American Enterprise Institute

March 15, 2007

[Edited transcript from audio tapes]

3:45 p.m.	Registration
4:00	Introduction:	Frederick M. Hess, AEI
	Presentation:	David E. Campbell, University of Notre Dame
	Discussants:	William A. Galston, Brookings Institution Bob Wise, Alliance for Excellent Education
5:30	Adjournment and Reception

Proceedings:

Frederick Hess:  I’m Rick Hess, Director of Education Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute.  This is a conversation, “Why Johnny Doesn’t Vote,” rooted in David Campbell’s new book.  If you are not familiar with Dave’s work, Dave is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame and David is going to talk about exactly why it is that Johnny does not vote. 

The challenges of encouraging and maintaining civic participation are as old as democracy itself.  On the subject of political apathy, Pericles taught the Athenians, “We regard the man who minds his own business and refrains from participating in public affairs not as a quiet man but as a useless man.”  Many centuries later in 1748, Montesquieu warned that “The tyranny of a prince is not so dangerous to the public welfare as the apathy of a citizen in a democracy.” 

David, being part political theorist and part empirical social scientist takes these kinds of warnings seriously and actually seeks to research them, God bless him.  Today, there is a widespread agreement that lack of civic engagement is a problem in the US and for American political culture.  Voter turnout even in presidential contests is an ongoing concern and masks far lower turnouts in other elections, famously including those from municipal government and local school boards.

Civic participation among American youth is particularly sparse; only 36 percent of 18-24 year olds actually voted in the 2000 elections while turnout in 2004 was up to 47 percent.  Turnout among 18 to 24 year olds has only once reached 50 percent since the voting age was lowered to the age of 18.  America’s schools serve a particularly important role in fostering civic engagement.  President Lincoln understood this well when he reportedly said “The philosophy of the school house in one generation will be the philosophy of the government in the next.”  With that in mind, it may be worrisome that when asked what traits define good citizenship for a 2003 poll by the National Conference of State Legislatures, 83 percent of those over 26 included “voting” but just two-thirds of those 15 to 26 did.

Today, David is going to shed light on the forces that explain voter turnout and the role that education can play in influencing the turnout of young citizens.  David has researched voting patterns extensively, delving deeply into the core motivations for turnout and tackling seemingly nebulous factors like civic duty and the role that they play. 

David’s many publications include articles and scholarly publications like the Journal of Politics and Public Opinion Quarterly as well as various edited collections.  His American Political Science Association awards include a prize for the best doctoral dissertation in American politics, the best paper on elections and voting and twice for the best paper on religion and politics at the association’s annual meeting. 

Currently, David is examining religion’s changing role in American civic life, a project that will be published as his forthcoming book A Matter of Faith, Religion in the 2004 Presidential Election.  David’s most recent book Why we Vote: How Schools and Communities Shape Our Civic Life was published last fall by Princeton University Press and will be the subject of our conversation today. 

Briefly, just to set up the conversation, let me point out that in Why We Vote, he confronts competing research on voter turnout and explains how both highly homogenous and highly heterogeneous communities can yield increased turnout.  He focuses specifically on the role of civic duty as a lasting detriment as to whether the individual will be a lifelong voter.  David writes “we have seen how an adolescent social environment with strong civic norms can lead to civic engagement later in life even when people leave the environment.” 

David reminds us that public schools have always had a central role in engendering the sense of civic duty.  He explains, “although largely forgotten owing to the intense attention paid to test scores in reading and math, originally the primary purpose of America’s public, or common, schools was to forge a common citizenry out of an immigrant nation.”  He cautions that civics education is under-valued today and that “in an era when high stakes-testing has become a national obsession, we have largely forgotten our schools’ civic mission.” 

After 9/11, we saw temporarily an upsurge in civics education.  That surge of enthusiasm, though, was short-lived.  This past September, the National Conference on Citizenship reported “9/11 does not appear to have triggered a broader civic transformation,” the report warned.  “While there are signs that civic recovery in the last few years, our civic health showed steep declines over the past 30 years.”  This is no cause to throw up our hands, of course, but to explore the challenge more deeply, to think more creatively and to act more intelligently.

In this spirit, let me turn the podium over to David and to the other members of this distinguished panel.  David is going to begin the event with a brief presentation.  After he speaks, we are going to hear from our two distinguished panelists.  I'll introduce them in a moment after David speaks. But just briefly, the first is Bill Galston at Brookings and the second is Bob Wise at the Alliance for Excellent Education.  The third panelist who is scheduled to be with us today, Wendy Puriefoy at the Public Education Network, unfortunately is ill and unable to join us.  David, with that, would you like to begin?

David Campbell:  Let me begin with a confession that when you speak in public, you are supposed to begin with a joke.  And I have come all the way from South Bend, Indiana and I have no joke to begin with.  But I do have a joke to end with.  So when we hit fourteen-and-a-half minutes, if you are just itching to get up and walk out, hold on for 30 seconds for the joke and everything will make sense, I promise. 

On September 26, 1989, Tracy Hodgeson [phonetic] - a real person, I did not make this up - cast her ballot in Boston's City Council election.  Now that is not a terribly remarkable event except for one interesting fact.  Her vote was the only one cast in that precinct, in that election, on that day.  And for a number of reasons, the political science literature would have predicted that Tracy should have been like the 300 or so other people in that precinct and not turned out to vote.  She was only 21.  She had only lived in Boston for two months and when interviewed by a reporter, she admitted that she was not very familiar with the candidates running.  So why did she vote?  Well, that same reporter asked her that question.  Her answer, I think, is quite revealing.  She said, “Well, I just think it is important to vote.  If you have the right, you ought to exercise it, whether you are going to make a difference or not.” 

My book and my presentation today is about why Tracy voted and why she voted alone.  In that same newspaper article where we learned of Tracy's lonely vote, we also learned an interesting fact about her.  Tracy Hodgeson, I mentioned, had just moved to Boston.  Prior to that, she had lived and was raised in Little River, Kansas.  Population is 693.  Its town website, and this town does have a website, advertises it as a town with a lot civic pride.  In 1992, which was the presidential election after this lonely ballot that I have described, voter turnout in Little River's county was 67 percent, 12 points higher than the national average that year and 27 points higher than in Boston.  Essentially, what I want to try to do with the next few minutes is convince you that the fact that Tracy Hodgeson was raised in Little River, Kansas, a town with a lot of civic pride, tells us a lot about why she turned out to vote even after she had left that environment.

Now, this presentation is a capsule summary; the book covered a whole bunch of stuff.  I could not hope to cover it all here and I'm not even going to try, but I did think it would be useful to kind of give you a flavor of how this works.  So, what I do in the book is sketch out what we might think of as a framework to explain why it is that being raised in one place might affect whether or not you are civically involved even if you move to another place. 

So the first step in laying that out or building that framework is to show that what you do now depends on where you are now.  That is the very idea that the community in which you are located has some bearing on whether or not you are civically involved here and now and, believe it or not, that in and of itself is actually a fairly radical proposition to a lot of political scientists, so I actually have spent a fair amount of time making that case. 

Next, remember that the story here is not just that Tracy Hodgeson voted because of where she was at that time but it was where she had been.  I need to demonstrate, or at least make a case, for the fact that what you did when you were young has something to do with where you were when you were young.  Building on that, it is not just what she did; it is where she was when she was young that affects what she does. 

