Civic Empowerment Gap

School Culture and the Civic Empowerment Gap

From Obedience to Engagement

By MEIRA LEVINSON From Harvard Education Letter

Every morning as they entered the public urban middle school in which I taught in the late 1990s, students were greeted by name by Mrs. Farmer or Mr. Beeza.1 “Good morning, Keesha,” Mr. Beeza would say with a grin from his perch on the schoolhouse steps. “Good morning, DeQuin,” Mrs. Farmer would smile to another. “Glad to see you—but take off your hat, please.”

Once inside, our students lined up in front of our assistant principal. Holding a metal-detecting wand in his right hand, he would sweep it in front and back of each child before he allowed them to proceed down to the cafeteria. A number of the sixth-graders were tiny, barely 4’6” tall, and still obsessed with Pokemon cards and bathroom jokes. What did they think about as they were screened for weapons each day? What did my eighth-graders—many still on the cusp of puberty themselves—think? How did the experience shape their engagement with adults and peers or their sense of membership in the school community? In three years of teaching there, it never occurred to me to ask them.

Schools inherently shape young people’s civic experiences. Both students and adults learn “their place” and what’s expected of them in the broader public sphere by observing and participating in the limited public space we call “school.” Schools also give—or deny—students and teachers opportunities to practice a variety of civic skills and behaviors via classroom procedures and routines, curricula and pedagogies, interactions in the hallways and cafeteria, and cocurricular and extracurricular activities. This need not be intentional. Rather, all schools teach experiential lessons about civic identity, expectations, and opportunities. As civic communities, they model whether individuals matter or are seen as being interchangeable, one of a mass. They model inclusivity or exclusivity, respect for multiple voices or mistrust of diverse others. These models significantly influence students’ civic attitudes and beliefs. Students develop habits of collaboration in schools that model these norms and practices; students in other schools learn to think individualistically and focus their efforts on self-preservation. In addition to providing models of civic engagement, therefore, schools also provide students opportunities to practice empowering (or disempowering) relationships, norms, and behaviors.

Obedience vs. Engagement
Unfortunately, many schools, especially those that serve predominantly low-income children of color, model civic disrespect and demand that their students practice submissive obedience rather than empowered engagement. They enact a continuous series of civic microaggressions against their students. These regular but unacknowledged mini-invalidations of children as civic persons worthy of respect are often barely noticeable to their victims—and usually totally invisible to their perpetrators. Together, however, they can cumulatively erode the self-confidence and self-image of those at the receiving end. Urban students’ experiences of these civic microassaults may profoundly influence their civic skills and identity development.

Consider the lessons kids learn at the school door itself. On the one hand, teachers like Mrs. Farmer and Mr. Beeza teach them that they are welcome and valued members of the school community. On the other hand, when children as young as 11 are routinely screened for weapons before they are allowed to enter the school building, they are also implicitly being taught how they are viewed within the public sphere—namely, as a potential threat to public safety and security. These are not lessons that most middle-class and/or white students are learning in their schools, since they are 4–10 times less likely to be subject to such policies. But they are civic identities imposed on a significant percentage of poor youth of color growing up and attending de facto segregated schools in urban areas.

The regulation of students’ movement through space once they get into the school building has equally strong civic consequences. A few years ago, I visited a number of public and private schools in the Boston area. In the private schools, I was struck by how freely and frequently students tended to move around within the classroom and throughout the school. By contrast, at the Boston public middle school in which I was teaching at the time, we constantly strove to minimize “transition time,” the time lost to instruction due to students moving from one activity to another or one classroom to another. We lined up students and walked them from class to class, supervised locker time, escorted kids to the cafeteria, and even instructed them which table to sit at while eating lunch.

Opportunities Denied
When students move around schools more freely, they are learning both that they are trusted and responsible members of the community and how to exercise their responsibility appropriately and live up to the trust placed in them. For many kids, this learning process involves some mistakes. They whisper to friends along the way or show up late to their next class. In facing the consequences for such misdeeds, students learn to exercise better judgment in the future.

Such opportunities were rarely available to students in the urban public schools in which I taught or at those I have visited since. Our relentless monitoring of students was rational, given the circumstances. Lunch, for example, was an extraordinarily rushed affair in which 250 students had to go to their lockers, get to the cafeteria, wait in line for food, eat, clean up, and line up for their next class within a 20-minute time span. (This continues to be the case in all Boston Public Schools, in order to minimize noninstructional time.) We also had good reasons to control students’ movements in the hallways. The school bathrooms were prone to vandalism. There was the risk that an unsupervised student might falsely pull the fire alarm. And although the school was relatively safe and orderly, enough fights broke out each year that it made sense to guard against the possibility of untoward contact by lining up and supervising students in the halls.

