidance counselors, principals, and history teachers who took part in order to learn more about what some of their students may be doing following graduation; other participants were administrators at community colleges who wanted to find out more about education in the military and how the skills that veterans have learned there can translate into college credit and help them find work in the civilian workforce.

The U.S. Citizenship Test is a required step in the naturalization process. All U.S. citizenship applicants, with some exceptions, must pass the citizenship test before taking the Oath of Allegiance and officially becoming U.S. citizens. Do you have what it takes to be a citizen? Take the test after the jump.

From the Wall Street Journal: One year after Congress voted to repeal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” elite universities such as Harvard, Yale and Columbia have ended Vietnam-era bans on the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) with highly publicized signing ceremonies among senior military officers and university leaders. Yet for all the fanfare, Yale is the only university that will have cadets training on campus next fall.

From The Weekly Standard: What exactly do we celebrate on Veterans Day? To be sure, we mean to honor the brave men and women, living and dead, who have fought America’s battles, past and present. But honor them how, and for what? About these matters, we lack a clear national answer.

From the New York Post: The re-embrace of ROTC by elite schools marks the end of a shameful chapter in our nation’s history. But ROTC cadets on these campuses—indeed, across much of the nation—still face serious obstacles to their aspiration to serve their country.