Two years ago today, we attended Civic Learning Week and produced an episode on the state of civics education in the US. We heard some good things and some frustrating things. Today we're getting an update on civics education with Emma Humphries from iCivics, hearing some student audio submissions from our friends at the Youth Media Challenge, and getting advice on how students can make change with Cheryl Cook-Kallio.
Click here to livestream the National Forum for Civics Learning Week.
Click here to listen to our episodes on civics education in the US.
Click here to read the full State of Young People report published by America's Promise Alliance.
And finally, click here to check out the work students are producing (and submit your own!) for KQED's Youth Media Challenge.
Transcript
Note: this transcript is AI-generated and may contain errors
kids are alright for trans.mp3
Nick Capodice: You're listening to Civics 101. I'm Nick Capodice.
Hannah McCarthy: I'm Hannah McCarthy.
Nick Capodice: I'm going to start today with a little bit of a throwback. Hannah, do you remember this?
Danielle Allen: The good news is we've actually reversed that dynamic. Now we're up to $0.50 per kid on civic education. All right, so, hey, we're moving in the right direction now. But look, look, now we can say we hit bottom right because we've turned we've turned it. We turned the corner. We've gone up from $0.05 to $0.50. So that's better than a poke in the eye.
Hannah McCarthy: Yeah, I do remember [00:00:30] this. That's Danielle Allen from our episode on the State of civics Education. Danielle is currently the director of the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation at Harvard, by the way, also the director of the Democratic Knowledge Project. But in this case, she was telling us a piece of good news that funding for civics has increased tenfold.
Nick Capodice: So we interviewed Danielle at Civics Learning Week two years ago. And I do mean two years ago. This is an anniversary of sorts, because this is [00:01:00] Civic Learning Week right now. Hannah and I are going to the Hoover Institution at Stanford on Thursday. We're going to interview attendees. Any listeners out there can go themselves if they wish or they can live stream it. I've got a link down there in the show notes, but I bring all this up because today is an update on the state of civics education in the United States. And without falling into hyperbole here, I want to say that civics ed is in trouble.
Emma Humphries: Because [00:01:30] what we know when it comes to civic learning is we don't have nearly enough of it.
Nick Capodice: This is Emma Humphries. Emma is the chief education officer at Icivics. They organize Civics Learning Week every year, and if you don't know Icivics, you should. They are an organization that we've worked with and collaborated with ever since our show began.
Emma Humphries: There's a lot of support for it widespread, ideologically diverse support for more and better civic education. But we're still in a situation where students are not getting nearly enough, [00:02:00] especially when you compare social studies or civics instruction to instruction in Stem or Ela.
Nick Capodice: So, Hannah, I'm using this anniversary of Civics Learning Week as an excuse to do two things today. First, to tell our audience why civics education is both extremely important and in a rough spot right now. And secondly, I'm going to share what students themselves see as the most important issues in the country.
Hannah McCarthy: All right, Nick. So Emma said that there [00:02:30] is, you know, support for civics education, that people want it. How do we know that?
Nick Capodice: Right. So I've got anecdotal evidence and polling data on this. I'll get the anecdotal out of the way. First. In our seven years of making this show, I have not met a single person Republican, Democrat, diehard, libertarian, independent, whatever who heard about our show and said Civics 101. Well, that seems a bit unnecessary.
Nick Capodice: I think. Our kids study enough civics already. Never [00:03:00] happened. And I will add, if that person was born in the 1970s or earlier, they then say, you know, I remember being taught civics exhaustively when I went to school. What the heck happened?
Hannah McCarthy: My mother has said that to me.
Nick Capodice: She has. And I heard her say it. And then more often than not, they bring up schoolhouse Rock.
Bill: I know I'll be a law someday. At least I hope.
Nick Capodice: Anecdotal evidence. Nothing like it.
Bill: Oh yeah!
Hannah McCarthy: Yeah, but let's have the data.