So what you do now depends on what you did then.  All of which leads us to the culmination, which is what I'm going to focus on here, that what you do now depends on where you were then.  The fact that Tracy Hodgeson voted in Boston had an awful lot to do with where she was in Little River, Kansas as she went through her formative years in adolescence. 

Before, however, I make the link between the past and the present, I thought I will just make a moment and lay out another important point that I make in the book, and that is that people turn out to vote or otherwise get involved in civic life for a variety of motivations and I want to talk about two specifically. 

One is the one that we focus on most, whether it is a political scientist or whether it is a political journalist or whether it is just political junkies, and that is people get involved in politics and turn out to vote because they have interests that they want to advance or defend.  They have a team they want to see win.  There is a candidate they want to see elected.  And therefore, we have long thought and there is some reason to believe this, that where elections are competitive, you find high levels of turnout.  You are more likely to turnout to vote when you think that the other side might win.  So think of that as a political motivation for turning out to vote.

However, that is not the only reason that people turn out to vote.  And to make that case, I want to actually show you just a very simple slide that I think illustrates this.  What I'm going to show you is a slide that plots voter turnout across the country.  Along the bottom axis, I'm going to rate every county in the 48 contiguous states according to how competitive they were in the 2004 presidential elections.  So the least competitive counties that went in are the most competitive counties than the other.  Along the other axis, I'm going to plot voter turnout in the 2004 presidential election.  Okay. 

Now, why you would be led to believe either by reading the political science literature or just by simply paying attention to the sort of the news in the air about politics, is that that line should go up as elections get more competitive.  In other words, there should be an upward sloping line because the more competitive the election, higher turnout.  That makes sense, right?  Well, here is what it actually looks like.  Here is where elections are competitive but here is where they are not competitive.  Notice the voter turnout is high in both of those places.  This is easy to explain.  This, not so much. 

Why would people turn out to vote in places where elections are not competitive?  Well, the reason is that wanting to see your team win is not the only reason that people come to the polls.  They also come to the polls because they believe it is their responsibility to be there, that there is a duty to vote, that the expression of voice is actually inherent within the responsibilities that come with citizenship.  Just to show you that this is not a fluke from 2004, here is the same picture from 2000.  Here it is, averaged across 1980 to 2000 and in every case, you see that same smiley face, voter turnout high where elections are competitive, okay?  We would have expected that.  But here, it is voter turnout high in places that are not so competitive.  And here is just a simple schematic to make the point, that here we have people voting out of political motivations and here out of what I call civic motivations. 

So why did Tracy Hodgeson turn out to vote?  Well, it was because of something about Little River, Kansas that enforced this sense of civic duty upon her.  But wait, you will be reminded, she was not in Little River at that time that her vote was cast.  And that is why I want to talk not so much about the communities in which we are located now, although they matter, but rather the communities in which we were as adolescents.  And the particular community I want to focus on is the school. 

As Rick noted in his introduction, schools have long played, or are thought to play anyway, an important role in teaching us the importance of active citizenship.  I'm not the only one who holds the opinion that you can think of a school as a community, that they have this function.  What this is showing you here is a quote from a very important report called, “The Civic Mission of Schools” that was put out by CIRCLE, the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, which at that time Bill Galston was running as well as the Carnegie Corporation.  And they say that schools are communities in which young people learn to interact, argue and work together with others and an important condition for future citizenship.

Here is the kicker.  Schools have the capacity to bring together a heterogeneous population of young people with different backgrounds, perspectives and vocational ambitions to instruct them in common lessons and values.  It turns out that while there are some intuitions into that idea, it is really tricky to figure out whether or not schools, independent of all the other things that might influence us, actually have the effects that we think they might. 

So what I have done is put together some data that allows us to speak to this point.  The question, “Do schools, really - that schools as communities - really teach us what it means to be good and active citizens?”  Now, how do you do that?  Well, you do it by tracing people, beginning with their adolescence and then, although this has a kind of sinister overtones, following them throughout their lives.  Well, not so much following, really more calling them up or sending them a letter seven years later and another seven years later to find out what happened to them after they left high school. 

So the data that I rely on begins in 1965.  It consists of an amazing survey.  A survey of high school students all around the country, a representative sample from public and private schools, so they have the students themselves, their parents, a whole bunch of questions asked of the parents, and in addition, this is the part that is absolutely mind-blowing and frankly is inconceivable in the contemporary environment.  The researchers who did this also administered surveys to the entire senior class of every high school of every student in that survey. 

So what does that mean?  It means you know something about the individual student.  You know something about their family life because you interviewed their parents and you know an awful lot about their school.  And because you know something about their school, it means that you can measure what I call the High School Civic Climate.  How do I do that?  

Well, in his introduction Rick mentioned a survey that was recently done that asked people “What do you think it means to be a good citizen?”  A similar question was asked in these high schools in 1965.  You were asked, “Well, what does it mean to be a good citizen?”  People give all sorts of answers.  They could say, “He goes to church” or “He obeys the law” or “He votes in every election.”  Not everybody picks voting in every election.  It varies a lot across schools. 

So that enables me to say, well, in some places you are more likely to find what I call a strong civic climate.  More people are endorsing the idea that citizenship entails the obligation to vote and be otherwise civically involved.  So I'm not going to go into the statistical details.  I would be happy to go over any particular questions you might have about the technical side of this but the bottom line is what I'm doing is looking at the high school civic climate in 1965 and using that to predict what people do 15 years later.  And what do we find?

Well, controlling for all sorts of things and accounting for the fact that people move and everything you might think matters, this is what you find - and let me just explain what this means.  These bars represent the increase in the probability that somebody turned out to vote, that is, went to the polls in the 1980 presidential election.  And what I have shown here are a few other things that political scientists already knew mattered.  Here is education.  We know that just simply having more education makes you more likely to turn out to vote.  We know, although sometimes we forget, that what your parents do matters.  That is this bar here.  We know that things like getting married matter, more stability in your community.  Okay, this is your high school civic climate.  It is not the biggest effect, although it ranks right up there with the others.  And the fact that we find any effect whatsoever - remember, this is after 15 years - is really quite remarkable.

There is more.  Not only does the high school civic climate predict whether or not you turn out to vote in 1980, it also predicts whether or not you volunteered in your community which, by some definitions, is the quintessential form of civic involvement.  But, and this is critical, it does not predict what I call electoral activism, that is the truly politically motivated stuff, working on campaigns and that sort of thing.  That is a function of other things, partly where you are, partly other characteristics about you but not your high school. 

Let me also mention that while your high school civic climate predicts whether or not you turned out to vote or you volunteered 15 years after high school, it does not have that effect only seven years after high school.  There is, in other words, what is sometimes called a “sleeper effect,” that what is happening to you when you are young does not have an immediate effect.  You have to reach a point in your life when you begin to settle down, when you are not in the disruptive years of college and such -- that is when we begin to see the payoff for strengthening the civic climate in our high schools, all right?

Now, the question is, what can schools do to enhance that civic climate?  And I wish I had the answer.  We have some clues.  We do not have the single magic bullet and the reason, I think, is because while we once paid a lot of attention to this question, that is why we have this data that I'm talking in the first place, unfortunately, a lot of scholars just sort of ignored this as a topic.  Now, fortunately, it is sort of coming back into the fore.  And hopefully, both the academics and policymakers will continue to pay attention to this. 

