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 a major part of what’s hurting the American newspaper industry is the decline in civic education in the nation’s elementary and secondary schools. He says this means young adults are not encouraged in school or in home to develop a newspaper-reading habit and that this is hurting circulation. And colleges, he says, have become focused on graduate and professional education at the expense of undergraduate education and teaching citizenship.

“Below the level of college, students have been likely to get no more than one civics course and one United States history course in their 12 years of primary and secondary education,” says Gans. “Where once the overwhelming majority of students read either newspapers or weekly news magazines and studied, debated and were tested on current events, today only a few schools carry on that tradition.”

As a result, says Gans, 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.

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.