Why We Need To Learn More About Youth Civic Engagement

In his book, Freedom Summer, Doug McAdam (1988) demonstrated the long-term impact of young people's participation in a collective movement aimed at rectifying centuries of racial injustice. Coupled with James Fendrich's (1993) book, Ideal Citizens, about black and white college-age participants in desegregating Tallahassee, FL, the findings outline a possible process whereby civic-minded adults are formed. Its features include (1. youth as an opportune moment in the life cycle; (2. organized action as the structure; (3. material, social and cognitive resources for support; and (4. participation for a just cause as a major driving force. These are not the only characteristics which spawn civic engagement, but in combination, they are powerful ones which occur across a range of longitudinal studies (Youniss, McLellan and Yates 1997).

Teach For America is a program which contains some of these same features. Recent college graduates agree to teach disadvantaged students in schools with low resources under the supportive sponsorship of an organization built on the principle that all children merit quality education. This principle may lack the historical gravitas of the civil rights movement, but inequity in quality education has proven to be an intractable issue that contemporary society has yet to solve. In this respect, TFA surely represents a just cause around which youth can rally. It should not be surprising, therefore, that graduates of the TFA two-year experience think and act like especially engaged citizens. They hold positive attitudes toward civic engagement. The vast majority believe that all youth should be given opportunities for community service. They vote at exceedingly high rates, much higher than the average for their age group. And, after serving, they remain committed to the TFA organization and, presumably, its guiding ideology about educational reform and equal opportunity.

The data reported by McAdam and Brandt (2009) fit with what we know about the roots of civic engagement. They confirm a pattern associated with youth activism of the 1960s and extend it to the present and to an issue beyond civil rights. If there is a surprise in this study, it is that the authors consider the graduates of TFA as not living up to the aims and claims of the TFA organization and not fulfilling the civic opportunities the TFA experience gave them. It is clear that the authors reached this less-than-favorable assessment of TFA by comparing graduates from the program with participants who started to teach in the program but dropped out, and with non-matriculants who were vetted and invited, but for unknown reasons, failed to join. In these comparisons, in which TFA graduates scored at very high rates, members of these other groups scored at even higher rates, coming close to the ceiling. For example, 92 percent of non-matriculants said they voted in the most recent presidential election, vs. 89 percent of the graduates.

A momentary step outside of the study itself seems appropriate here. For more than two decades, political scientists have decried the low and declining rates at which young voters, ages 18-24, appeared at the polls on election day. Whereas youth activists had a strong hand in winning the right to vote for 18 year olds in 1972, in the 2000 presidential election of Bush vs. Gore, only about 35 percent of young voters voted. More youth voted in the 2004 election (about 48 percent) (Lopez, Kirby and Sagoff 2005). And many youth have come out in the recent 2008 primary elections (Lopez and Marcelo 2008). Nevertheless, scholars who study voting patterns have taken the low turnouts after 1972 as signs of a troubled youth cohort and a danger for the future of our democracy. These concerns are unfortunately part of a broad pattern in which the decline in voting has been accompanied by low rates of interest in political news, low scores on tests of civic and historical knowledge, and attitudes favoring careers that produce personal wealth over careers that benefit society (Levine, 2007; Pryor, Hurtado, Saenz, Korn, Santos and Korn 2006). This is no small matter if only because the data form a coherent portrait...