But I want to give you just sort of two quick examples of maybe ways we can learn about how you build a sense of civic responsibility within a school.  Because what we know, both from my data and others, is that it is not actually the introduction of a particular curriculum that seems to matter all that much, or if it does, having a civic space curriculum is perhaps necessary but is by no means sufficient.  There is something more than just what goes on in the classroom; it is something about the ethos of the school.  And I would like to suggest that there is a precedent, actually -- one thing our public schools actually do quite well.  That is, they teach tolerance.  Now, how do they do that?  Well, it is not usually through a particular curriculum but rather through an ethos, that teachers believe that something that they ought to be doing.  It has become a norm within schools. 

And now for the next part, I need to just pause for a moment and give you a qualification here.  You may have caught that I'm here from the University of Notre Dame.  So you are going to think that the next thing I'm about to tell you, which is good things about Catholic schools, is something that I have to tell you.  But I do not, actually.  It turns out that lots of other people have said the same thing and they are not from Notre Dame and I would not normally bring this up but I just somehow think it is relevant here. I'm neither a product of Catholic schools nor am I even a Catholic myself.  But nonetheless, there is a lot of evidence that suggest that we can learn a lot about how to build an ethos of community responsibility from observing what Catholic schools do.  And I'm convinced that even though that ethos or responsibility in those Catholic schools does actually spring from the Catholicism in which those schools are based, by no means would it have to be a Catholic school or even a religious school in order to find a place where young are taught that they ought to be responsible for their community.  The bottom line is that we have lot yet to learn.  But the first step is to recognize that it is worth learning and hopefully, what I have described here does that.

So I promised you a joke.  Well, before I get to the joke, let me just tell you a quick story.  A few years ago when I was first starting on this project, I was at a roundtable discussion sponsored by the National Association of the Secretaries of State.  This is a group people who are actually quite concerned about voter turnout and because they write about elections in most states, they have something to do with voter turnout.  And I was on this roundtable and I was asked by someone there, someone from a Secretary of State's office, “What can I do tomorrow to boost voter turnout in my state?”  And about that time, I did not know what to say.  Now, I have an answer.

My answer is all we can do is start tomorrow but we cannot expect the payoff until much further down the line.  Remember that sleeper effect.  But the good news is the things we do now can actually have a difference as we look forward.  All of which brings me back to Tracy Hodgeson, remember her?  Our lonely voter there in Boston? 

As you scatter tonight, details of what I have said are going to fade away but there is one thing that I want you to remember and it is the one thing that I wish I could have said to that person at that meeting in the National Association of the Secretaries of State and that is, that you can take the girl out of Kansas but you can never take the Kansas out of the girl.  Thank you.

Frederick Hess:  Thanks David.  Speaking first will be Bill Galston, senior fellow at Brookings Institution Governance Studies Program and a College Park Professor at the University of Maryland.  Bill was founding director of the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) as David noted.  Bill has extensive policy experience including service as deputy assistant on domestic policy to President Clinton and he is the author of eight books and more than one hundred articles.  Bill?

Bill Galston:  Well, friends, Washingtonians, countrymen, I'm here to praise this book, not to bury it.  As a matter of fact, as the father of a 22-year-old son, I found it positively inspiring because this idea of the sleeper effect -- I mean, it tells me I only have 11 years to wait.  It is going to be a long decade.  This is a wonderful book but I have got to say, Dave, you really blew it when you chose the title.  I mean, given the fact that Bob Putnam was the director of your dissertation, given the way you begin this book, perhaps you should have called, “Voting Alone.”

But I have something even better for you, and you sort of foreshadowed it at the end of your remarks, you could have called it, “Toto, I do not think we are in Kansas anymore but what really matters is that we used to be.”  I'm going to do three things in these brief remarks. 

First of all, I’ll share some minor or at least modest factual quibbles and supplements to some of the things that Dave said in the book. Then I want to raise very quickly a question about the model of voting that forms the spine, the analytical spine of this book.  And then, in the third and longest part of my remarks, I want to assume that the findings of this book are correct and ask, “What do they mean?”  “What are their implications?” because I think that is what really matters.

Starting with the factual quibbles, David is a little bit more skeptical about voter participation by young adults than I think the facts warrant.  As Rick noted in his introduction, participation by young people rose by 11 full percentage points.  That is not percent.  Percentage points, from 36 percents to 47 percent, between 2000 and 2004, regaining most of the ground that had been lost since 1972 and moreover, there is evidence that that surge continued in 2006, and early analysis had voting by young adults up by 10 to 20 percent.  That is two to four percentage points over the figure in the previous off-year election of 2002. 

Obviously, it is too early to see whether this represents a trend or just a momentary interruption of a long downturn, but I think there are reasons for hope.  There are signs of renewed interest and activism throughout his generation, I believe. 

It may interest you, some of you in the room, to learn that there has been a steadily widening gender-gap among younger voters.  In 2004, it reached a record six-point edge for young women over young men -- fifty percent for young women versus only 44 percent for young men.  Interestingly, if you look at the population as a whole, the three-point male edge in 1972 turns into a three-point edge for women by 2004.  So you have some very interesting long-cycle gender trends here that I think we political scientists ought to pay more attention to than we do.

Second, not so much quibble as addition, Dave Campbell in his book notes signs of a diminished sense of duty among young people.  I think I can add some data to that.  In a 2002 study of young adults that CIRCLE did, we gave them four options, four options for explaining what they think the most important aspect of voting is.  Voting is a choice, it is a right, a responsibility, or a duty.  Thirty-four percent said that it was a choice in their view.  Thirty-one percent said that it was right.  So the choice plus right equals 65 percent of respondents.  Those who said that it was responsibility, 20 percent and the duty, only nine percent, so 65 to 29 on this sort of autonomy versus norms dichotomy.  Interestingly, a college education increases by ten full percentage points those who take the side of duty or responsibility as opposed to choice, or choice or right. 

A 2006 study of young adults with a somewhat different set of options showed that 31 percent regarded voting as a choice, 25 percent as a responsibility, and 35 percent they voted because they believed that it might affect the outcome and in this respect, they are not so different from older voters.

Quibble or addition number three, Dave quite properly distinguishes between school-based civic education in the narrow sense and the broader sense, the narrow sense being sort of official, classroom-based civics education.  The broad sense being, what he calls along with others, school climate.  And the reports varied in results concerning civic education in the narrow sense, research results that are somewhere between modest and discouraging. 

To make a long data story short, there are other data sets and studies that, I think, shed a somewhat more encouraging light on the civic effects of classroom-based civic education than Dave reports, but perhaps we can talk about that in the question and answer period. 

So that is the first part of my remarks.  Second, I can do very briefly.  The voting model that guides this study, as Dave indicated in his charts, is dichotomous.  We can regard voting as either duty-based or interest-based.  And that is true and revealing as far as it goes.  My question is whether that is an exhaustive model because I can think of at least two other motivations that are potentially very important. 

First is what might be called the expressive function or value of voting.  You vote because you want to identify yourself with something you value.  I suspect that is a lot of what is going on in this surge of enthusiasm among young voters for young Senator Barack Obama.  I do not think it is either duty or interest.  I think it is a third thing and we ought to investigate that third thing. 

