Assessing the Civic-Building Capacities of Schools: Early Findings from a Survey of Parents and Students

Schools in the U.S. have long been charged with the work of preparing young people for engaged citizenship. Do they, in fact, accomplish this work? Using survey data from 164 schools, we find mixed performance of schools in terms of their civic-building capacity, with striking disconnects between rhetoric and reality. We show that although students rate citizenship as a strong school priority, they are infrequently exposed to activities that support community engagement. Similarly, parents expect classrooms to have open climates in which students are free to discuss and disagree about controversial topics, but students report that such environments are a rarity. Additional findings indicate that lower-socioeconomic-status, female, nonbinary, and public/charter school students are significantly less likely to perceive their classrooms as open, and Black students perceive more open climates than their White counterparts.