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.’”

Creating Capital Citizens: César Chávez Public Charter Schools for Public Policy and Civic Education
By Richard Lee Colvin
(April 10, 2013)

Chukwuma Isebor, an 18-year-old high school student whose father emigrated to the United States from Nigeria for college, says that prior to his senior year he was cynical and distrustful “of the government and the way it treated lower-income citizens and minorities.” Yet, there he was in December, arguing with two classmates before a panel of three judges that the patriotic spirit of the nation’s founders could be revived and the quality of American democracy improved if citizens participated more actively.

Chukwuma, Joseline Barajas, and Chyna Winchester are seniors at the César Chávez Public Charter Schools for Public Policy campus on 12th Street Southeast in Washington, DC, 11 blocks east of the Capitol. They offered up their thoughts on citizenship and democracy as they participated in the annual “We the People” competition at their school. The nationwide competition, sponsored by the Center for Civic Education, tests students’ knowledge of the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights in a congressional hearing-style format. Teams research an opening statement that responds to questions on one of the competition’s six themes and then answer queries from a panel of judges. The goal of the competition is to promote knowledge and appreciation of the Constitution as the foundation of democracy in the United States.

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Yesterday, Massachusetts state Senator Richard T. Moore took to the opinion pages to promote a new civic education report in Massachusetts by the Special Commission on Civic Engagement and Learning: “Renewing the Social Compact.” As Moore writes, “if our government, ‘of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth,’ as Abraham Lincoln proclaimed, we, the people, need to learn about how our government works, understanding our role as citizens in our own government, and how to become civically engaged. As citizens of our town, state, and country, we have more to do than just voting.”

In celebration of National School Choice Week, we have been highlighting our ongoing case study series “Teaching Citizenship in Charter Schools.” The series explores how top-performing charter schools have incorporated civic learning in their school curriculum and school culture. We have published three case studies so far: Daniel Lautzenheiser and Andrew P. Kelly’s “Charter Schools as Nation Builders: Democracy Prep and Civic Education”; Joanne Jacobs’ “Counting on Character: National Heritage Academies and Civic Education”; and, most recently, David Feith’s “Making Americans: UNO Charter Schools and Civic Education.”

The third-annual National School Choice Week officially kicked off earlier this week, with over 3,600 events planned across the United States to bring attention to and advocate for more educational options for students and families. (Click here to see what school choice events are happening near you.) As the nation turns its attention to school choice, it’s  a good time to take a look at how charter schools are approaching civic education.

To better understand and advance the efforts of charter schools to teach citizenship, AEI’s Program on American Citizenship and its Education Policy Studies Program are working with a select group of “trendsetter” charter schools that seek to raise the bar for civic education. Building on our 2012 report, we commissioned a series of in-depth case studies exploring how top-performing charter schools have incorporated civic learning in their school curriculum and school culture.

Over at the “Rick Hess Straight Up” blog at Education Week, AEI’s Rick Hess highlights our new series of case studies on teaching citizenship in charter schools. Providing some helpful background as to why we think these case studies are important, Hess writes: “Amidst our “achievement-gap” drenched discourse, it’s easy to slight other educational priorities–like, say, the obligation of schools to teach, prepare, and equip students to be good and responsible citizens. As I noted in The Same Thing Over and Over, since our nation’s founding, schools have been asked to inculcate good citizenship with at least as much urgency as they’ve been asked to promote literacy and numeracy.”

Last week, the AEI Program on American Citizenship published a case study by Daniel Lautzenheiser and Andrew P. Kelly that looked at the Democracy Prep Public Schools network in New York City. Today, we’d like to highlight the second study in the series that explores how top-performing charter schools have incorporated civic learning in their school curriculum and culture: “Counting on Character: National Heritage Academies and Civic Education.”

In the first in a series of in-depth case studies by the AEI Program on American Citizenship exploring how top-performing charter schools have incorporated civic learning in their school curriculum and school culture, AEI’s Daniel Lautzenheiser and Andrew P. Kelly take a look at the Democracy Prep Public Schools network in New York City.

Charter Schools as Nation Builders: Democracy Prep and Civic Education
By Daniel Lautzenheiser and Andrew P. Kelly
(January 16, 2013)

On a sunny Tuesday in June, the streets of Harlem, New York City, are filled with the usual midday crowd hustling in and out of subway stations and eating hurried lunches. One thing they are most decidedly not doing is voting. And this is a disappointment for a small army of schoolchildren dressed in bright yellow shirts.

The students in yellow attend one of the charter schools in the Democracy Prep Public Schools network and, with the help of their teachers and several parent volunteers, are waging a Get Out the Vote (GOTV) campaign. The occasion is the Democratic congressional primary for New York’s 15th Congressional District, which encompasses upper Manhattan (including Columbia University, Washington Heights, and Harlem) and surrounding locales. Congressional primaries are typically low-turnout affairs in which incumbents have a massive advantage.

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The American School Board Journal has an article in its current issue about the importance of civics education, even at a time when social studies and civics classes are facing challenges in the era of “college and career” readiness. As Ted McConnell, executive director for the Civic Missions of Schools, reminds, education should be “about preparing students for college, career — and citizenship.”

In this morning’s edition of “Rick Hess Straight Up” over at Education Week, AEI scholar Rick Hess hopes that the momentum from the election will focus much needed attention on civic education in our nation. “Students,” Hess notes, “are remarkably unprepared for citizenship.”

Here are some recent happenings in the citizenship world:

• A new CIRCLE study reveals that knowledge about voter laws is still lacking among young Americans
• From the Education Gadfly: “U.S. Civics education is lacking…but at least we’re not France.”
•  Former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor writes in the San Francisco Chronicle that it’s “time to restore civic learning”

Fourth grade students at Harlem Prep, part of  Democracy Prep Public Schools (one of the charter school networks profiled in Strengthening the Civic Mission of Charter Schools), have created a catchy song, sung to the tune of Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call me Maybe,” encouraging eligible voters to get out and vote this November 6. Check it out.

Over at The New York Times‘s “Campaign Stops” blog, Ann Beeson, a lecturer at the University of Texas and former legal director of the ACLU, notices that many young people are very involved in different civic organizations, but that few of them actually vote.

Writing recently for Education Week, AEI’s Daniel Lautzenheiser expanded on the “new and potentially transformative way of thinking about schooling” that charter schools provide.

Celebrating the release of a new 25th anniversary edition of Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students, Andrew Ferguson argues in The Weekly Standard that Bloom’s diagnosis still holds true–that America’s colleges are still not preparing their students for lives well-lived as citizens.

Missed Friday’s “Whither American Education?” conference at American University? Here are some highlights from the event.

On Tuesday, we highlighted some differing responses to the Education Department’s new report, “Advancing Civic Learning and Engagement in Democracy.” Much of the debate centers around how much schools (and the federal government) should focus on traditional classroom civics education (emphasizing knowledge about government and American democracy, e.g.) versus a newer model of “action civics,” which focuses on civic participation and service learning.

Yesterday, Teaching America editor David Feith entered the fray.