"It doesn't seem to make any difference who gets elected—nothing changes. Why should I care?” This could be the voice of any of a hundred million or so adults over 18 in the United States who won’t cast a ballot on November 2. Turnout for federal elections has steadily declined from 1960—when 63.6 percent of the voting-age population voted—to 2000, when the figure was 51.3 percent.
But the same sentiment applies to growing numbers of high school students. In last year’s annual survey of college freshmen sponsored by the American Council on Education and UCLA, only 21.5 percent reported voting frequently in high school elections—a slight drop from the previous year and a plummet from the record 78.7 percent in 1968.
Adults’ apathy toward the electoral process is often explained by widespread cynicism about politicians’ vested interests and Beltway power broking. Could it be that those attitudes take shape long before people are old enough to vote?
Daniel McFarland, an assistant professor of education and (by courtesy) sociology, and graduate student Carlos Starmanns are studying student councils in hundreds of high schools across the country. Their preliminary findings suggest that, at their best, student councils can fulfill the lofty aims of well-meaning administrators: to promote community spirit, give students a voice and train future leaders. Frequently, though, there are grounds for the cynical view that councils are little more than puppets of school administrations; that school elections are empty popularity contests; and that students who run for office care more about impressing college admissions committees than serving their classmates.
Student government “is a really important socialization environment,” says McFarland, but in many cases it may be doing more harm than good. “It’s [students’] first experience of representative government, and if it’s a joke and it doesn’t matter and has no authority or influence, what are they learning?”
McFarland and Starmanns began their study by examining the written constitutions of 207 public and 66 private high schools. They plan to continue with interviews and a rigorous analysis of the effects the high school experience has on adult political participation.
In public schools, the Stanford researchers found a striking correlation between student power and a school’s socioeconomic level (determined using the percentage of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunches). By and large, students in more affluent districts have councils with influential student participation, while councils in poorer, minority schools wield no influence.
Student representatives in wealthier schools are far likelier to have the power to raise and spend money, make recommendations to the faculty and, with enough votes, even override faculty vetoes of their decisions. In one well-to-do New Hampshire public school, McFarland learned that students served on the committee to select the new principal, passed changes to disciplinary procedures and proposed a schedule of special events for Martin Luther King Day. When the principal vetoed the proposal, the student council members considered appealing the decision to the district, but decided against it, in part to preserve their relationship with the principal.
McFarland and Starmanns also found a great disparity along socioeconomic lines in the quality of written constitutions. Poor schools tend to have skimpy documents with only a vague description of the council’s purpose and procedures and the powers of each office. Wealthier schools generally have well-defined written frameworks. One 20-page constitution, complete with a preamble clearly modeled after the American Constitution (“We the students . . .”), lists strict attendance guidelines, spells out what to do in cases of conflict, describes each office’s powers and responsibilities in exhaustive detail, and specifies precise requirements for amending the constitution. It reads very much like a living document, open to change and relevant to the life of the school.
McFarland’s current research substantiates patterns he first noticed in yearlong field studies of two schools in the Midwest. He found, for example, that in the poor, rural school, few students even bothered to run for student council. In one grade, every candidate ran uncontested. And candidates ran without any kind of platform or campaign, just as you’d expect in a government without real power.
Whatever the reasons for the lack of meaningful student government in impoverished schools—principals’ fear of students, more pressing claims on meager resources, or attitudes students may bring from home—these findings distress educators who believe public schools ought to empower future citizens and help level society’s playing field.
Abundant research “exposes the differences in educational quality in this country between public schools in affluent and in poor neighborhoods,” says Eamonn Callan, an associate dean at the School of Education and author of the 1997 book Creating Citizens: Political Education and Liberal Democracy. “What I find revealing and troubling in Dan’s work is that opportunities for civic engagement within the school are also distributed differentially.”
“One could say that poorer schools are likely to create apathetic citizens,” Starmanns reasons. Political apathy is one of the social-cognitive “loops” identified by psychology professor Albert Bandura in his book Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control (1997). Simply put, powerlessness discourages participation, and failure to participate ensures lack of impact. But if educators effectively engage students in school government, students should come to see themselves as people who can make a difference.
William Damon, director of the Stanford Center for the Study of Adolescence and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, notes that while young people are quite involved with their families and friends—and to a lesser extent their schools—the picture changes in matters of citizenship. “When it comes to what it means to participate in a democracy or even to be an American or someone who imagines herself as one of the future leaders of this country, that’s where we see the radar screen being kind of blank,” he says. Since 1972—the first year 18-year-olds could vote in a national election—voter turnout in presidential elections among those in the 18- to 24-year-old group has shown a downward trend, the main exception being 1992.
Alternative schools—charter, magnet or private—seem to offer opportunities for meaningful political participation greater than even the wealthiest public schools. Student councils typically consist of 20 to 40 officers, regardless of school size, so these generally smaller schools enable a greater percentage of students to hold office. And because alternative schools tend to have a clear mission, their constitutions try to uphold school values—by encouraging the election of moral exemplars, for example. However, alternative schools also tend to give faculty tighter control over students (including reins on elections), leading McFarland and Starmanns to wonder whether such schools raise citizens who are not used to thinking for themselves.
Nearly two centuries ago, visiting Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville observed that Americans tended to belong to voluntary associations, and he argued that this “associationalism” taught us civic virtues indispensable to self-government. Today, social scientists such as Harvard’s Robert Putnam have noticed a disturbing trend in the past several decades: Americans no longer seem to be a nation of joiners. In his book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Putnam gives examples of sharply declining membership in organizations from bridge clubs to charities, service groups to school ptas and even bowling leagues. He cites dwindling involvement in activities such as working for a political party, attending a political rally or running for office. An erosion in civic engagement, Putnam believes, may weaken the glue that binds our democratic society.
Tocqueville showed that a foreign eye sometimes can see what is invisible to locals. Similarly, McFarland says although most high schools think they should have student councils, social scientists haven’t bothered to study the institution. “People think of student government as a frill, like band and art,” says Callan. Callan was born in Ireland and lived for 20 years in Canada, so he is well acquainted with civil tensions that can threaten to tear a democracy apart. Starmanns, who spent most of his life in Spain, Germany and Argentina before coming to the United States to study political philosophy, says that while the American system of student government is probably the most advanced in the world, that doesn’t necessarily mean students here have better chances to participate.
But socioeconomic differences don’t explain everything that ails American schools, in Damon’s view. He cites Columbine High School—“a place that was reeking of disengagement,” he says—as a stark example of a spiritual poverty that can coexist with material wealth. (In Putnam’s terms, divisive cliques work against “bridging social capital,” the stuff that ties a society together across racial, cultural, religious and class lines.) Conversely, Damon points out that there are inner-city schools where students actively participate because principals have faith in their charges. Under the best leadership, he insists, economics need not be destiny.
Some would disagree, and discussions of American education have a way of quickly turning political—especially when the subject is politics itself. But scholars can probably all agree on one thing: all students deserve a good education and appropriate opportunities to engage in civic life.
MARINA KRAKOVSKY, '92, is a writer in San Mateo, Calif.