And another thing that I think is going on in voting quite frequently is what might be called an expanded conception or understanding of benefit.  The question that a lot of voters ask themselves is not “How am I doing?” but rather “How are we doing?”  Voters are guided by their conception of the situation and prospects of the country and not just their own situation.  There is a lot of political science evidence in favor of that.  So I think it would be interesting to broaden out this dichotomous model by adding another two legs and then seeing how that affected the analysis, but I do not think that lays a glove on the central finding that this book presents. 

So let me spend the last few minutes of my remarks thinking about the implications of the central finding.  Dave Campbell really did not underscore this point in his presentation, but one of the things that the book argues provocatively, somewhat counter-intuitively and certainly, controversially is that there are many positive civic consequences that flow from homogeneity as opposed to diversity.  Let me summarize some of them.

Homogeneity as opposed to heterogeneity tends to produce things like trust, the order and discipline that flows from what I will call a normative community, the internalization of duty, civic engagement, and interestingly, for those of us who deplore the current level of political polarization in Washington and around the country, increased participation by more moderate and less zealous partisans. 

So, if these are some of the important if unheralded advantages of homogeneity as opposed to heterogeneity, what does that say when you put that up against what has been happening to our society?  And let me just tick off a few points that I think reveal the tension between this finding and other political choices that we have made and other trends that were undergoing.

If you look at the past 80 years, you can divide them very neatly into two 40-year periods.  In the first period, we adopted a self-conscious policy of homogeneity by slamming the doors of immigration shut.  We became an increasingly homogeneous society.  By the end of that 40-year period, the percentage of foreign-born citizens that was in 1965 was the lowest ever recorded, under five percent. 

In that year, we changed course, momentously changed course.  Opened up the doors of immigration, radically diversified the sources of immigration and the results is that the percentage of foreign-born citizens has almost tripled during that period.  We are a far more diverse society than we were 40 years ago and if you look at the youngest cohort of Americans, about four times as diverse as we were in the early 1960s. 

So there is a tension between homogeneity and a liberal immigration policy.  If you turn from demography to culture, there has been a shift away from the valorization of homogeneity that characterized my childhood and young adulthood towards the legitimization of cultural and normative diversity.  There has certainly been a social validation of individual autonomy and choice over norms of responsibility and duty, and unlike the period when I was growing up, we now line in a country where citizens are required to do almost nothing.  They have lots of choices but almost no mandatory duties. 

Along with all of these, there has been what might be called a flight toward homogeneity as one of the consequences of diversity.  This is certainly readily observable in America's political parties which are far more homogeneous internally than they were 30 years ago.  It is true in America's states and if anybody is interested, I can provide lots of data on this, and it is true even for counties.  Intriguingly in 1976, only 27 percent of voters lived in counties that gave super majorities or 20 percentage points or more to one candidate or to a candidate of one party or the other.  By 2000, that had risen to 45 percent.  By 2004, it was up to 48 percent. 

There are other forms of sorting flight towards homogeneity that have occurred in response to the increased diversity of American society.  We have lots more sorting by income, by age, by marital status, and by communities of affinity in general than we did 30 or 40 years ago.  What are the consequences of this combination of increasingly diversifying society and what I'm calling the flight towards homogeneity?  Well, what we have is a situation in which politically and culturally, we have homogeneity within this affinity groups and polarization between or among them, and conflict between or among them.  We have diminished trust interpersonally and also institutionally and along with that, we have a phenomenon that political scientists have documented as public revulsion against high-conflict politics. 

So, in conclusion, if this is the situation, if these are some of the issues raised by Dave Campbell’s analysis of the consequences of homogeneity, what are we to do?  Well, if we would look at today's adolescents and young adults, we see an interesting combination.  We see very low levels of interpersonal trust and very high levels of tolerance.  That is to say, young people conspicuously exhibit the virtue that most closely corresponds to heterogeneity.  In addition, they display very high levels of affinity for policies and lifestyles based on choice and the exercise of rights as opposed to duties and responsibilities.  This is the normative outlook that heterogeneity tends to create. 

The challenge that Dave Campbell’s book poses is rebuilding a normative community, a community with some normative homogeneity within the multiple heterogeneities that characterize contemporary American societies such that parents, neighborhoods and schools mutually reinforce and promote the internalization of some core civic norms.  Clearly, in modern America, this cannot be done on the basis of ethnicity or religion.  The informal Protestant establishment is gone for good.  It can only be done on the basis of a new common civic culture.  My suggestion, for what it is worth, is that shared experiences of mutual responsibility and obligation are particularly important for the moral formation of adolescents and young adults. 

This raises questions such as the following:  Should young people be expected to take more responsibility for the common civic space known as their school as is the case in Japan?  Should there be policies such as a broad-based draft for all 18 year olds with a wide menu of civilian and military options?  Should we have something along the lines of a National Teacher Corps that might give young people a real sense of participation in the future of their country?  And finally, I would ask in the spirit of the occasion and certainly given my fellow panelists, what are the implications of all of these for the No Child Left Behind Act which focuses so exclusively, as Dave Campbell noted, on academic achievement as opposed to, at the expense of I would say, the historic civic mission of schools?  Can we do both?  And what are the long-term consequences if we cannot?  Thank you very much.

Frederick Hess:  Thank you, Bill.  Speaking next is Bob Wise.  Bob is president of the Alliance for Excellent Education from 2001 to 2005.  Bob served as the governor of West Virginia where he was particularly known for his efforts to address teacher quality and for creating a statewide scholarship program.  Prior to his tenure as governor, Bob represented the second district of West Virginia in the U.S. House of Representatives. In the House, Bob was particularly known for his efforts to promote affordability of college and to support efforts to ensure availability of financial aid for all students.  Welcome Bob.

Bob Wise:  Thank you Rick, and thank you very much for this opportunity.  Now, the direct message I got from your book, which I think is a very important message, is about encouraging civic responsibility and involvement.  In a more implicit message I got, mainly because I work for an organization whose mission is to advocate the policies that every child who should graduate from high school or college are ready for the workplace and then they take their place as a citizen, is that this book gives us and points us to some areas of education reform. 

Now, I'm going to open with a story.  You talked about Tracy Hodgeson and I thought you wove her through artfully in the whole book.  I'm going to talk about Mrs. O'Shaughnessy, also of Boston, also involving a City Council seat.  Because when Tip O'Neill was the speaker of the House of Representatives, he used to greet incoming new members of Congress with the story of when he was a young man running, I believe, for the City Council.  It might not have been really made – yes, I think you have heard the story before, too - but it was a local seat.  And it was a very close-fought election and he lost by one vote. 

And so he went dejectedly, as he was going back to Brewster where his family has grown up and he has grown up next door to Mrs. O'Shaughnessy [phonetic].  Tip and the son were of the same age.  And Mrs. O'Shaughnessy was sweeping her stoop and says, “Tip, oh Tip, you look dejected.  What is the problem?”  And he says, “Well, Mrs. O'Shaughnessy, I just lost the election and I lost by one vote.”  And she is, “Oh Tip, if I had only known, I would have voted for you.  I would have gone to vote.”  And he says, “Well, Mrs. O'Shaughnessy, how could you not vote?  I have grown up next to you.  Your son, Billy, and I were in school together from when we were this high.  I carried out the garbage out for you two times a week.  How come you did not vote?”  She said, “Tip, you never asked.” 

