Civic Initiatives Playbook
Prepared by Rivka Press Schwartz
When we (if we?) teach civics in our schools, we generally take one of two approaches: civics as a body of knowledge, or civics as a set of practices in conversations across lines of difference. In the former category, we teach our students about the founding documents or principles such as checks and balances and the rule of law; in the latter, we ask them to engage in civil discourse, consider others’ perspectives and values, and avoid getting stuck in conversational ruts of mutual refusal-to-listen.
This playbook offers a guide for initiatives like the SAR traffic light project.
When we (if we?) teach civics in our schools, we generally take one of two approaches: civics as a body of knowledge, or civics as a set of practices in conversations across lines of difference. In the former category, we teach our students about the founding documents or principles such as checks and balances and the rule of law; in the latter, we ask them to engage in civil discourse, consider others’ perspectives and values, and avoid getting stuck in conversational ruts of mutual refusal-to-listen.
Both of these are worthwhile and important. But neither of them engages our students doing the work of civics: taking action, as citizens, to make change. That work involves building coalitions with other citizens, engaging government and elected officials, doing a whole lot that falls under Max Weber’s description of politics: “the slow boring of hard boards”.. This area of civics education–call it action civics–is enormously important, and confers upon students many benefits:
I. A sense of their own efficacy
In a nation of 330 million people, it is certainly easy to feel that nothing any one of us does makes a difference. In our current political climate, in which so many of us feel frustrated and stymied, that sense of ineffectiveness is only heightened. Political scientists point to the importance of “political efficacy”--the sense that one has the ability to make a difference–in determining whether people will engage as citizens in a democratic polity. When one is convinced that nothing one does will make a difference anyway, the understandable response is to disengage. Working on a local issue–meeting with local leaders and other concerned citizens; seeing the possibilities of concerted collective action; having the experience of hearing politicians engage with your demands–can refute that thwartedness and foster a sense of efficacy. And sometimes (although there is no guarantee), you can actually achieve your ends and see change.
II. A realization of the power of local government
The toxic quality of our current political discourse is deeply bound up in the nationalization of all politics. The discourse on the nightly news or on your preferred social media feed is far more likely to be about national parties and national elected officials than about local issues or local representatives. But the national government is the one farthest away from us, the biggest, the one in which we are least likely to be able to effect change. Even living in the largest city in the country, my students were able to engage directly with local elected officials to make the case for their proposals or initiatives. In smaller cities or towns, students would have even more ability for directly having their voices heard.
And moving our focus away from national politics is important for more than how it stops our students from feeling thwarted, and helps them feel efficacious. Focusing on local politics helps our students understand the lived reality of federalism–the division of powers between the national government and states and localities. Many very important issues of great importance to citizens, from education to zoning and housing policy to policing and law enforcement, are matters of state and local, not federal, government. The mistaken overemphasis on the federal government, for all of its power and scope, keeps citizens from paying attention to the power that their local governments wield over many vital issues–power that they might be more likely able to bend to their needs.
III. Politics is not for posturing; politics is for power
In his important work Politics is for Power, political scientist Eitan Hersh decries what he calls “political hobbyism”--engaging in politics as a way of asserting one’s righteousness or declaring one’s affinity for a team, rather than as a way of getting things done. The purpose of politics is not, at the end of the day, to declare our allegiances (or our antipathies.) It is to accomplish society’s ends, to achieve human flourishing. Spending hours doomscrolling, or yelling at people who are wrong on the Internet, may feel like political engagement. After all, we have expended our time, our blood pressure, and our emotional equilibrium on it. But what we have not done is anything that will make anything better for anyone, or advance any issue that we care about. (It is bracing, and sobering, to think about how much time we have collectively expended in just this sort of posturing and performance.) Instead, says Hersh, put down your phone. Go to your local town council meeting, run for the school board, join your local party committee. Any and all of that work actually takes steps towards effecting change. Having students engage in the work of politics–in identifying an area that needs improvement and working with other citizens and elected officials to make change–helps build the muscle of civic action, and helps them grow into voters who know that spending a Sunday on a social medium is not, in fact, doing politics.
One side effect of doing politics, rather than performing for the likes, is that it forces us to consider whom we are willing to work with, whom we are willing to be in coalition with. Online, I can be exquisitely pure, and heap calumny on those who deviate from any of my (self-evidently correct) positions in the slightest. In the real world of accumulating politics and making change, I need allies. Finding those allies, considering what it means to ally with someone on one issue whom I disagree with on others. (Visibly-Jewish and visibly-Muslim students, to take one obvious example, might have a great shared interest in combating hate crimes, even as they vastly disagree on geopolitics. But there, again, is the national politics/local politics distinction.) There are, of course, limits to our coalition building. Even if the Klan wants to help extend public library hours, I’m not going to their rallies. But there are more subtle, and therefore, more challenging and more interesting cases that getting offline and doing politics in the real world forces us to think about every day.
