Search

This paper investigates how legal cannabis access affects student performance. Identification comes from an exceptional policy introduced in the city of Maastricht which discriminated legal access based on individuals' nationality. We apply a difference-in-difference approach using administrative panel data on over 54,000 course grades of local students enrolled at Maastricht University before and during the partial cannabis prohibition. We find that the academic performance of students who are no longer legally permitted to buy cannabis increases substantially. Grade improvements are driven by younger students, and the effects are stronger for women and low performers. In line with how THC consumption affects cognitive functioning, we find that performance gains are larger for courses that require more numerical/mathematical skills. We investigate the underlying channels using students' course evaluations and present suggestive evidence that performance gains are driven by improved understanding of material rather than changes in students' study effort. [This paper was produced as part of the Centre's Education Programme. The Centre for Economic Performance is financed by the Economic and Social Research Council.]

The Association for Career and Technical Education (ACTE), on behalf of career and technical education (CTE) professionals in the United States, advocates for clearly focusing American high schools on the goal of preparing every student for full participation in a spectrum of college opportunities, meaningful work, career advancement, and active citizenship. Leaders are called upon to make needed changes in school culture, instructional strategies and organizational priorities that will support this new purpose. The people at ACTE strongly believe that CTE courses and instructional methodologies have an important place in the redesigned high school of the 21st century. In their view, there should no longer be an artificial split between academic coursework and CTE studies, nor should exposure to career- or interest-based coursework be delayed until late in high school or college. Rather, they believe that all coursework, with clearly articulated standards and expectations, can help build in students the mix of skills, aptitudes and attitudes they will need for success after high school. This paper reviews the challenges and current efforts in high school redesign, and offers a number of recommendations about what elements should be included in the efforts to reinvent the American high school for the 21st century. (Contains 26 endnotes.)

Indiscriminate enforcement and worksite raids, a revival of anti-immigrant activity at the state level, and the undermining of our legal immigration system are all putting nearly 6 million U.S. citizen children at risk of separation from their families. And many of these children are Latino. Beyond the "Border: Family Separation in the Trump Era" outlines the harm to children, families, and communities caused by these policies in the areas of education, health and mental health, public safety and economic opportunity. It is a plight that affects not just Latinos or immigrants. It's having an impact on our entire country's future and long-term vitality.

This paper provides descriptive data on differences in civic engagement between advantaged and disadvantaged groups. Because there is not always consensus on what measure best describes disadvantaged, this paper used multiple indicators (race, ethnicity, citizenship status, family income and educational attainment) across four measures of civic engagement: (1) Percentage of survey respondents who volunteer with a formal non-profit provides measure of formal volunteer rate by group; (2) Percentage of survey respondents who do not volunteer but attend community meetings or work on community problems indicates whether disadvantaged groups exhibit a preference for community-oriented work over what is generally accepted as volunteering with a formal organization; (3) Percentage of individuals who both volunteer and either attend community meetings or work to fix a problem in their neighborhoods to provide better understanding about how volunteers from some groups are also highly engaged community actors; and (4) Percentage of all respondents, volunteer and non-volunteer, who attend community meetings or work on community problems to provide another view of group differences in civic engagement. Using the 2005-2007 Current Population Survey's Annual Volunteer Supplement was used for source data, major findings include: (1) Family income and education predict both likelihood of civic engagement and the rates of attrition; (2) Higher levels of income and education predict higher civic participation and attrition rates; (3) Whites tend to have higher rates of civic engagement and lower attrition rates than blacks, Hispanics or Asians; similarly, native-born citizens have higher rates of civic engagement and lower attrition than immigrants; and (4) Findings for race, ethnicity and citizenship status hold even when family income and educational attainment are considered. A Technical Appendix includes description of the logistic regression used for this analysis. (Contains 4 footnotes, 2 figures and 7 tables.)