Well, somewhere between Tracy Hodgeson who went out unasked and Mrs. O'Shaughnessy who needed to be asked, we have got to examine what it is that gets people to the polls.  And I think that Dave's book does it well.  Now Mrs. O'Shaughnessy contradicts -- I do not know if it is a good thing to contradict my first law of politics.  I did not evolve this through -- and I do not recommend you do it and follow my system either - through the exhaustive research that Dave did.  I did it through many years. 

Wise’s first law of politics is that citizens’ vote turnout -- their percentage of turnout is in direct relationship to their age.  About 18 percent of 18-year-olds will vote.  Eighty percent of 80-year-olds will vote.  So three weeks before the election, where do you think I will choose to go spend most of my time, the high school or the Senior Citizens' Center?  Where is it that most candidates spend most of their time?  And so the lament of former West Virginia Senator Jennings Randolph who left the Senate, I believe, in 1984 that he was one of the main sponsors of the 18-year-old vote, the constitutional amendment.  For many years afterward, Senator Randolph lamented that the audience that he and the group fought to enfranchise turned out the least.  And so I'm interested, Bill, in your observations. 

I thought Dave responded to that in his book well because what he points out is that while the voting percentage of young people did go up in proportion to the overall voting percentage, it stayed roughly the same.  But that is an important discussion.  I'm kind of fascinated - I'll just make this a side note - this concept of the voter as a sort of -- the young voter, the high school graduate as a kind of a political Manchurian candidate.  He is going to be -- in 15 years, he will suddenly blossom.  That is about like some of the investments my wife and I have made in recent years towards retirement.  I hope that we get that returned in 15.  But that would also incidentally bear out the same –- my same premise, which is that voter turnout in the younger years is unfortunately much, much lower than it should be. 

Let me point out that this book makes a very important point, I think -– you do not spend a lot of time on it but I think it may be one of the most important points in there and that is there is an importance to voting more than just voting.  That is voting -– the act of voting itself may encourage civic participation.  As a middle-aged woman one time explained it to me, she voted because that was her license to gripe.  And once that she voted, now she had the ability to go get involved in a whole lot of other things.  She can go to town meetings and complain to her representative, she could write angry letters.  But whatever way, it got her involved; it was part of the process.  And so, if you believe that people led in to activities incrementally rather than jumping in the pool all at once, then the act of voting is something that can begin that process towards greater civil involvement. 

Now, I have got to be honest.  I have got some concerns about Tracy.  And you expressed these concerns, too.  Tracy went and voted without the slightest idea of whom she was voting for.  I liken this to -– have you ever been on -– I, one time, got a chance to go out on a police shooting range.  And it was one of the ones where – and you can get the video games for this too -- it is all the same theme where you are walking along and the door swings open and you whip around and you have got to make an instant decision whether to shoot or not.  And hopefully you develop -– I mean, is it a crook or is it grandmother that is popping out of that door?  And so it is a training mechanism for police and SWAT teams and military officials and others but you have got to make a quick decision.  Well, I have to dissent.  I am delighted that Tracy is out on the range but I'm just afraid she is going to blow me away when I pop through the door and I can consider myself the good guy.  So, I'm glad she is out there but I'm concerned about what it is she is doing when she is out there. 

Which leads to, I guess, the second law or premise I have developed, which incidentally I did not develop fully until I took this position that I have had for the last two years in the non-profit sector.  This was after I left the office.  Wise’s second law is that ultimately, as we seek to develop policies at the Alliance for Education about high schools and getting them implemented – Wise’s second law is that ultimately every important decision is going to be made by an elected official.  Now, some will dispute that but if you are talking about who sets the final priorities, it is going to be an elected official.  Budgets, it is -– whether it is a No Child Left Behind, whether it is a defense bill, whatever it is.

And so then the question becomes –- that then adds graded emphasis to making sure that A) we get Tracy out on the range but B) Tracy then is taking some time to be fully informed about what she is doing.  It is kind of you using the example of Toto and Dorothy leaving Kansas.  Well, it would have been a whole lot of a different book if the house had fallen on Glenda the good witch as opposed to the bad witch.  And so that is what I think we need to be thinking about – I’ll go ahead to reach back for the Wizard of Oz.  I got to admit it.  Now the long-term recall is a lot better sometimes than short-term. 

So let me talk for a second because I think you issued a very important challenge, Dave, in your book.  And I'm going to quote exactly, “Is it really possible to expect today's schools, beleaguered as they are, to add the promotion of civic responsibility to their leading list of responsibilities?”  That is an incredibly important question.  My answer is yes, but I think you can do it in a way that epitomizes, represents what we know about high school reform.  Because the other point that this book makes is that civics as we –- well, I'm not sure if many of you had civics, but civics as I had it in the ninth grade in 1960 something probably did not lead directly to public engagement.  That something else in the educational process leads to that. 

So then, how do you set up the situation if civics -- learning how the three branches of government operate -- is not what motivates somebody to go to the polls? What is it in civic involvement in that school that can?  How can you set that up?  Let me suggest this, that as you consider No Child Left Behind you are looking at how you approach education in a holistic way rather than simply a segmented way.  I'll give you an example: civic involvement.  Let us say the high school class volunteers or is coerced or has a requirement to do stream cleanup.  You can send them out to pull out tires for the requisite number of hours or you can do a whole set of instruction around what it is chemically that happens in a stream when you drop rubber and other products into it.  How does algae develop, how is it that other types if pollution, what is the impact on it?  You send students out to tutor younger children, perhaps mentor, a successful model in a number of schools, high school students going to grade schools or to middle schools, middle school students going to grade schools. 

So instead of just simply sending them out to read to the younger children, what about a course and a course of instruction around the development of the brain and how that develops?  What happens in an educational process?  What are some of the other areas of the growing process?  Just do the same thing as those who volunteer in nursing homes, the physiology of aging.  Or perhaps they volunteer to work in a soup kitchen for the homeless.  A whole set of issues there, nutrition: what is it that somebody needs in terms of nutrition?  What are the social factors?  And for the entrepreneurial-inclined, how can we better deliver services than having soup kitchens?  And so, yes it takes ingenuity, it takes some work, but there is a way that you bring civic involvement into the overall education process.  And in so doing, you engage the student.  Because whether or not civics is boring -- but guess what, history is often boring, math is often boring -- the challenge is how we keep the students engaged so that we do not have third of them dropping out in high school and another third not finishing with the skills which they need. 

So, I guess the -– and each one of these examples, incidentally, can provide a positive reason for voting because if you -– however you feel about the stream, somebody is making a decision on what is permitted in that stream.  How do you feel about senior citizens and healthcare?  How do you feel about the homes?  All of it has political - political in the sense of being that decisions will be made, implications, and what – and this is the way that you can affect it. 

I need to get to Wise's third law very quickly and Wise's third law is and it is a corollary to the second law and I hope that nobody in here will be offended.  But the third law that I have come to realize is that at the end of the process, ten PhDs are trumped by one state legislator.  So the need then is to be able to inform the policymakers, the elected policymakers but to be able to do that in a way that they relate to and then is relevant to them.  That is what this book does. 