Emma Humphries: Yeah. So we've we've done the polling. Are some of our partners have [00:03:30] done the polling. So when it comes to the general public, it is more than bipartisan. Just striking overwhelming majority of Americans believe that civic education is one of the best things we can do to strengthen our constitutional democracy and enhance our our national cohesion, and to sort of push back against all the social divisiveness we're seeing. So recent reporting from the America's Promise Alliance. They recently released their State of Young People 2024 report, [00:04:00] which showed that 9 in 10 young people. So 91% believe that everyone should have access to civic education. However, just 4 in 10, 43% of young people feel even somewhat prepared. So we are failing them. They are asking for more and better and more engaging civic education, and they're not getting it. And as a result, they do not feel prepared to take up their important role as participants in our constitutional democracy.
Nick Capodice: So, Hannah, if I take a second and I try [00:04:30] to remember what I learned in grade school, the first things that leap out are things like Pemdas, you know.
Hannah McCarthy: Oh yeah, the mathematical order of operations that really saved me in math class.
Nick Capodice: Yeah. Or like the mitochondria.Is the.Powerhouse of the cell or foil.
Hannah McCarthy: Keeping algebra fresh.
Nick Capodice: But if I'm thinking what school taught me, as in what resulted in me sitting in a chair right now in front of a microphone, being one of the happiest people I've met. It was, in essence, [00:05:00] civics. And I don't necessarily mean social studies class or knowing about the Teapot Dome scandal, or even how a bill becomes a law, which is super important. But in this instance, I mean, being a good citizen, a good classmate.
Hannah McCarthy: This is what we talked about in our live show about civics writ large, that it's not necessarily just about learning how the government works, it's about how you speak to other people in your class, how you relate to your teacher, [00:05:30] how you deal with conflict or advocate for what you want in a larger community.
Nick Capodice: Right. And learning to agree or disagree with someone to use evidence to back up an argument. You know, we do that in essays and other topics, but that is a really important piece of being a person and that is civics.
Emma Humphries: It's really interesting that, you know, for some time now you've seen increasing calls for more and better civic education. It's getting a lot of attention that hasn't fully translated into changes in state [00:06:00] legislation. There have been some wins. The we are going in the right direction. More states are providing more instructional time, more course requirements around civics. But still, all these years later, the vast majority of states only require one semester of civics or government, and they typically teach that in 12th grade. Another way to put it is we spend 13 years from kindergarten through 12th grade preparing students for careers, teaching them how to read, teaching them math and science. And then [00:06:30] we spend one semester, their senior year preparing them for the very thing that public schools were founded to prepare them for in the first place.
Nick Capodice: I have to jump in here and say that we are going to do a full episode on this sometime, but Emma's point is a valid and supported one. Madison. Jefferson. Washington. Myriad others. They believe the point in education of school was to prepare students to be good citizens.
Emma Humphries: If we saw literacy rates or math [00:07:00] rates the way we see civic rates, parents would be up in arms. If you found out that your kid was only getting ten minutes of math instruction a week, you would you would pull them out of the school. Yet that's exactly what's happening with civic education across this country, particularly at the elementary level. So that's what Civic Learning Week is about. It's about calling attention to this need for greater civic education and hopefully activating people to pay a little bit more attention and start demanding from their state legislatures that their students get [00:07:30] these learning opportunities.
Nick Capodice: And again, we are not talking about knowing the birth and death dates of presidents or what a discharge petition is.
Emma Humphries: I'm not so concerned that students can't rattle off the names of all nine Supreme Court justices, and even takes me a second to do it. I have to kind of picture them all in their official portrait and go through one by one in order to remember them all. It's not even that important to me that most people can't name the five freedoms of the First Amendment. I wish they could. But what matters is that if you were [00:08:00] to give them those five freedoms, they would say, yeah, yeah, those are important. I value those, that's what matters. It's the disposition towards democratic governance, towards the common good. I think that's what matters most. And so we need to stop focusing so much on, you know, just rote memorization. Although I am 100% here for for promoting civic knowledge and start thinking, how can we engage young people and all Americans to care, to care about [00:08:30] American democracy and to care that they live in a democracy because they want to live in a democracy?