Over the past decade, public attention on the importance of the civic development and education of youth has grown. To address these concerns, the East Bay Conservation Corps (EBCC) Charter School opened in 1996 with the explicit mission to prepare and engage students grades K through 12 as caring citizens who are capable and motivated to fully participate in our democracy. While content standards and assessments readily exist to articulate the academic and artistic development of students, youth civic development, especially at the elementary level, has been under-conceptualized. What is needed is a more robust, comprehensive developmental framework for citizenship education that begins with younger ages and addresses civic skills and dispositions to the same degree as civic knowledge. The product from this project is a set of tested, reliable measures of civic knowledge, civic thinking skills, civic participation skills and civic dispositions that are referenced to recent efforts to provide frameworks of competencies in civic education. Two sets of instruments were developed using a comprehensive conceptual framework for civic indicators at the elementary level. The measures include a student survey of student civic knowledge, skills and attitudes that relate to dispositions, which is the focus of this report; a set of corresponding grade level observation checklists of student skills and behaviors was also developed. Starting at a young age to foster developmental foundations for civic engagement includes a democratic orientation to others and identification with them as fellow members of a community and body politic. This focus is not only developmentally appropriate but also consistent with the goals of many elementary schools to foster prosocial skills and behaviors. In addition, there is a need for greater attention to age-appropriate, instrument identification and development for elementary aged students to document student civic development by focusing on what they can do, an important and often overlooked facet of K-12 civic education research and practice. Addressing this need will also assist other public elementary schools interested in recapturing their civic mission and in creating a K-12 developmental framework for civic development. Appended are: (1) Student Survey Used in National Pilot; (2) Student Observation Checklists for Grades K/1, 2/3 and 4/5; (3) Pearson Correlations between Scales; (4) Tests of Significance for Findings by Gender; (5) Tests of Significance for Findings by White and Non-White Subpopulations; and (6) Descriptive Statistics of Full National Sample. (Contains 3 figures.) [This Working Paper was produced by CIRCLE (The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement). For CIRCLE Working Paper 46, see ED494037.]

The Internet is a revolution unfolding before our eyes. There is concern that this revolution will increase class and racial differences and that a new digital divide between information haves and information have-nots will exacerbate existing levels of inequality in American society. This paper examines how the Internet has been tapped to deliver information about the schools in ways that either explicitly or implicitly try to cross the digital divide. First, the paper looks at several examples of websites that are trying to cross the digital divide by presenting local information about the schools. Second, the paper looks at the problems with harnessing the Internet as a tool for doing research about the schools. Third, the paper illustrates some of these problems by analyzing patterns of usage of one of these websites to see if actual usage shows patterns of inequality or expanded usage. The final section of the paper looks at the possibility of harnessing the Internet in a way that goes beyond the consumer-choice model embodied in most current school-based sites to a much more expansive citizen-based model of improving schools and, even more ambitiously, building stronger communities. (Contains approximately 87 references. (Author)

The purpose of this project was to gain a better understanding of dimensions of trust and inter-relationships between those dimensions during the adolescent years. Drawing from survey data collected at the beginning and end of a semester in eighty middle- and high-school social studies classes, relationships were assessed between: social trust, trust in elected officials, trust in the responsiveness of government to ordinary people, trust in the American promise, and trustworthiness of the media. The study was designed as a randomized evaluation of a civics curriculum called Student Voices in the Campaign, with data gathered from two waves of surveys with 1,670 students ages 12-19 during the fall of 2004. Students from ethnic minority backgrounds were less likely than their ethnic majority peers to trust elected officials or people in general or to believe that the government was interested in ordinary people. However, ethnic minority students were not less likely to believe in the general tenets of that all people, regardless of background, had an equal opportunity to succeed in America. Controlling for social class, age, and ethnicity, adolescents' trust in the American promise and their civic commitments were found to be significantly predicted by the youths' proximate experiences of social inclusion in their communities and, particularly for ethnic minority students) by their reports that teachers practiced a democratic ethos at school. (Contains 9 tables.)

The historical study of university campuses can tell us much about the changing character and presuppositions of citizenship. Likewise, the study of citizenship can shed considerable light on the nature of universities. Throughout American history, various elite institutions can be seen struggling to establish a semblance of order and control in political society-most clearly in the late 19th century with large numbers of immigrants changing the urban landscape, and with populist movements threatening elite cultural and political dominance, but equally in the face of early 20th century phenomena of mass society, propaganda, and global interdependence. The author finds it helpful to think of modern universities, emerging in the late 19th century, as right there in the struggle, as new institutional arenas of public practice to shape new kinds of citizens. From this perspective, universities and modern citizenship are intertwined in ways mutually complicating and obscuring. With the aim of untangling some of these connections, this review covers a sample of formative texts on the broad topic of citizenship and the historical development of modern universities in the United States. (Contains 47 endnotes.) [This paper was produced by the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE), University of Maryland.]

Fostering an ethic of active citizenship is typically a key goal for national service. However, national service advocates often assume that national service will act as civic education, paying insufficient attention to what this means and how different policy designs further or undermine different conceptions or aspects of citizenship. This paper explores the relationship between national service and civic education through a study of the Civilian Conservation Corps and VISTA, to see what lessons might be learned and applied to the nation?s current program, AmeriCorps. Given that citizenship has multiple, contested meanings, this is looked at from five perspectives: (1) constitutional citizenship; (2) critical citizenship; (3) citizenship as patriotism; (4) as service; and (5) as work. While this list is neither exhaustive nor the perspectives mutually exclusive, different goals are suggested for the national service civic education agenda.