This book is very relevant to what policymakers need to be thinking about because think about it from an elected official’s position: what you are talking about in here, Dave, is pointing out the need for practice-based learning.  You are talking about the need for multiple assessments in the school system.  You are talking about the need for relevance in the educational process and how you bring that about.  And then you are promising at the end not only improved graduation rates but you have got a real bell ringer at the end for every elected official - more voters.  And when you have got more voters, then you deal with Mrs. O'Shaughnessy's issue which is how do you ask them?  Ask them first and then how do you ask them, which is critically important.  So from our standpoint at the Alliance for Excellent Education, this is a very valuable book.  It is a valuable book because we intend to use it as not only a demonstration of the value of civic education, which we do happen to think is very important, but also believe that it further illustrates the need for meaningful high school reform  Thank you.

Frederick Hess:  Thank you Bob.  David, any particular responses to any of the points raised?

David Campbell:  Let me just talk for one second about a point that was raised that I think is worth exploring here.  So I told you an awful lot about Tracy Hodgeson.  One day, I'm sure I'm going to meet her or I'm going to meet somebody who knows her and then I'll be dreadfully embarrassed because she is a real person.  The point was made that she admitted when she turned out to vote that she did not know anything about the candidates running.  I think that actually is a good point, that what I'm not saying is what we want is an electorate that is dutiful but ignorant, but I see no reason why actually duty cannot go along with learning about the candidates.  And would it not be – and this kind of picks up on the thread that Bill gave us – a better electoral system if rather than parties simply trying to mobilize the people who already agreed with them by sending out shrill messages micro-targeted to them, but instead we had an electorate where we knew there was going to be a healthy percentage of people already at the polls and evaluating candidates and parties on the basis of something more than just simply this narrowly-targeted appeals?  I think that is what we should be pushing for.

Male Voice:  Now, in terms of the implications for policymakers or educators, of the findings in the book, Bill raised an issue that you did not have an opportunity to really discuss in your opening remarks, which is his question of homogeneity versus heterogeneity in school environments.  Right, this is on the public agenda at the moment.  This time the Supreme Court is hearing the Jefferson County case, one is in the Seattle case relating to weighting racial criteria, factors and trying to create diverse learning environments. 

Now, could you talk about this a bit because your book suggests and, in fact, one of the strength of Catholic schooling might be in that they are actually, in important ways, less diverse than some comparable schools, and that this is actually an advantage in fostering a sense of civic duty?  One is that a misreading then of your argument; or two, what does that mean for people thinking about school reform?

David Campbell:  Well, this is a sticky subject and I actually want to make clear that I do not want anyone to leave here saying, “Yes, I heard this guy from Notre Dame today and he said that we ought to just put all the liberals in their schools and all the conservatives in their schools and America will be a better place,” because that is not what I'm saying.  What is interesting about the question of a common set of values, or if you want to think of the national model, E Pluribus Unum, is that the Unum comes from what is essentially what we decide it means.  So there was once a time when in those Catholic schools, the Italians at theirs and the Catholics at theirs and the Poles at theirs, that does not exist anymore.  Now they think of themselves all as one group, and that is --

Frederick Hess:  And most of the people in Catholic schools are not Catholic.

David Campbell:  That is true and in many cases.  In other words, what unites us is up to us and in fact, I find encouragement in the fact - and this might sound a little strange - in that the type of homogeneity where I find all the effects that were described are actually not racial and not ethnic.  In fact, I make a point in the book of pointing out that what I describe about political homogeneity is not the case for those other types of homogeneity.  That is actually very important and why?  Well, it is kind of hard to change your race although it actually is possible to think of racial groups differently, and that has happened, of course, across American history.  But, of course, what I’m talking about is political homogeneity.  What makes you think you have something in common with someone else politically?  Well, that is certainly not embedded -- it is not genetic or anything.  It is something that actually we can affect. 

And so when we talk about bringing people together, I think the schools play a role in that in reminding us of what we have in common rather than necessarily emphasizing what makes us different, and that can be done in a classroom that is ethnically and racially heterogeneous just as much as it can be done in one that is ethnically and racially homogeneous.

Rick Hess:  Okay.  With that, why do we not open it up?  Rosemary has the microphone, please wait for her.  And Juliet has a microphone also.  Please grab them and please as I always say, actually ask questions rather than make speeches from the floor.  And with that, let’s open it up.

Patrick Phillips:  Hi I’m Patrick Phillips.  I’m the Executive Director of the Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools.  You are not going to have to wonder about my platform here.  Let me just get to the heart of what I think is a really important issue and it grows out of Governor Wise’s remarks about NCLB high school reform and that kind of context.  I really want to challenge us today to ask the question whether or not we can accept a fundamental education reform law for our country NCLB that says that reading and mathematics and science are core and social studies is not.  I do think that we have to confront the idea that there is required core knowledge, that kids ought to come out of schools with [indiscernible] American government about history and that that needs to be a part of what we define as the essential content that we need to hold ourselves accountable about. 

So I would like to hear some discussion about that but while you are thinking about that, I also want to add that I do believe that whole school reform and community engagement and service learning and other kinds of things are just as critical, and I’m right there with you, and our organization is doing whatever we can to promote that whole school whole district idea, Shelly Berman School and Hudson Massachusetts being a shining example of the kind of work that is going on there.  So I do not disagree with you there but I really want to challenge the idea that if we can say that we got other stuff in the core, I think social studies, history, economics, the preparation for citizenship content needs to be there as well.  And point in fact, 27 states already have in their assessment and accountability system some degree of civics, history, assessment and testing requirements.

Rick Hess:  Okay.  Who wants to address first?  Bob?

Bob Wise:  To me it is not either/or.  What it does, as I tried to point out in my opening remarks, it requires some creativity that perhaps we have not always displayed in our public school system or in any school system to integrate them. I will not back off from something that was -- if we do not have standards for reading, math and science, then what we are going to do is we are going to continually be refusing to look in the mirror because I truly believe that -- and if you are looking at the international competitive world situation, if you are looking at what it is that a child needs to be able to function in today’s society and I, as a political science major, I think I fall down on the humanist side as much as anyone does, but I also recognize there are some absolute standards we have to have. 

And having said that, how do you make a whole person and how do you work that so that the civics exercise and particularly in the content courses in secondary schools, particularly in high schools, that that civics exercise also may have applications of math, may have applications of literacy, may have applications of science?  How do you discuss political science today without discussing all the science?  To me I do not see how it can be done and, indeed, your work itself is a science.  But even then, every aspect of our life today has a scientific background. 

So long-winded perhaps, I agree with you but I’m not backing off on the need to be able to measure on some of these hard issues, which I think are essential because trust me, the rest of the world is measuring that way and we have to be cognizant of that.

Bill Galston:  Let me just add a word from the front.  I recently spent four days at a private congressional conclave devoted to the sole topic of the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind and a lot of the people there, including some people who were essentially involved in the drafting of the original bill, feel trapped between something that is too narrow and something that is too broad.  Their fear is that if they start adding in other core dimensions of knowledge to be measured beyond this very narrow, perhaps too narrow core that they have defined, that there will be a kind of slippery slope where every advocacy group for every subject will say, “Why not me?”  There are op-ed pieces being published in national newspapers about the shame and the folly of ignoring the arts in public schools, et cetera.