Hannah McCarthy: You know what, Nick? This is for me bringing up that interview with Danielle Allen again. She told us that when people born before World War Two were polled about whether it was essential to live in a democracy. 70% of them said, yes, it is. But when people in their 40s or younger were polled, only 30% of them said it was essential.
Nick Capodice: Right. That statistic has [00:09:00] not left my back pocket in two years. And Emma continued on that vein. So to get back to the recent polling that America's Promise Alliance did, by the way, I've got a link to that full report in the show notes. Fair warning. There's going to be a lot of links to things in the show notes today. So if you're, like in a civic mood, just, you know, get a big cup of coffee and open them all up.
Emma Humphries: But here's the data point that stood out the most to me, which is that only 23% of young people trust the adults in their own [00:09:30] community. Put another way, 77% of young people do not trust the adults in their own community. That shocked me. It's the declining trust in institutions and the declining trust ultimately in democracy, in this belief that a democratic government, whether it is a republic or a free and open 100% pure democracy, which I know we do not have, but that declining trust in democracy is real. [00:10:00] It's getting worse. And to me that's the biggest fallout. Young people can't understand the value of living in a democratic country if they don't understand the alternative. So what they see is dysfunction and they come. They see, okay, dysfunction, democracy. Maybe they're not putting the alliteration together. But if all you know about American democracy or democracy in general is what you see on 24 hour cable news or [00:10:30] the very, uh, one sided news sources that a lot of us tend to run to, then you might think that a different form of government could be better. You might think it would be better to have just one person calling all the shots. It would certainly feel more efficient than our slow moving democracy. So I think if you were to ask this question of young people in the 80s and 90s, you would have had way higher percentages. So it's not that I'm shocked that there's declining trust. I [00:11:00] was just shocked at how bad it is.
Hannah McCarthy: So just to recap everything Emma has said, students do not trust our institutions. They have lost trust and faith in democracy and they do not feel prepared. But they want to.
Nick Capodice: Exactly.
Hannah McCarthy: Nick, it's a little bleak.
Nick Capodice: It is. Hannah. But I'm gonna bring you back from the void after the break, I promise.
Hannah McCarthy: Did Emma have any words of optimism [00:11:30] to share?
Nick Capodice: Of course she did.
Emma Humphries: What gives me hope is that young people care so much. Whenever anyone says, oh, kids these days, I'm like, they're amazing. Have you talked to any? Because if you think they're all terrible, then you should go spend some time in schools and you should try talking to them so they care a whole lot. They just care about different things. And we thus far haven't cared enough to give them the knowledge, skills and dispositions they need to feel that they can effectively [00:12:00] pursue change or advocacy, or just otherwise be engaged politically. That gives me hope. Another thing that gives me hope is our nation's civics teachers. These folks are patriots. They they love America. They love our form of government. They love our history and our founding documents. And they are so thirsty to share that with with students. And we just need to band together to support them and to come together as Americans and [00:12:30] say, we believe this is important. We know we are polarized. We know the parties are pushing us to the edges.
Nick Capodice: Too bad We are gonna hear exactly what some of the things kids these days care about and what they can do about it right after a quick break.
Hannah McCarthy: But before that break, if you're up for it, you can support our work and our only occasionally dampened optimism at our website, civics101podcast.org. We're [00:13:00] back. You're listening to Civics 101. It is Civic Learning Week, and we are talking about the state of civics education in the United States. And, Nick, you were gonna call this episode The Kids Are All Right at one point. Are you still going to call it that?
Nick Capodice: It's still in the air, Hannah. Only our listeners will know what we ended up calling it. I don't know if a reference to a song by The Who is spot on, but that is a sentiment I come back to year after year working here at Civics 101. We have done [00:13:30] student contests, we've had kids propose legislation, we had a high school freshman create an Arrested Development style radio mockumentary about the Constitutional convention. So yeah, the kids are all right. Gosh darn it. They care a lot. And that is something we as a nation want.