IV. A glimpse into how the sausage gets made
One result of our distance from the actual work of governing is that most of us have no idea how government does anything. How is the decision to build a new subway station arrived at? To change the times that parking meters have to be paid? The locations of bike lanes? Getting involved in this work can be disheartening. (Indeed, the figure of speech comparing legislating to sausage making originated at a time when the latter was a fairly gross enterprise, and eating processed meats a risky undertaking.) But it can also be enlightening. In our first year of working on an action civics project, my students decided to ask for a left-turn signal at the corner of our school’s block, to ease traffic for carpools and buses dropping students off in the morning. How do you get a left-turn signal in New York City? My students learned. After attending community board meetings, learning about traffic studies, and visiting with the elected official who was revered as a traffic-light whisperer, they and I understood a great deal more about the process of deciding to install a turn signal–and what the tradeoffs were. While we never did secure a turn signal, we learned a great deal about local government, and how it works, in the trying.
V. Community building and institution building
The laments about our current age of atomization and loneliness; and the concomitant collapse of institutions from bowling leagues to labor unions to churches; reverberate from Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone to Yuval Levin’s A Time to Build. Americans, for a variety of reasons, have stopped joining. We spend ever-increasing amounts of time lonely and alone, and the deleterious effects of that are seen in many measures of wellbeing. Coming together to meet real people in the real world, to work towards a real goal, builds community, connection, and a sense of shared endeavor (and accomplishment, if the effort pays off.) If the work is sustained, not just a single effort or project, it can begin to build institutions, and perhaps to re-knit the fabric of American collective life.
If you’ve been convinced of the value of engaging your students in an action civics project, the next question is how. The second half of this paper will attempt to offer a practical handbook for implementing action civics in schools. While this guidance is based on a course taught to high school seniors, there is very little that cannot be generalized to all high school students, and motivated middle school students.
Deciding upon a project
In working with students, it is absolutely critical to start with a project that students are invested in. Throughout this project, educators will have to practice ceding control, as this undertaking is by its nature far less managed than a classroom lesson might be. And here is the first place to practice this. A project that the students are invested in, even if it seems less realizable, might engage greater student investment than a more realistic project chosen by the teacher. (And our gauges of realizability might not be accurate. One year, my students wanted to work on extending the hours that student Metrocards could be used in the New York City transit system. At the time, the cards only worked at certain hours of the day, and only on school days. I steered my students away from the project, thinking that something that required a decision of the City Council was too far-reaching and complex. The next year, City Council announced that student Metrocards, rebranded as OMNYcards, would be good for rides any day of the year, at any time.)
The procedure by which we arrived at a topic was not a quick one. The goal, however, was not speed–it was to arrive at a project around which there was consensus, as all students would have to work on it once a topic was chosen. I devoted at least three class periods to the choosing.
The first step was brainstorming. Students wrote down any problem or need that they saw in their local community and wanted to address. Library hours. Traffic flow. Night and weekend recreational opportunities for teenagers. Building bridges between different communities. Voter registration. More opportunities for exercise and fitness. Each student wrote every one of their ideas on a separate post-it note, which I collected and grouped by theme. Once we had a cluster of themes that garnered more significant support, I invited the students to attempt to persuade one another. Students were asked to go stand in different corners of the classroom based on their preferred projects, and then to state what it might take to convince them to join another group. Within the groups, students refined exactly what angle they wanted to take on their area of shared interest, and tried to win their peers over. Eventually, with conversation, convincing, and facilitation by the teacher, they were able to coalesce around one project on one theme.
(Or, nearly. One thing that emerged that I hadn’t anticipated was that students had a different idea of citizenship than I did. They were not always primarily focused on bettering the community around them, but on bettering the school community in which they spent most of their time. Eventually, I accommodated their desire to make change in the school community, while accommodating my desire to have them engage with the polity more broadly: we began to do one internal, and one external, action civics project.)
Without quashing students’ dreams or discouraging ambitious goals, there is a role for a teacher here in keeping them grounded, and in the realm of the possible. Things are the real-world equivalent of “soda in all the water fountains” in middle-school-government elections are not likely to lead anywhere. Helping students figure out a reasonable scope of an undertaking, that can reasonably be assayed in the time-frame available, will help ground the project, keep it moving forward, and feel productive. (This might seem contradictory to my early story of the Metrocards. And perhaps it is. But some tempering of ambition and enthusiasm is necessary when plans get extremely elaborate and increasingly farfetched.)
2. Mapping out the steps
This part of the project is, of course, tentative and iterative. Your understanding of the different tasks that need to be accomplished, and the steps it will take to accomplish them, will change as the project unfolds, both as you learn more and as you respond to circumstances. One of the realities of a number of the projects my students tried to tackle over the years was how challenging it was to secure cooperation from other community members, and how often a project that was meant to be more broadly collaborative had to be narrowed in scope because of the lack of collaborators.) But you and your students need some sort of roadmap with which to begin. Over the weeks that we were working on each of these projects, we returned multiple times to our lists and plans, revising them, and the students’ assignments, as the work we were doing changed.
