Doug McAdam, professor of sociology at Stanford University, gave a lecture sponsored by the Arthur Levitt Public Affairs Center in the Events Barn on Nov. 2. McAdams, a scholar of social movements and contentious political issues, spoke on the topic of "The Long-term Civic Impact of Youth Activism: The Curious Contrast Between Freedom Summer and Teach For America." McAdam has recently completed a study on the civic effects of the Teach For America program on young people, and spoke about the contrast between those results and the results of his famous study on the Mississippi Freedom Summer.
In 1986, McAdam completed a follow-up study on the civic effects on participants in the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer, in which college students went to register black voters and to emphasize the denial of rights to blacks in the state. In that research, described in his book Freedom Summer, McAdam found that students who participated in Freedom Summer had significantly higher levels of subsequent civic-minded attitudes, dedication to radical politics, and activist commitments than the students who were accepted to Freedom Summer but did not participate. His findings in this research have contributed to the widely-held idea that civic activism and service among youth will contribute to "making citizens" in the future.
McAdam said he is skeptical about that idea, believing instead that only very specific types of service will have the effect of instilling civic virtue and behavior in participants. He does not believe that the Freedom Summer phenomenon is generalizable to all civic involvement and service-learning programs. He said that because of the unique historical and cultural factors surrounding each different service experience, it makes no sociological sense to treat them all the same way.
His similar study of Teach For America was inspired by a request from the program's founder, Wendy Kopp. McAdam said that Teach For America has always considered itself not only a way to bring much needed teachers to students in under-resourced schools, but a way to create civic-mindedness and activist leadership in America's youth. To assess the effectiveness of this civic component, McAdam's research compared three groups – people who completed a full two-year stint in the program, people who began the program but dropped out in the middle, and people who were offered a position in the program but didn't accept. If the Freedom Summer-based conventional wisdom about the civic effects of service were correct, TFA participants would have higher levels of subsequent civic values and participation than non-participants or drop-outs, similarly to Freedom Summer.
McAdam said that he has just finished the initial analysis of his Teach For America data, and that he has made some surprising findings. The survey, sent to people who applied for and/or participated in TFA from 1993-1998, measured the respondents' attitudes towards civic service, their continued participation in service, and their participation in political activism. McAdam said that the attitudinal results found that TFA graduates measured slightly higher than drop-outs and non-matriculators on the indicators of civic values and attitudes. In measures of participation in educational service, however, there was no difference between graduates and non-matriculants, though drop-outs did score slightly lower. The only way that TFA graduates participated more in service was in continued participation with TFA, an area which is obviously that is only open to graduates. In fact, the group with the highest subsequent overall service involvement was non-matriculants. In the area of political activism, McAdam said that the data shows that graduates of TFA are less involved in activism organizations, less likely to give money to organizations, and less likely to vote than both drop-outs and non-matriculants.
McAdam pointed out that the differences in civic participation between each of these groups is relatively small compared to the gap between all of the subjects and their age peer group as a whole. He also mentioned that the initial attitudinal findings seem to contradict the behavioral findings. When McAdam reevaluated the attitudinal data, he found that most of the higher results for TFA graduates come from the group of graduates who have continued their participation with the program. McAdam said that his hunch is that this is the result of these participants ongoing socialization into the program's goals and beliefs.
So why are there no enduring effects from Teach For America the way there were from Freedom Summer? According to McAdam, he sees three main differences in the experiences which may account for the differences in the effects. One is the importance of the gap between participants' prior expectations about the world and the reality of the world they see in their experience. In McAdam's words, today's college students do not have the "starry eyed view of reality" that college students in the early 1960s had, so the transformative effects of the experience on their worldview are not as great. Also, McAdam said, Teach For America's organizers don't have the radical political mission and philosophy that Freedom Summer's organizers had, and therefore the program doesn't result in radical resocialization. Finally, he said that Freedom Summer was focused on sending its participants out into the world to continue the mission of social change, whereas Teach For America doesn't specifically subsequent action other than continued TFA participation.
McAdam concluded that we have to get away from ahistorical, asociological assumptions that youth service in and of itself has positive civic effects. Instead, we need to evaluate why some service experiences have significant effects and others do not in order to understand what really has positive effects on civic life. Following his lecture, McAdam answered questions about his research from students and faculty.
-- by Caroline Russell OShea '07