Cheryl Cook-Kallio: First of all, the founders believed that the purpose of public education was to create participatory citizens.
Hannah McCarthy: Oh, Cheryl.
Nick Capodice: Always a delight to have her on the show. This [00:14:00] is Cheryl Cook-Kallio. She is currently the president of the Alameda County Board of Education. She's a constitutional scholar and a former teacher and so many other things.
Cheryl Cook-Kallio: And if you start right there, everything we do is to teach a young person how to be part of a community, whether that's their neighborhood, whether it's their city, whether it's their county. We want them to be connected to what happens to them. So in that sense, the reason this is important is it takes what they've learned in school and it forces [00:14:30] them to apply it to the world around them, which is what they're going to be doing as adults. So where some parents would look at this and say, well, this is an add on, no, no, this is the result of public education. It should be the result of all education is that you become a participatory citizen.
Hannah McCarthy: When Cheryl says participatory citizen, she doesn't just mean like running for office, right?
Nick Capodice: Right. I mean, like, it could be, you know, I mean, I hope somebody's listening to this episode will be the president [00:15:00] in 30 years, but most of us won't be president or senator. But maybe, maybe we will be on something like the PTA, the Parent Teachers Association. Or maybe you'll just be a parent who recognizes your kid is sprinting across the street in an unsafe place because there's no crosswalk.
Cheryl Cook-Kallio: So what do you do then? Who do you go to? You don't go to your congressman. You go to your local electeds, your your city council. You're having issues with your school because [00:15:30] the lights go off or the pipes don't work or the bathrooms are not clean. Where do you go? You go to your school district and you talk about it there. And so if you teach kids how to take care of problems at the very local level, then what you're teaching them is how to be adults in the real world and take care of their community.
Nick Capodice: And to that point, to show everyone out there how students do want to take care of their community. I wanted to share the work done by Rachel Roberson and her whole team at KQED.
Hannah McCarthy: Kqed, [00:16:00] by the way, is a member station, just like NPR. Our station is this one's out of San Francisco, and they run a program called the Youth Media Challenge, which is a massive collection of audio, video, and images made by students.
Nick Capodice: And any middle or high schooler in the country can submit one on a host of topics. There's a link in the show notes to their site. You can learn how to create your own project, or you can just look and listen to the other ones. And for today, I am sharing just [00:16:30] a few short clips of a few of these submissions, just to let you get a feel of what's on students minds. So first, this is Matthew from Edgemont Junior Senior High School in Scarsdale, New York.
Matthew: Did you know that in 2023 there have been more than 632 school shootings in the USA alone? That has almost two shootings a day. Crime rate has been on the rise, and with 10% of all violent crime being firearm related, it seems obvious that we must do something about guns. Untrustworthy [00:17:00] people have access to guns, which leads to violent crime and tragic loss of life. We should pass laws to ensure everyone who is in the possession of a firearm has taken a proper gun safety course to prevent accidental deaths, children obtaining access to guns and enforce background checks that restrict gun access to unstable individuals.
Nick Capodice: Matthew's piece was about gun violence in schools, and to that Cheryl said, yes, the law is important, but it's not the only thing.
Cheryl Cook-Kallio: The first thing [00:17:30] the knee jerk reaction is to go. We have should have a law, but a law is a paper barrier. It's not enforced. You can have a law on the books, but the police don't show up and enforce it. It doesn't do anything. Does that make you feel safe to wave this piece of paper in front of somebody's face and say, you're not supposed to have the gun while they're pointing it at you? No, it doesn't, but that is the the backup that, that that you need to do things within your school to make sure that you're safe.
Hannah McCarthy: So what should Matthew or any other [00:18:00] student who cares about this do? If a law isn't protection enough, what is?