Rick Hess:  And Richard Simons is in town pushing for --

Bill Galston:  Right, so I think it is important and you know my bonafides in the area of civic education, but I think it is important for us to understand the logic that got the political system to where it is today.  There was a real sense that schools were not focusing on education and as a result, students were being short-changed.  And then people asked themselves some very hard questions: What are the subjects without which our young people will simply not have a future?  And the roster that you ticked off, a very parsimonious one is the answer that they arrived at and the question is whether by broadening that out significantly, will it throw the baby out with the bath water?  I think this is going to be a very, very difficult legislative challenge in the next year or so.

Rick Hess:  David, let me ask you specifically on this point.  It strikes me that in some sense this question of how much or how little is there in that assessment framework is separate from what you are arguing about in the book.  You are really talking about that civic culture that does or does not exist in schools when you are talking about the educational component here.  Given that, how does this play out? 

Does high stakes accountability in your reading interfere with the ability to create the kinds of high school cultures that teach civic participation, or is that not a problem, or could you explain a bit of your thinking on NCLB?

David Campbell:  Well, I think an undue emphasis on high stakes assessment on these narrowly defined competencies can crowd out things like civic education, and I think they have in many places and that is a problem, but there is no reason why they have to.  So in my talk, I mentioned that a civics curriculum might be necessary for what I’m talking about but it is not sufficient, but it still very well might be necessary.  And I actually agree with Bill; there is some evidence.  I myself have contributed a bit to this literature that what goes on in the classroom does actually matter.  I’m not suggesting that. 

So if we want to encourage schools to pay more attention to civic responsibility, what are some ways that we could do that?  Well, one of the ways might actually come out of the very logic of No Child Left Behind, which is the idea that we are going to evaluate schools and we are going to publicize the results of these evaluations so that people kind of know what is going on.  Well, what if civics or social studies or American government or whatever you want to call it, what if that was part of the assessment so people knew that in this school, the students were doing well on that measure or they were not doing so well?  And if that sounds weird, if that sounds strange, there is no reason that we cannot do it because I can point to examples right here in North America where this has been done very successfully, in particular the Canadian province of Alberta does this.  They have phenomenal exams there.  They are not the sort of lowest common denominator exams that you find in so many states in the US.  Rather, these are rigorous exams.  Alberta students do very well in these international assessments, and social studies is one of the subjects.  It is one of seven or eight subjects.  They are not controversial and they seem to do the trick.  I do not see why we cannot do that here.  If the Canadians can do it -- I’m Canadian I should say, I could make jokes about them.

Bob Wise:  Could I just do 30 seconds because I think it is important.  I want to respond to something to what Bill said, too, is the assessment issue.  This becomes all critical if we insist on the existing structure, but is it just possible that maybe we ought to have a slightly longer school day?  Is it just possible that we ought to have more time in the classroom where we are able then to engage?  We are now down, as I looked at it recently amongst developed nations, we have the least amount of time and the 180 days as a rule than most developed nations.  I might add that when I tried to get that changed - that is not a popular thing to run on incidentally - but when I tried to get that changed, the first industry that comes screaming in was the tourism industry.

Rick Hess:  Absolutely.  Yes sir?

Rocco Morano:  Thanks.  Hi, I’m Rocco Morano and I serve as Director of Student Activities for the National Association of Secondary School Principals.  We call it NASSP because that is a mouthful, and I also serve as the Director of the National Association of Student Councils which back in 1944, NASSP said they should be there to be a laboratory for democracy to give kids an opportunity to practice democratic practices.  So as I look at the talk about adding civics courses and this and that, and I used to be a social studies teacher so I’m not opposed to that, but my feeling is if we want to foster civic engagement among young people, we have to give them an opportunity to practice it.  And how do you do that?  Well, you have to give them a vote on how the school is run.  They have to have some say in what is happening to them, and schools that allow that I think find -- and you mentioned it, Dave, I guess in your book, you called it “civic climate of the school” and I think that is really an important part. 

So I was just wondering if in your research, if you have found more of that and how the rest of the folks feel about that because that is something that schools do not traditionally do but we have just developed a project where it is called Raising Student Voice and Participation to try to teach schools to do that.  And, of course, you need the principals involved but it is an important thing, but just wondering what you found.

David Campbell:  Well, it is actually hard to tease out what happens when you have a student government in a high school in the US because most high schools actually have something of that sort.  There has been some work done on this trying to tease out the differences between one form of governance versus another, and there has actually been some sociologist at Stanford that have found some interesting results when you look at the way even the school constitution is written.  What I have looked at is not so much what we might call voice in the school partly because there is not a political scientist like variation. 

We need to have things that vary in order to explain other things that we are interested.  And so one thing that I have looked at is not so much student government per se but whether or not young people have voice in the classroom.  That is, are they given an opportunity to openly discuss political issues within the classroom?  And that has actually huge effects on all sorts of things that we are interested in and the more I look at that data, the more I’m convinced that there really is something going on there and that for me is a useful model.  I do not think that comes with any sort of ideological baggage, and what we are talking about is giving young people an opportunity to grapple with real issues and that sounds interesting to me.  That sounds like pedagogy and I do not think that is too alien from what we would want going on in our classrooms as compared to just sort of rote memorization, which is often what civics turns into.

Bill Galston:  I wonder if I could just add a word here.  I emphatically agree with what Dave just said but I wonder, I do not want to start a fight here but I wonder whether you are not pulling your punches just a little bit?  Because as I read your book, the civic climate that you think is very important for promoting the internalization of norms, including the norm of civic duty, the civic climate is in fact the climate of a normative community in which there is substantial, not only agreement around shared norms of conduct, of social expectation, but real unity of purpose among those who bear authority within that social system where you have instead parents serving as lawyers for their miscreant children and litigators vis-à-vis teachers and principals supporting by and large the judgment that teachers and principals make concerning grades and disciplinary questions and things of that sort.  And this is part and parcel of your high regard which I share for Catholic schools.  I mean the essence of that great book Catholic Schools and the Common Good is the creation of a normative community, and there is something about the idea of a normative community that rubs against the grain of a lot of what is going on not only in schools and in the country today.  So I do think that your excellent analysis poses more of a problem for current practice than you are making fanatic right now but you may disagree with my reading of your book.

David Campbell:  You are right; I did pull my punch so I'll admit I'm not wild about the idea of having students too heavily involved in the actual governance of the school for precisely the reasons that Bill has articulated.

Frederick Hess:  Let’s spell this out a bit so if Deborah Meier were here, Debbie’s response is ‘David, you are nuts.’  That the only way children are going to learn to be effective democratic citizens is if all through their schooling they are given substantial real input and to the way that they are educated.  So what do you find unconvincing about that kind of response or analysis?

David Campbell:  Well, because I think that functioning in a democracy does not only involve the exercise of voice but it actually does involve the recognition of the need for authority and for the sort of normative climate that Bill was just describing.  So it is a balance, and so I am not suggesting that students should not be involved at all in the governance of the schools.  Sure, there are some questions in which they can probably have a productive voice.  But at the end of the day, we need to be concerned about the actual curriculum that they are being taught and I'm not sure I would be comfortable with high school students making those sorts of decisions.  I think it is fair for them to actually listen to the wisdom of others and that is kind of the way we want, I think, a democracy to function.  You want to balance your own voice versus the judgment of others.  It is not just simply me, me, me the whole time.

