With the Elementary and Secondary Education Act reauthorization looming and Washington’s eyes focused on school turnarounds and the Common Core State Standards, we must listen to the voices of dynamic leaders tackling the challenge of high-quality literacy instruction in the nation’s school districts.

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.

America's public schools were once thought to provide the cornerstone for an informed citizenry, but we are playing fast and loose with our future if we continue to downplay or simply ignore the role civic education plays in making citizens of us all.

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.

Join us for a discussion with Senator Bennet and John Easton, commissioner of the Institute of Education Sciences.

Community colleges are subsidized through direct state and local government appropriations and through student grant programs. Every student who drops out represents an investment loss by the taxpayers in that student's uncompleted education.