Although the rules were rational, they were not reasonable. In controlling students’ movements and even their physical bodies in these ways, we were also teaching them about how we evaluated their potential for responsible and self-regulating behavior—poorly—and denying them opportunities to demonstrate or develop these self-regulating capacities. We were caught in a vicious cycle. Their lack of opportunities to practice responsible school-based behavior led some of them to behave irresponsibly when they did grab freedom, which reinforced our mistrust and led us to clamp down even tighter.

1. Note that these are pseudonyms.
In all these ways, we unintentionally exacerbated rather than eliminated the skill, attitude, and behavior disparities that lie at the heart of what I call the civic empowerment gap. It is common knowledge that American citizens have vastly unequal levels of civic and political power, depending on differences in race, level of education, and especially wealth. As a nation, we seem to accept such antidemocratic patterns as the natural state of affairs. Demographic differences in participation rates are explained in the same way so many did the reading or math achievement gap a decade ago: as a natural result of unequal access to resources. We are no longer publicly willing to countenance unequal academic outcomes based on students’ racial or economic backgrounds, however; nor should we be willing to countenance unequal civic outcomes on the same grounds. Public schools were founded in the United States for civic purposes. These schools—and the nation they serve—must be held to account for achieving civic outcomes for all children that are as high in quality as the academic outcomes we now claim to expect.

Transforming School Culture
School culture is one key mechanism for teaching true civic equality and empowerment. I suggest that every school must be intentional, transparent, and reflective in how it both models and enables students to practice authentically empowering civic relationships, norms, and behaviors. By doing so, schools will help students acquire essential civic skills, empowered civic attitudes, and habits of civic participation that are collectively necessary for combating the civic empowerment gap. Intentionality is necessary because otherwise schools will fall back into the inadvertent mélange of sometimes empowering, but at least as often demoralizing, practices sketched out above. Transparency is necessary so that the “sorting out” both students and adults do to make sense of their experiences becomes a shared activity and, ideally, therefore also comes to reflect shared judgments. Reflection forces educators and students alike to continue this process of checking themselves and seeking feedback over time. Finally, authenticity matters because only authentic experiences will fully convince students that they can be truly efficacious and responsible civic actors.

Consider how students’ experiences of entering school each morning might have changed if we had talked openly and reflectively as a school community about student safety. I suggest at the beginning of this essay that screening students for weapons teaches them that they are viewed by authorities as potential criminals. But maybe youth infer a different civic lesson: that their own safety and security are valued by school officials. In this respect, they may feel valued and even validated by this process. On the other hand, students at risk of getting jumped were terrified of making the journey to and from school unarmed and, hence, defenseless. Did the teachers and administrators even understand the circumstances under which they were trying to survive? Some students thought not. School stood as just one more example of a public institution that ignored their needs and concerns, imposing policy “solutions” that were out of touch with reality.

Had we been more transparent with students about our intentions and invited them to be openly reflective with us about their authentic concerns, we may have been able to construct a mutually agreed-on, safe, and empowering set of policies. We might have eliminated the weapons screening but set up other mechanisms—advisories that foster deeper and more trusting relationships among teachers and students, say, or a school safety committee to assure students they were entering a safe community every morning. Maybe we would have anticipated Chicago’s example and worked to create a “culture of calm” in our school and safe zones outside of school, with parent and other adult volunteers patrolling students’ paths to and from school as allies.

I don’t know what ideas we would have generated together. This is the point: Youth have to have the opportunities to share their insights and to hear adults’ own reasoning if we are to cocreate civically engaging and empowering school communities.

Schools can and must help students experience empowered citizenship in order to enable young people to build knowledge, skills, pro-civic attitudes, and habits of civic participation for the future. By building such experiences and norms into their everyday practices, schools can help reduce the civic empowerment gap and benefit from young people’s energy and insights to become more effective and vibrant institutions themselves.

Meira Levinson is an associate professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and coeditor of the forthcoming Making Civics Count: Citizenship Education for a New Generation (Harvard Education Press). This essay is adapted from her book, No Citizen Left Behind (Harvard University Press, 2012).