Congrats are due to Peter Levine, director of CIRCLE and Program friend, who was recently appointed as the Lincoln-Filene Professor of Citizenship and Public Service and as a research professor in the School of Arts & Sciences philosophy department at Tufts University. If that’s not enough, Peter also has a forthcoming book, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For: The Promise of Civic Renewal in America (Oxford University Press, September 2013).

According to the Associated Press, the city of Los Angeles has just released a smartphone app that will allow citizens to communicate even more directly and efficiently with their government. The app will allow residents to report potholes, pay city bills, and look up dog parks—among other things—from their smart phones. “Instead of calling 311 to report problems,” the AP writes, “residents can use the app. They can even snap photos to accompany reports of potholes or graffiti.”

Writing at the Huffington Post, Rachel Tardiff worries that the decline in civic education in public schools has had very real effects on how citizens engage (or don’t engage) their government and advocate for change. Using the recent debate on social networking sites over gay marriage as an example, Tardiff notes that her Facebook feed became “a stream of red, with a huge swath of [her] friends changing their profile pictures” to the red equal sign to show their support for same sex marriage. Unfortunately, she writes, not many of her friends knew what else they could do to show support for their cause: “We’ve grown up in the political reality . . . where civic education courses are a luxury and a sense of civic duty is quaint. When all you feel you can do to further your views is to share a photo on Facebook . . . then it’s a short but hard fall from engagement to impotence.”

In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote of his visit to America that “Americans of all ages, all stations in life, and all types of dispositions are forever forming associations. . . . Nothing, in my view, deserves more attention than the intellectual and moral associations in America.” Writing 160 years after Tocqueville, the American political scientist Robert Putnam described in his book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community that Americans were becoming less likely to participate in these associations—that instead of joining bowling leagues, they were “bowling alone.” That was over ten years ago. How are Americans faring today?

Earlier this week, the National Conference on Citizenship (NCoC), the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE), Harvard University’s Institute of Politics, and Mobilize.org released a joint report looking at millennials’ civic behavior. Focusing on Americans aged 18 to 29, the report finds that young Americans are civically engaged in a number of different ways, even if only half of them voted in the 2012 presidential election.

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.

Peter Levine, director of the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE), raises the question at his blog about what we actually mean when we use the term “civic engagement.” “There is no single answer to this question, which is deeply contested,” he notes.

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.

Here’s an end-of-the-week news roundup for things happening in the citizenship world you may have missed:

• CIRCLE has compiled some great reports examining youth voting behavior in the presidential election.
• Writing for the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory, Bridget Draxler, a professor at Monmouth College, highlights a new civic engagement program at St. Olaf College.
• Rebekah Sanderlin, an Army wife, writes in the New York Times “At War” blog about the challenges that military families face.
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Writing before the election at NonprofitCommunity.com, Carolyn J. Lukensmeyer, executive director of the National Institute for Civil Discourse and author of the forthcoming book Bringing Citizen Voices to the Table, makes the case for more direct citizen involvement in governing decisions. Worried that part of the cause of our current political dysfunction is a hyper-partisan form of politics, Lukensmeyer believes that citizens themselves can—and should—come together and “make the important decisions that need to be made.”

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.

In the Huffington Post, Alex Wirth, part of the Harvard Public Opinion Project, discusses the results of a new poll by the Project that finds that youth voter (defined as voters ages 18-29) turnout this November could be the lowest on record.

We have been following with great interest the release of CIRCLE’s new report that examines the standards, course requirements, and mandatory assessments related to civic education in each of the 50 states.

Writing at The Huffington Post, Peter Levine, director of the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning (CIRCLE), makes the case for presidential candidates and political pundits to take citizenship seriously.

Last November, we covered a report by the National Conference on Citizenship (NCoC)–whose annual national conference, by the way, is today and can be live streamed beginning at 1:00 PM EST here–that made the case that a community’s level of civic engagement was related to its economic success. On Wednesday, NCoC released a follow up to that report: “Civic Health and Unemployment II: The Case Builds.”

Though much attention is now being paid to the Chicago teachers strike (AEI’s Rick Hess has some good thoughts on that here and here), there’s another education initiative in Chicago’s schools worth mentioning: a pilot program to teach a yearlong civic-learning curriculum to seniors in fifteen of the city’s schools.

With all the recent emphasis on using college as a “crucible moment” to teach students to become civically engaged, it becomes easy to forget that many citizens, whose engagement should also be valued, do not participate in higher education. A recent report by the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) looks at the civic engagement of this population.

According to a new report by the Chronicle of Philanthropy, Americans across the country and in different income brackets have surprisingly different levels of charitable giving. The study, “How America Gives,” looked at IRS records from 2008 for taxpayers who itemized their deductions and who earned $50,000 or more that year. The authors found that these Americans donated a median of 4.7 percent of their discretionary income to charitable causes. The picture becomes more interesting, though, when you compare the data by region, income level, etc.

Over at The Chronicle for Higher Education‘s “The Conversation” blog, Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, takes aim at partisan activity in the college classroom. Four years ago, Wood argued against the practice of some colleges awarding class credit to students who volunteered on a presidential campaign, worrying that “when the distinction between academic study and political activism is lowered, political activism tends to dominate, and real education is thrust aside.”