Gabrielle Gurley for Commonwealth Magazine Jul 22, 2009
It’s civic engagement at its finest. Like most students, Boston youth organizer Katherine Garcia, 16, had never designed a curriculum for a high school course. Roy Karp, executive director of Boston–based Civic Education Project, had never recruited students to work on one. But Garcia and five other young people joined forces with Karp and others beginning last summer to create the first high school civics course offered in the Boston Public Schools since the system dropped what was a required subject in the 1970s.
The pilot course is the product of a six-year “Campaign for Civics” led by youth organizers of the Hyde Square Task Force in Jamaica Plain. They launched the push for a high school civics course after Maria Padilla, one of the youth organizers, wrote an op-ed for the Boston Globe in 2003. Concerned about violence in her neighborhood, she argued that if people were more knowledgeable about government and voted more often, politicians would “take people in my neighborhood seriously.”
The new course helps students learn about the political system so they can better understand how that world relates to them. “People know they have a government, but they really don’t know why,” says Garcia. “So [the class] just teaches them how they can be involved in the government.”
The grassroots campaign for the course became a hands-on exercise in civics participation, gaining momentum when the young people testified before the Boston City Council two years ago. The group also lobbied Mayor Thomas Menino, Boston Public Schools Superintendent Carol Johnson, and members of the Boston School Committee.
The unusual gambit by the youth organizers didn’t stop there. They demanded and won a seat at the table, selecting the curriculum writers and participating in the curriculum writing process. English High School and Madison Park Technical Vocational High School offered the year-long course last year. Another Course to College, a preparatory public high school in Brighton, will add the class this fall, and other Boston public schools have expressed interest.
Teens Leading the Way, a Lowell–based statewide youth coalition, is also exploring the creation of new civics curriculum that could be implemented statewide. Their pilot campaign, building off the Hyde Square Task Force model, focuses on schools in Everett, Haverhill, Holyoke, Lowell, and Worcester.
Why the resurgence of interest in civics education? That depends on how you define civics, says Robby Chisholm, a Boston Public Schools history and social studies senior program director who also worked on the project. According to Chisholm, students often see civics as a dry study of the structure and function of government, rather than as a tool they can use to spark change in the world around them.
For now, the class, “Civics for Boston Youth: Power, Rights and Community Change,” is an elective course for juniors and seniors. Although Boston does require eighth-graders to take a civics class, the youth organizers would like to see it become a graduation requirement for all high school students.
American history and civics instruction are required subjects in Massachusetts elementary and high schools, but teachers usually integrate civics into US history and social studies classes. (About 25 percent of questions on the MCAS history tests cover civics.) As a result, Karp says, there’s “no wiggle room” left to cover civics well in an “already packed” curriculum.
“My sense is it is not being done in the US history classes,” says Karp, who grappled with the US history curriculum during a brief stint as substitute teacher at Haverhill High School. “If you are you’re going to give kids a robust experience in American government,” he adds. “You really do need a separate course.”
There is no information available on how many school districts teach stand-alone civics courses. (The state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education is in the process of compiling course-level data.) Although there are several bills pending in the Legislature that would make the completion of a high school civics course a statewide graduation requirement, the state’s budget crisis alone makes that unlikely in the near future. However, local school districts can choose to institute their own high school graduation requirements.
Garcia, a junior at West Roxbury High School’s Brook Farm Business and Service Career Academy, says the hardest part of working with the curriculum developers was wrestling with how much emphasis to give to history topics like the founding of the American political system. To keep their peers engaged, Garcia says, the youth organizers wanted to focus on 21st-century politics and current events.
The writers pushed back, explaining that to understand current events requires a basic foundation in government and history. Being youth organizers, “they were not shrinking violets,” says Karp.
The group compromised by introducing history subjects early on in the academic year. Discussions about social movements such as building a family community center near the Jackson Square MBTA station and controversial issues like radical Islam and the 2005 terrorist attacks in London come later on. They also explore the rights and responsibilities of individuals in American society and the court system.
“Adolescents in general are very concerned with fairness and their rights,” says Chisholm of the Boston Public Schools. Supreme Court cases involving freedom of speech and search-and-seizure issues in schools really engage them, he added. Near the end of the course, students work on ideas for developing outreach and action plans for community campaigns.
Already Chisholm has seen an impact. He chalks up some of that to the excitement about the Barack Obama presidency. On election night, about 20 to 30 English High civics students watched the returns with teachers at the headquarters of City Year, the citizen service organization.
“In my experience, kids don’t show up on a weeknight to do that,” Chisholm says.