Cheryl Cook-Kallio: So when you look at something to your point about what do you do with the kid that has this on their mind constantly, and these kids, this generation of kids that had this on their mind since they were in kindergarten, they have practiced hiding in corners and getting into closets and putting, you know, screens over the windows and putting interior locks on their doors. Teachers have lived in fear about what in the world are they going to do? [00:18:30] The You try to start as small as possible, depending on the age. And so if you're doing middle school kids, for example, you know, where do you feel the most safe? How do you how do you take care of yourself? What would you do in this circumstance? And then perhaps the school ASB would come up with some kind of plan in order to address safety concerns, because the kids will see it in a way that adults don't. Adults think, you know one way kids. Kids are seeing it totally differently. And so having kids have voice in that is extremely important, [00:19:00] if for no other reason that they feel like they're part of the solution. But the more important reason is that their voice is different because of their age and because of their experience. And so I think that that when you look at that, the larger you know, how do you help the kids feel like they have some efficacy. You break it down into parts.
Hannah McCarthy: I really appreciate that because we sometimes look at students Being active civic participants and say, you know, hey, this is great. They're going [00:19:30] to really change the world for the better when they're in charge. But this is different. This is the idea that a student has a unique view and they can help find a solution right now.
Nick Capodice: Yeah, they want to help fix the problem. And to echo that, here is hyphen from Lowell High School in San Francisco, whose submission gave advice to people on what they could do.
Hai Fen: It's important to understand the impact you can have on someone's life, and what you can do to help them if they are struggling. You can advocate by [00:20:00] supporting someone who needs help volunteering for a mental health organization, and by correcting those who use stigmatizing language. Be an advocate today and start raising awareness for mental health. Please go check in on your loved ones from time to time just to see how they're doing. You never know what someone can be going through, so make it your job to care.
Cheryl Cook-Kallio: You could do the same thing with mental health, right? The kids are worried about their own mental health, they're not really sure about what a crisis is and what a crisis [00:20:30] isn't. What they know is that we're in there when they're in distress. They need to have a plan. And, you know, since the pandemic that has, um, become more of an issue, uh, with kids. So, for example, in, in their internal school, it could be just being part of a plan. If it is something one step beyond that, it's going to the school district saying, we need more support in this area, that this is really a crisis, that, you know, that we need the mental health services. [00:21:00] Uh, on a a little bit broader level, for example, Alameda County, where I'm on the I'm a school board. We have a county wide plan that allows us to build Medi-Cal, which is our version of Medicaid for mental health services for students in school. So we've been able to provide help for, um, for the district's kids. Don't know that. And so part of going through the process of checking on what the mental health services are would be them saying, oh [00:21:30] wait, we have these services, so how do we access them? Right? Because part of the problem may already be solved and they may just not know how to access it.
Nick Capodice: And the last one, Raphael and Elijah from South Pasadena High School in California.
Raphael and Elijah: Between all the horrors, though, I saw people who needed help help getting back on their feet, help finding a job and functioning in society, help defeating their demons, I realized these aren't nameless people. They're human beings. Our brothers and sisters, our [00:22:00] mothers and fathers. I became convinced we could not, no matter what, abandon these people. The United States needs to adopt a harm reduction policy to address the opioid epidemic effectively. Evidence from Switzerland demonstrates the potential success of such an approach. After implementing harm reduction strategies like supervised injection sites and medication assisted treatment. Overdose deaths dropped by 50% and new heroin users declined by 80%, according to the Stanford Social Innovation Review. In the United [00:22:30] States, the need for similar measures is urgent.
Nick Capodice: I didn't have time to include the entire piece here, but in Indiana, they talked about actually working in a safe house in Alaska, caring for people suffering from opiate addiction.
Hannah McCarthy: Yeah, I've listened to the whole thing. It's actually incredibly striking listening to a personal story, but it's also a statement, right? It's it's saying this is a problem. And also here are some potential solutions that have been tried in other countries.
Nick Capodice: Yeah, it's a solid, powerful piece. [00:23:00] And maybe Raphael and Elijah aren't old enough to vote, but they definitely could ask an elected representative to visit their class.
