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.

We recently came across this speech by the education reformer and Massachusetts state senator Horace Mann (1796–1859) and just had to share. Given in celebration of Independence Day in 1842, Mann discusses the need to think seriously about the perpetuation of our political institutions (a theme Abraham Lincoln had given attention to in his 1838 Lyceum Address) and the role that a strong culture of civic education plays in doing so. We thought it especially appropriate to share now, as it relates to the recent release of our latest case study looking at civic education and school culture in charter schools.

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.”

In the latest in a series of in-depth case studies exploring how top-performing charter schools have incorporated civic learning in their school curriculum and school culture, Robert Maranto (University of Arkansas) takes a look at Houston’s YES Prep Public Schools. YES Prep (the “YES” stands for Youth Engaged in Service) began in 1995 as a program at Rusk Elementary School in the Houston Independent School District, then became its own independent charter school in 1998, and currently is home to 10 grade 6–12 campuses serving 6,400 students in the Houston area. From its beginning, Maranto points out, “YES Prep has emphasized citizenship through service to the community.”

Each year, the Major George A. Smith Memorial Fund awards the HOOAH Award to a veteran who “defines citizenship through service to our country, both in uniform and beyond.” Past honorees include Eric Greitens, Derek Blumke, Eric Hilleman, and Chris Marvin; read their inspiring stories here. Nominations for the 2013 HOOAH Award are now being accepted.

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.”

At the New York Times “At War” blog, James Dao takes a look at the US Chamber of Commerce Foundation’s “Hiring Our Heroes” effort to help military veterans find jobs in the civilian world.  As Dao recounts, Kevin Schmiegel, a retired Marine Corps lieutenant colonel and executive director of Hiring Our Heroes, organized a team last year to create a “Personal Branding Resume Engine,” a website that helps veterans translate their military experience into jobs that civilian employers can understand. Unveiled this week at a job fair at the 69th Regiment Armory in Manhattan, the resume engine was developed with the help from Fortune 500 human resources managers.

The folks over at the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) have just released a new working paper on civic education: “New and Alternative Assessments, Digital Badges, and Civics: An Overview of Emerging Themes and Promising Directions.” Building on their previous research looking at the way states test (or don’t test) their students on social studies or civics, this study takes a look at alternative assessment mechanisms that can test students’ knowledge and civic skills. Instead of just using multiple-choice tests, for example, schools might look at introducing digital badges that students can earn when they have demonstrated some civic skill.

In the continuing saga over the proposed Eisenhower Memorial, new Congressional legislation would halt any additional federal funding for Frank Gehry’s design and send the memorial back to its planning phase. (Read more background on the memorial controversy here.)  Congressman Rob Bishop (R-Utah), the chairman of the House Subcommittee on Public Lands and Environmental Regulation, introduced the bill, which Susan Eisenhower—Ike’s granddaughter—supports. “We are very respectful that this is a memorial for the American people,” she told the congressional committee last week. “I think we might be in a different position if the public hadn’t been so very strongly against this design.”

At Brown University, the only remaining Ivy League institution that has yet to welcome ROTC back to its campus, students are taking to the campus newspaper to discuss the prospect of ROTC at Brown. As we noted in October, the editorial board of the student paper, the Brown Daily Herald, has for the past two years issued statements calling for the reinstatement of the program on campus, only to be met by opposition from the campus administration. In a recent back-and-forth, two more students weigh in—one arguing for the program’s return, and the other arguing against it.