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.

According to a recent study by the Pew Research Hispanic Center, only about one-third of the 5.4 million legal immigrants from Mexico who are eligible to become citizens of the United States have pursued the path to citizenship. This rate of naturalization is only half that of legal immigrants from all other countries combined.

In its spring issue, Education Next hosted a forum about how schools can best educate Hispanic students. Responding to the question, CEO of Chicago’s United Neighborhood Organization (UNO) Juan Rangel answers that schools catering to Hispanic populations should emphasize civic responsibility and good citizenship.  ”A quality public school that emphasizes civic responsibility and good citizenship,” he writes, “will suffice to transition immigrants successfully, challenging them and the rest of us on our joint commitment to the welfare of our nation.”

Immigration reform is quickly becoming an in-the-news issue, as we noted earlier this week with Peter Skerry’s suggestions for what reform might look like. The Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) has just joined the conversation, releasing a new fact sheet that uses post-election youth polling to examine young people’s views of immigration. The survey found that only a relatively small portion—7.8%—of young Americans ages 18-24 rated immigration as their top issue in the 2012 election. Perhaps unsurprisingly, those that did, however, overwhelmingly favored liberalizing immigration laws.

The Center on Education Policy at George Washington University has just released a new report that provides a good overview of current research on civic education in charter schools and suggests opportunities for further research. (In regard to this latter point about future research opportunities, as Maria Ferguson, the head of the Center, notes, “The most interesting finding from our analysis is that the research that exists about civic education in any kind of school (charter, traditional public, or private) is limited at best.”)

According to the Washington Post, a new proposal by the Washington DC State Board of Education would, among other things, eliminate the current requirement that students take a course in American government in order to graduate from high school. Instead, students would be required to take courses in world history (1 unit), United States history (1 unit), and Washington, DC history (0.5) units, and then would have the choice to fill their remaining 1.5 units of social studies with classes such as economics, financial literacy, global studies, or government/civics.

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.”

Yesterday, President Barack Obama delivered his second inaugural address—and the nation’s 57th. While much has been written on the politics of the speech, there are also some good citizenship themes in it that are worth pointing out.

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.

This year is the “Year of Citizens” for the European Union, which officially kicked off the year-long focus this past week in Dublin, Ireland. Viviane Reding, a politician from Luxembourg and the vice-president of the European Commission, told her audience in Dublin’s City Hall that the vast majority of EU citizens—86 percent—don’t know what their rights as EU citizens are, and that almost 70 percent don’t believe that their voices are being heard. This year’s focus on citizenship is, she says, an effort to change that.

Writing in The Atlantic, Eric Liu, a former Clinton speechwriter and creator of Citizen University, warns that with all the discussion that’s sure to come about immigration reform, we must be careful not to neglect discussing the destination: citizenship itself.  “What is this thing that needs to be earned?” he asks. “What, besides a bundle of rights, does the status entail and require? What do longstanding citizens take for granted and what is asked of brand-new Americans?”

The “Song of a Citizen” project isn’t especially new, but it’s one we were unaware of until reading this post on citizenship and civic responsibility over at the Besette Pitney American Government and Politics blog.

According to the new “Volunteering and Civic Life in America” report issued yesterday by the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS) and the National Conference on Citizenship (NCoC), Americans volunteered in 2011 at significantly higher levels than in 2010, with the national volunteer rate reaching a five-year high.

At the National Conference on Citizenship (NCoC) website, Alice Murphy interviews Eric Greitens, author of the recently-released book The Warrior’s Heart: Becoming a Man of Compassion and Courage. The book is an adaptation of Greiten’s previous book, The Heart and the Fist: The Education of a Humanitarian, the Making of a Navy SEAL, but is aimed specifically at younger readers in an attempt to equip them with the drive and resources to begin a life of volunteering and civic engagement even now as teens and young adults.

In the Wall Street Journal‘s weekend interview, Sohrab Ahmari sat down with Harvey Mansfield, William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Government at Harvard University, to discuss the “crisis of American self-government.” This year marks Mansfield’s fiftieth year teaching politics and political theory at Harvard, where he has authored such books on government and democracy as Spirit of Liberalism (1978), Taming the Prince: The Ambivalence of Modern Executive Power (1993), America’s Constitutional Soul (1993), and a new translation of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (2000).

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.”

Next Tuesday, November 27, the Hudson Institute is hosting a timely and much needed conversation about the role of the citizen and civic space in modern American politics. Here is the event description:

National Affairs magazine editor Yuval Levin, writing in the October 8, 2012 issue of The Weekly Standard, noted that this year’s presidential election seemed to have deteriorated into a contest between a “simple-minded and selfish radical individualism,” on the one hand, and “a simple-minded and dangerous radical collectivism” on the other.

In an interview last week with Florida Today, Lou Frey, a former US Congressman and founder of the Lou Frey Institute of Politics and Government at the University of Central Florida, discussed the importance of civic education efforts in his state. Florida is currently field-testing a new high school civics exam, which it plans to implement statewide next year, and has been leader in promoting civic education for all K-12 students.

Today, as voters across the country stand in long lines to perform their civic duty and cast their votes, it seems appropriate to remind ourselves of why voting should be so important to Americans. In 1865, Frederick Douglass addressed the annual meeting of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society in Boston and provided a robust defense of black Americans’ desire to vote. His words are worth reading again today.

Tomorrow, Friday, October 26, the Bradley Center at the Hudson Institute is hosting a panel discussion to explore how problems in government can open the way for an active citizenry. The event, “Broken Cities or Civic Renewal?”, begins at 12:00 PM at the Institute, but can also be livestreamed here.