Harvard Graduate School of Education's Meira Levinson argues that recovering the civic purposes of public schools will take more than tweaking their curricula. Drawing on political theory, empirical research and her own experience from teaching at an all-black middle school in Atlanta, Levinson calls on schools to remake civic education.

Have efforts to cultivate "vocational" citizenship skills failed to satisfy the broader obligation of schools to cultivate the next generation of citizens and civic leaders?

What’s important now is not to let what happened to Fishtown be ignored. For whatever reasons, the culture that used to characterize working-class America — indeed, that made working-class America the spine of America’s civic culture — has come apart. Recognizing that this has happened is the indispensable first step in figuring out what to do next.

Sponsored by AEI's Program on American Citizenship, Frederick M. Hess, AEI's director of education policy studies; Meira Levinson, associate professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education; and David E. Campbell, associate professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame, have commissioned leading researchers and scholars to explore the issues of citizenship and schooling by looking at domestic and international data, teacher training, and schools and classrooms.

Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, American educators have been debating what to teach students about the new threat posed by international terrorists. While the threat has intensified, the basic questions about the importance and role of civic education are similar to those faced by previous generations. In...

Even as charter schooling has been at the forefront of education reform efforts, we know remarkably little about how these schools approach this critical dimension of education. What have charter schools done with the opportunity to rethink civic education? Are there lessons to be learned? Are there challenges that impede their ability to teach citizenship?