Cheryl Cook-Kallio: There is not a politician alive who doesn't want that picture. With a classroom full of kids with a smile on their face, right? They're all like that. And and not only because that's a great photo op for whatever they're doing. I mean, they're not really supposed to use that for political purposes and that sort of thing, but it also is a way [00:23:30] for them to build community in an area that they can't touch otherwise. And I've said this to adults, I've said the same speech to adults. They go to the website, they do info at whatever dot whatever for a Congress member. They type up their little letter and hit the button, and it goes directly into a hole somewhere. That is not the way that you read as an elected official.
Hannah McCarthy: Yeah. You know, I feel like we haven't really been over this on the show in detail. How do you reach an elected official?
Nick Capodice: Excellent question. Hannah. Sheryl's advice is you [00:24:00] call them, you don't email them first. You call them. You are polite. When you call them, you say, quote. The purpose of my call is to ask you about, in this case, the opioid epidemic. Who on your staff deals with these issues and would you transfer me to their office?
Cheryl Cook-Kallio: Sometimes they pick up the phone. Hallelujah. Most times they don't. And you leave a very detailed message. You know, here is my email address. And just for convenience, I'm going to send you a follow up [00:24:30] email. Okay. There's two touches there. Right. You're still not going to get an answer most of the time right. So what do you do. You wait five days. You make another phone call, ask to be put to their voicemail, and then send another email. I know you're really busy. I know you get 200 emails a day, but I'm really anxious to talk to somebody in your office that can answer my questions, you know? And I'm putting this here, so it's at the top of your email. By the time you touch some 4 or 5 times, somebody's going to get back to you, you know? [00:25:00] And so when people call and say, well, they never answered me, chances are you didn't hit the right person. And these people get hundreds of calls a day. So you need to be persistent in a way that you're not used to being persistent.
Nick Capodice: And it may sound time consuming. It may sound difficult. I know some people who never call anybody on the phone ever, let alone five times.
Cheryl Cook-Kallio: It'd be great if we all could reach our federally elected officials [00:25:30] and have a mass amount of things done at one time, but you're also dealing with your congressman and your area, who also has to deal with the congressman in another area who may believe totally differently than you do. Like on the opposite end of the spectrum. And you're trying to figure out where the sweet spot is. So, you know, compromise is hard. I mean, people get upset. You know, I don't you know, they didn't do everything I wanted them to do. Well, that's what politics [00:26:00] is. It's the art of compromise, right? So I think that to get kids excited and to recognize that small victories are important. So you may have wanted to, um, solve the unhoused situation in your city, but instead you provided an opportunity for people to have a place to take a shower, get a hot meal, you know, maybe have some warm socks, or at least have access to those things. That's a big deal for those individuals. And, [00:26:30] you know, and it also affects individuals of whom you're unaware. So it's not a small thing to do that for a group of people.
Hannah McCarthy: Start locally. Focus on your own community. Make a plan. Be persistent.
Nick Capodice: I think that is the Magic quartet, Anna. And if enough students do it, it might be all of us, not just the kids who are all right. That's [00:27:00] it for today's show. Huge shout out to Rachel and the rest of the folks at KQED for their work on the Youth Media challenge. You really should go check their stuff out. Youth media@kqed.org. And also big thanks to Icivics, who we will see at the National Forum at the Hoover Institution in about 24 hours. Sheryl's going to be there. Emma's going to be there, I think 25%. I think 25% [00:27:30] of the guests we've had on the show are going to be there. This episode was made by Hannah McCarthy and me. Nick Capodice. Our executive producer is Rebecca LaVoy, and our senior producer is Christina Phillips. Music. In this episode from Epidemic Sound Helliniko and my own personal and my own personally elected member of my musical and my own personal elected member of my musical Congress, Chris Zabriskie, who he who actually emailed me back after one time. [00:28:00] I emailed him one time and he wrote me right back. What a guy. Chris, you have my vote. Civics 101 is a production of NPR, New Hampshire Public Radio.