At the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union, ethnic Latvians were only 52 percent of the total population of Latvia, and official use of the Latvian language had greatly diminished while Russian had become the dominant language. It took 15 years to develop the legal instruments necessary for stabilizing the official status of the Latvian language while complying with internationally accepted human rights norms. The law in its current form is clear and functional, although there are certain difficulties in implementation. Not all of those who are required to know Latvian at the necessary level are in compliance. This report presents information on: (1) "Education Law"; (2) "Law on Citizenship"; and (3) "Incorporating the Concept of Integration into the State Administration System." The paper notes that although the law helps establish the official position on language, in a democratic society, all people can converse in private as they wish. There is no threat from the Latvian government regarding the assimilation or "Latvianization" of ethnic minorities. (SM)

Germany and Canada are at opposite ends of the debate over language integration and ascension to citizenship. German naturalization contains an explicit language criterion for naturalization. The first German immigration act will not only concentrate on control aspects but also focus on language as a criterion for legal immigration. Canada does not base entry or citizenship on knowledge of either of its official languages. Acquisition of a second language in Canada is voluntary and largely dependent on labor market incentives. This paper offers a comparative review of Canadian and German legal and educational programs. Nine sections focus on the following: "Canadian Immigration Policy: Post 1945"; "Canada's Citizenship Act and Language Requirements"; "Historical Development of Germany's Immigration Policy"; "Confirmation of German Citizenship"; "'Aussiedler' Language Tests"; "Canada's Market-Based Language Tests and Instruction"; "Canada's Language Benchmarks"; "German Language Training"; and "Evaluation of Second Language Acquisition in Canada and Germany." Five appendixes contain excerpts from the German and Canadian law and data on the language support program for ethnic Germans and foreigners in Germany, status 2000. (Contains 3 figures, 11 tables, and 64 references.) (SM)

U.S.-born children of immigrants may be less likely to receive some social services than are children of native-born immigrants, if foreign-born parents who are themselves ineligible are less likely to apply on their children's behalf. Researchers used retrospective data from a sample of about 2,400 low-income, predominantly Hispanic households in three U.S. cities to determine whether children with foreign-born caregivers were less likely than children with native-born caregivers to receive benefits from any of five programs over a 2-year period: Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), Supplemental Security Income, Food Stamps, Medicaid, and Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children. The most significant disparities between children of citizen and noncitizen caregivers were in TANF and Food Stamp use. Overall, the gap in service usage between children with U.S.-born caregivers and foreign-born caregivers varied from program to program and depended, in part, on immigrant citizenship status, in addition to nativity status. (Contains 33 references.) (SM)

Civic education is essential for sustaining constitutional democracy in the United States, a country with the world's oldest constitutional democracy with political institutions whose philosophical foundations serve as a model for aspiring peoples around the world. This task force paper involves a nation-wide discussion of civic education, what its principal goals should be, and how civic education can be revitalized. The paper answers the following questions: "What is civic education and what should its principal goals be?"; "What evidence is there of the need to improve civic education?"; "What is the relationship of civic education and character education?"; What are the characteristics of successful programs in civic education?"; and "How can civic education be revitalized?" (Contains 25 references.) (CB)

Using the yardsticks of independence and equality, an analysis of the literature on youth from a citizenship perspective can track youth's citizenship status and capacity to become full citizens. For young people, education is an avenue to either exclusion or independence and equality. For example, dropouts are more likely to live in poverty, and economic independence is considered key to achieving full citizenship. Exclusion exists in the school system, as schools continue to stream young women into traditional career paths and allow racial discrimination. Schools fail to provide the knowledge and capacity to make informed, intelligent choices about substance abuse and sexuality. Access to education, student debt, and labor market conditions delay economic independence. Young people face discrimination due to age and membership in a particular community. Examples of differential treatment are found in the areas of work, medicine, social services, and legal system. Their right to protection from harm is infringed upon most by the transportation system and societal problems related to gender, poverty, and marginalization. Having hope for the future and feelings of belonging influence youth participation in politics and resistance to marginalization through formation of subcultures and via political protest. The notion of precariousness best captures the experience of youth citizenship with respect to exercise of rights and responsibilities, access, and belonging. (Appendixes include a 271-item bibliography and roundtable summary.) (YLB)