3. Assign roles
This action civics project was the bulk of the work in my Values of Citizenship class, and the bulk of a student’s grade. Every student had to have a role. Committees worked on different aspects of the project; every student was on a committee; and every student had to present to the class about what they had done. Of course, in this class as in any other, some students took on more significant roles, and some did more of the work. But every student must have a role, and specific responsibility, whether it is arranging food and logistics, preparing a slideshow, or speaking to an elected official. The teacher’s role in this undertaking is counsel, guidance, and oversight and accountability.
4. Let the kids drive the bus
Well, not literally, if your project involves going somewhere. But in every way, students should be the initiators and executors of the project. I helped students figure out what steps they needed to take and who could help with them, but they had to take those steps on their own. (The year my students were working on securing the turn signal, we sent representatives to both a Bronx Community Board meeting and the local police precinct’s Community Liaison meeting. Neither of those institutions was one that my students would have been aware of without my guidance. But once they were, they found the dates, made a plan, and attended the meetings–not I.)
Another year, in the post-2020 moment of racial reckoning, my students decided that they wanted to plan a gathering with students from other local Bronx schools, independent and public. The plan ran into a snag with the lack of interest on the part of the local exclusive independent schools. My students secured the participation of one public charter school in the Bronx, and invited them to come for a morning of sports, conversation, and pizza. On the morning of the event, a teacher from the charter school came to ask me if he could meet the teacher he had been speaking with and planning with. Teacher? She was a high school senior. This young woman, to whom academics did not always come easily, quarterbacked the entire project and received glowing feedback for her work, both from me and from my counterpart at the other school. Nothing I could have written on a report card comment about her potential, her skills, her stick-to-it-iveness could ever have accomplished what the opportunity to achieve this success did.
In one of our internal school projects, the students advocated for an earlier dismissal time on Friday, in advance of Shabbat. They prepared a PowerPoint to share with the administration, comparing dismissal times at other area Jewish high schools and offering two alternatives. I arranged for them to come address an administration meeting, but otherwise sat quietly by. Getting schedules from their friends in other schools, coming up with a plan, making a slideshow, presenting their work–that was all them. The school ultimately adopted one of their proposals, and thus our schedule remains. Again, in a very different way, they got to see their own efficacy, the power of organizing, and of informed advocacy.
5. Build coalitions (or at least try to)
Politics is a numbers game, and the more people you get invested in your project, the more likely local elected officials are to take notice. Wherever relevant, we tried to undertake our projects in collaboration with other members of our community–reaching out to other schools, to other religious communities, to other people who might have a stake in the outcomes we were advocating for. Those overtures were not always successful, whether because the potential partners we identified did not see the value in the work we were doing, or because they did not believe that high school students would be able to pull it off. For all of that, there was great value in the trying, in having students think about who else in the community might partner with us in this undertaking and in reaching out to attempt to enlist and persuade.
6. Take all the wins you can get
The nature of political work, as anyone who does it can tell you, is that it’s hard work, it takes a long time, and it doesn’t always pay off–certainly not immediately. (See Weber’s hard boards.) In some years, my course was only a semester long, so we had even less time to achieve our goals. And we didn’t always.
The trick was to see wins in all sorts of ways–in the things we did accomplish, in the lessons students learned about government and how it works, and communities and how they come together. Perhaps most importantly, in the skills they discovered that they had as people and as political actors. In getting a “no” for our turn signal, we learned about how left-turn signals affect oncoming traffic, and thus the decision to install a turn signal becomes a tiny example of far larger political and philosophical questions about who should be inconvenienced, and how much, for the benefit of whom. The realization that those questions came into a traffic light decision, and the ability to think them through with students, was a win. So was two high school students getting to meet and speak with a State Assemblyman who was the traffic light guy (again, they went to his office without me.)
The year we ran voter registration drives, our external drive, at the Riverdale Y (a local Jewish community center) was something of a flop. Nearly all of the individuals who came through the Y were already registered. But the internal drive, at SAR High School, was a great success, registering many of our seniors and even juniors who had not yet registered to vote. Meeting with students from one other school that shared a borough with us but draws a different student population than ours was a success, even if other schools we had hoped would participate did not. Reaching out to the managing agent of the local strip mall to present a proposal for student parking during the day built and exercised all sorts of capacities, even if the parking plan was rejected.
As a teacher of civics and the values of citizenship, I, too, needed a renewed sense of efficacy–of the purpose of my work, of the sense that our citizenry could act meaningfully, that change was possible, that education about citizenship in this moment was purposeful. Working with students attempting to take action in the real world, learning about their community, the collective, the work of government, and themselves as they did, was sustaining for me as it was meaningful and genuinely empowering for them. Try it.
