Gwu-participants-gans

DISCUSSION: Saving newspapers: The case for "civic literacy" testing in America's schools

Curtis Gans is director of American University’s Center for the Study of the American Electorate and was a reporter for a wire service and a major city newspaper in his earlier professional life.

Gans argues that the central problem afflicting newspapers is declining readership, which has led to declining advertising, declining rates that newspapers can charge for advertising and, in this severe recession, companies which have previously advertised no longer exist and those that continue to exist no longer can afford to spend as much. None of this will be reversed until readership can be rekindled.

Gans argues that the decline in readership has been progressive and generational -- partly due to new technology, but also, in large measure, to the abandonment by America's educational institutions in seeing the development of citizens as one of their primary missions. Colleges have focused on graduate and professional education and in schools below the level of college, students are lucky if they get one civics course and one U.S. history course in 12 years of pre-college education. The number of schools who use newspapers for the study, teaching, debate and testing on current events has dwindled to a precious few.

Civic engagement, civic knowledge and thoughful consideration of current issues have all suffered. But relevant to this conference is the fact that newspaper reading has suffered. A diminishing percentage of the young have developed a newspaper reading habit and less than 30 percent read any newspapers at all. Most college freshmen fail civics tests and most now think they should be expected to be knowledgeable about politics and public affairs. Fewer than one third read a newspaper.

Restoring a knowledgeable and engaged citizenry, resuscitating newspapers and a newspaper reading habit and perhaps providing legitimate subsidy for both begins with the one institution which has the capacity to do all of this  -- America's schools.

Gans offers a five-point solution:

• Make civic and current events knowledge part of what is tested under the “No Child Left Behind” program.

• Testing, in turn, would force the development of a longitudinal civics and current events curriculum beginning in the third grade.

• Such a curriculum could and should include newspaper reading as the source for information and analysis of current events.

• This, in turn, would make possible government subsidies to newspapers for school circulation which would not impinge on editorial freedom and would substantially boost readership and likely substantially increase advertising revenues.

• If this program were carried out over the 10 years from grades three through 12, it would promote a newspaper reading habit which could last a lifetime.

Gans favors focusing on print newspapers for civic literacy programs because he says news delivery on the Internet is not commercially viable, and because online news readers spend far less time on the news than do print newspaper readers. “People graze the Internet,” he says. “They read newspapers.” The Internet encourages headline and single-story reading and fragmentation, he argues, while newspapers provide guidance, analysis, commentary across stories.