Frederick Hess:  For instance if we think about so many efforts of high school reform - Bob, you should speak to this - so much, for instance, the relationship thrust of the Gates Foundation Strands Aid, maybe not the last year or two but certainly in the previous five years was about getting students engaged and reaching out to them in their interest and meeting them where they are.  And it sounds when I hear you discuss it or in reading the book that you are suggesting that there is a little bit of mis-diagnosis going on there, that what is missing in some of these notions of high school reform is the emphasis on strong modeling and strong mentoring and clarity of values that is sometimes absent in the high school environment.  Is that a fair rendition of what you were saying?

David Campbell:  Yes, I would agree with that.  I think what we are looking for are schools in which people feel the connection.  They feel that they are part of the community.  I do believe that learning to function in a community that are small trains you for functioning in communities that are large, and the things you were just describing are going to help us get there.

Bob Wise:  I guess meeting them where they are can have different meanings, and the meaning to me is and what I have tried to stress throughout is in the learning process, engaging them in ways and – Rocco, you were talking about this in the same way - setting it up so that if it is something they want to learn without getting into the question of how much authority [audio skips] after you set schools schedule, but setting it up so that we are engaging them and we are doing it in an inter-disciplinary way so that a lesson is not simply about, once again, about cleaning a stream; it is about all the different things that happened in the stream.  How did the stream get there and so on?  It is an additional challenge to creativity and teaching.  But I think in so doing, not only is a teacher more creative, but I think it encourages the students to develop the soft skills that are very important to us too, as important as the math and science that I just stood up for, or the development of the soft skill, the communications, the problem-solving and so on.

Hi Hsu Chek [phonetic]:   My name is Hi Hsu Chek.  I have a question.  The heterogeneous environment, whether the emphasis on maybe political participation still produces the same effect?  And another question I have is the sleeper effect.  What is the cause of the sleeper effect and I wonder whether Tracy, the 21-year-old, I wonder if she is out of the sleeper effect because minus [sounds like] 7 years I do not know whether she applied as the age of the sleeper effect?

David Campbell:  Touché on the fact.  I actually make this point in the book that in pointing out the sleeper effect, I have to actually in the end concede that Tracy does not quite fit the model because she would be a little early for that, but you can only find so many anecdotes to build a book.

Male Voice:  I think you activated too soon.

David Campbell:  Exactly.  But the more interesting question there I think is why we see the sleeper effect and then also what is happening in heterogeneous communities.  So let me touch on the sleeper effect first.  Young people go through a very disruptive period in their lives immediately after high school.  If they go to college, it is especially disruptive.  But even if they do not, this is a time of life that is very unsettled for them and it is also actually why you see low rates of voter turnout and other forms of civic involvement among young people.  They are often in a new place.  They often have new friends.  They are often just trying to figure out how they are, getting started in a new job or they are in college and all those sorts of things just leads to unsettled life. 

It is, however, very interesting that a lot of evidence, not just mine but evidence from a fair number of scholars have now shown that whether or not you are a lifetime voter is pretty well decided within about the first of three or so election cycles in the United States at the age of 18.  If you have not voted in one of the first three elections in which you are able to vote, you have a much lower probability of being a lifetime voter. 

So in other words, that is a very important period and that is a part of the story of the sleeper effect; that if it is going to happen, it is going to have to happen within that window of time and it is when people have begun to become a little settled in their lives that they are most likely to then adopt the behavior of “Okay, I'm going to turn out to vote”. 

On the question of heterogeneous communities, what it is basically asking is if you saw the chart that I showed you, “Hey, voter turnout is high in heterogeneous places.  What is the fuss?”  Well, voter turnout is high there but lots of other stuff happens to be low there.  Volunteering is low.  Trust is low.  Interestingly however, tolerance is high.  Bill actually mentioned this.  So it is not as though everything fits together in a neat and tidy package.  It is a complicated world and as we sort of think of the different policies, we have got to think about the reality of the trade offs that are often made here.

Bill Galston:  Well, I think that is a very important point, and the language of tradeoffs, which finds its natural home in economics, also, it seems to me it, does important work in the area of social theory and values.  Fifty years ago, we were a high trust, low tolerance society.  Today, we are just the reverse - a high tolerance, low trust society.  I do not think that is an accident and if you ask me what are the circumstances under which we could simultaneously be a high tolerance and a high trust society, that may be Utopia.  It is certainly very difficult because [audio skips]

David Campbell:  It is Canada.

Bill Galston:  But at least in this country as Dave points out - you Canadian chauvinist - at least in this country, it seems, according to your book -- and if your are not alone your mentor is also exploring this issue as you know, that the processes that tend to produce tolerance tend to undermine trust and vice versa.  In the interest of being  maximally subversive Dave, may I take you up on the point that you made earlier about your political heterogeneity as opposed to racial  heterogeneity?

Frederick Hess:  Let’s do this in a brief exchange.  We will make this the closing exchange.

David Campbell:  Oh, we are not at the closing already.

Frederick Hess:  We are?  Are we not?

[Cross talking]

David Campbell:  Okay, then I will not open this up because it would be a longer discussion.

Frederick Hess:  We will have it in the adjacent room.  Jerry, quick question?

Gerald Sroufe:  I’m Jerry Sroufe with the American Educational Research Association.  This is not a research question.  I’m wondering as the discussion went on if we study voter behavior because we can, not because it is really all that important.  And many of the things that we have talked about that we would like to have in terms of political participation as soon -- when we look at the data, we have voting and then nothing.  We have almost nobody that is politically active in this issue.  And I am just wondering if this is the measure worth trying to build or if we should not be looking at other outcomes?

David Campbell:  Well, first of all I would say actually I think we know a fair amount about other forms of engagement.  We know more about voter turnout than perhaps any other form of political or civic involvement.  But that is not to say that we do not know a lot about other things as well.  So in general, I would say yes.  We need to study more than voting and actually I kind of debated whether or not the title Why We Vote really was an accurate reflection of what I have written because it is actually more than just voting, although voting is central.  And that may be is where I would come back to you and say I do not think we pay too much attention to voting. 

Voting is the central act in a representative democracy.  For most people, it is the single way that they get involved and, of course, it is what leads to who is actually in office, and so it is worth paying  a lot of attention because it is more that just what an individual does in the ballot box.  Our overall levels of voter turnout say something about the democratic legitimacy of the system in which we are in.  And so I guess that is the political scientist in me.  But yes, it does matter and we should pay maybe more attention than we do to it.

Frederick Hess:  Okay.  And then particularly given the sleeper effect, there is serious data collection problem here, right?  You have to maintain a question for 14 years, give or take, to find something which is when it is tough to retain an attention span in this town for 14 months.  So that is something of a challenge, although actually it does.  Actually, in the spirit of mis-titles for the article spin offs for this, you could have gone with the Manchurian Voter.  Anyway, with that I would like to thank all of you for joining us today.  I would like to thank the panel for a rousing conversation.  I would like to invite all of you into the foyer.  We have got a little bit of snacks and a drink if you would want to hit Dave with questions or catch Dave and Bill’s exchange on the heterogeneity point, I have no doubt it will be interesting.  And with that, I would like to wish all of you a good day and look forward to seeing you soon.

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