Civic Norms in America’s Schools

David Campbell

This project will examine how adolescents learn civic norms in their schools. Understanding how young people develop a sense of civic obligation can shed light on the precipitous decline in young people’s political engagement, given the evidence suggesting that America’s youth are increasingly individualistic and thus have a diminishing sense of public responsibility. The eventual aim of this project is to identify ways in which participatory norms can be encouraged within schools, much as public health scholars have identified ways to facilitate norms against smoking and drinking among young people. But in order to design strategies to strengthen civic norms, we need to know how they develop in the first place.The primary dataset for this analysis will be the U.S. component of the IEA Civic Education Study (CivEd), an unparalleled source of data for civic outcomes, whether the unit of analysis is the individual student or the school. CivEd consists of interviews with roughly 2,800 students in 124 schools across the United States. The study will test a variety of potential factors affecting the strength of participatory norms within a school. Some will be of relevance to school teachers and administrators and include the degree to which students have voice in the governance of the school, the methods of civics instruction employed within the school, and the prevalence of community service among the school’s population. Other factors will be of greater relevance to policymakers, including the socioeconomic and racial diversity within the school and whether it is in the public or private sector.

About David Campbell

Having earned his Ph.D. in 2002 from Harvard University’s Department of Government, David is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame, and a faculty fellow of Notre Dame’s Institute for Educational Initiatives. Much of his research has examined the reasons people become involved – or not – in civic and political engagement, including the civic norms they learn in school. He is currently working on a book manuscript in which he argues that much of what we generally call “political” participation is often driven by “civic” motivations, and that these motivations can stem from civic norms rather than political conflict. In addition to publications in Public Opinion Quarterly, the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Political Behavior, and the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, he is a co-author of The Education Gap: Vouchers and Urban Schools as well as the co-editor of Charters, Vouchers, and Public Education (both published by the Brookings Institution). He has won awards for the best paper in religion and politics at the American Political Science Association annual meeting and the best paper by a graduate student at the conference of the Midwest Political Science Association. His work has also appeared in popular media like the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Boston Globe, and San Jose Mercury News. He has been a visiting fellow at Princeton University's Center for the Study of Democratic Politics, as well as a research fellow with Harvard University's Program on Education Policy and Governance.