This report analyzes developments in Canadian child care policy in the 1990s at the federal, provincial (Ontario), and municipal (Toronto and Peel) levels, highlighting problems that are associated with a male model of citizenship. The report discusses the child care policy process as one in which state bodies are challenged by the diverse and largely women-driven child care advocacy movement. First, the report outlines some of the major developments of the 1990s that have created increasing hardship for women; foremost among these is the diminished accessibility to child care due to stagnation of or cutbacks in the funding of child care services. Connected to this is the ongoing concern among advocates for not-for-profit child care about a shift of services to the private and unregulated sector, arguably lowering quality. Also at issue are the poor and deteriorating working conditions of mostly female child care providers. These considerations are intended to highlight the importance of linking social class and gender inequality in an analysis of social policy. Second, the report discusses the effectiveness of different strategies of child care advocacy, raising some of the most persistent questions among feminists concerning political citizenship (i.e., whether it is possible to obtain social rights for women through the state, and if so, what the conditions are which make it possible). The report concludes by asserting that most women's and advocacy organizations are dismissed by governments as "special interest groups"; based on their outsider status in official politics, and lacking stable alliances, these organizations are drawn toward political solutions that may prove palatable to governments in the short run but may undermine general claims for child care as a universal rather than a targeted service. (Contains a 114 references.) (EV)

Schools for Future Youth (SFYouth) is an EU Erasmus+ funded project running from 2014-2017, which aims to build the skills and capacity of teachers and young people to use global citizenship to improve teaching and learning. The project encourages both curricular engagement with global issues and spaces for young people to actively participate and take action on global issues through informal spaces in school. This report is a comprehensive account of the data collected on the SFYouth project and answers questions about how the project impacted on teachers' and young people's understandings and experiences of global citizenship and youth participation in Europe. It responds to the project logframe and contextualises this evidence within conceptual understandings of global citizenship and youth participation in different country spaces. Specifically the report responds to the questions: (1) What impact did the Schools for Future Youth project have on schooling activities and approaches to teaching and learning? (2) How did the Schools for Future Youth project impact on participating teachers and young people? and (3) What factors supported the impact of the Schools for Future Youth project? [Also collaborating in the project: Oxfam Italy, Polish Humanitarian Action (PAH), and CARDET.]

Originally founded as a private means for diplomats' children to earn an internationally recognized high school diploma, today the International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma Programme (DP) serves students from a variety of backgrounds in 144 countries. The IB mission and Learner Profile--consisting of ten attributes to foster in students--suggest that development of students' citizenship is the core purpose of an IB education. In this study, in four public schools in California that offer the DP, I interviewed DP Coordinators, teachers (n = 15) and students (n = 24) to learn their perspectives about how and the extent to which the DP develops students' citizenship. I also surveyed students using items that were administered as part of other surveys to large samples of high school-enrolled 17 and 18 year olds. The results indicate that the DP's heavy pedagogical reliance on discussions, debates, oral presentations, written assignments and teamwork, enables students to develop many of the skills that are necessary for civic advocacy. Results also indicate that the DP places a strong emphasis on students' knowledge of issues related to public policy. Interview results indicate that the DP does not seem to strongly prioritize students' knowledge of U.S. government structure and functioning. The student survey results, however, show that compared to nationally representative samples of similarly aged 12th-grade students, the sample of IB students scored higher on nine of ten items that tested their knowledge of U.S. government history and functioning. The DP develops students' citizenship through promoting their awareness of political and social issues and required active engagement with a local or global issue. Most IB students and teachers feel that the DP develops students' academic civic mindedness and model citizenship to a considerably greater extent than other curricular alternatives (including California College Prep and Advanced Placement courses). Finally, teachers feel that the strongest limitation to their prioritization of students' citizenship development is their lack of clarity on how to frame the civic implications of the knowledge, skills and attitudes they seek to develop. The paper includes the following appendices: (1) Student interview protocol; (2) Teacher interview protocol; (3) Student survey; and (4) Student survey details.

This working paper describes some of the ideas underpinning NZCER's Future-Focused Issues (FFI) project. There is a variety of ways to interpret what it means to take a "future focus" in education. This paper explains why the FFI project has focused primarily on concepts specifically mentioned in relation to "future focus" in "The New Zealand Curriculum": sustainability, enterprise, globalisation and citizenship. It introduces the notion of "wicked problems"--challenges characteristic of the 21st century that intertwine future-focused issues--and what these may mean for society and education. Finally, it outlines what we have learned in our studies of education in relation to the FFIs. Appended are: (1) Previous NZCER projects that the future-focused issues project draws on; and (2) Previous NZCER projects that the future-focused issues project draws on. (Contains 3 figures, 2 tables and 9 footnotes.)