Many local public schools in North Carolina, and some private schools, are attempting a participatory form of civics education. The movement is encouraged by a national organization called Kids Voting. Several North Carolina counties have been using Kids Voting curricular materials for years, and other counties are just starting up.

Kids Voting started in 1987, when three friends from Arizona were in Costa Rica for a fishing trip. They were told that Costa Rica had high voter turnout in part thanks to a civics curriculum that taught students about voting and encouraged them to go to the polls with their parents to cast mock ballots. When they got back to Arizona, the three friends tried to work on something similar for the United States.

In North Carolina, Kids Voting has chapters in Buncombe, Cabarrus, Catawba, Cumberland, Durham, Guilford, Haywood, Mecklenburg, Onslow, Randolph, and Wake counties, and the program is expanding into Clay, Greene, Henderson, Iredell, Jackson, Madison, New Hanover, Onslow, and Randolph counties.

Kids Voting provides lesson plans, known as Civics Alive! and Destination Democracy. Daintry O’Brien, executive director of Kids Voting North Carolina, said Kids Voting lessons are compatible with the state-prescribed course of study, letting students meet not only some of their social studies requirements but some English, math, and character education requirements as well.

O’Brien lists some of the lessons in the Civics Alive! exercises that are favorites with teachers. There is the voting chain, an exercise with K-2 students in which they tabulate their voting preferences by making links in a paper chain. Another popular lesson with teachers, O’Brien said, is a difficult questionnaire that voters in Alabama were required to fill out when they sought to register to vote. The questionnaire was designed, of course, to keep blacks from voting. The Civics Alive! textbook erroneously refers to this questionnaire as a “literacy test”.

Kids learn ubiquity of government

According to Amy Farrell, executive director of Kids Voting Charlotte-Mecklenburg, a popular Civics Alive! exercise with high-school students is Mindwalk, in which students keep a diary of everything they do in their everyday lives that is affected by government regulation. It’s “eye-opening” for kids to learn how much the government impinges on every area of daily life, Farrell said.

There are other exercises, too, which vary in complexity according to the age of the student. One exercise for K-2 students is based on the fanciful book Would You Rather…, by John Burningham. For older students, Civics Alive! gets less fanciful, with assignments that include following the media coverage of candidates, keeping track of the issues and the candidates’ responses, and following up on campaign promises to see whether candidates keep them.

The aspect of Kids Voting that is most obvious to the general public is the mock ballots the students cast on election day. The paper ballots are somewhat different from the ballots given to adult voters. The leading candidates have their photos next to their names, for the benefit of “voters” in the lower grades. The wording of proposed bond issues is simplified. Also, in Charlotte-Mecklenburg, the ballots are bilingual (English-Spanish) and contain opinion-poll-style questions proposed by the teachers and approved by the local Kids Voting board. Questions asked on the Charlotte-Mecklenburg ballots have included questions on school prayer (1992), a dress code for teachers (2001), and whether the FBI should read suspected criminals’ email (2001) (young “voters” disapproved teacher dress codes, approved FBI surveillance, and overwhelmingly approved school prayer).

‘Trickle-up’ effect on parents

Kids Voting seeks to encourage voter turnout among the students after they turn 18. The program also seeks to increase turnout among parents: As they help their kids with their homework and bring their kids to the polls for mock elections, the parents, the group hopes, will themselves become more politically active. Indeed, when two University of Kansas researchers studied the 1996 elections in several Kansas counties, the researchers found that the Kids Voting program increased voter turnout both among 18-year-olds who had participated in the program and among parents with children in the program. The “trickle-up” effect on parents inspired the researchers, Amy Linimon and Mark R. Joslyn, who wrote that “our findings support a hopeful view of educational innovation in encouraging a politically active, engaged, and informed citizenry.”

The “trickle-up effect” is eagerly sought by Kids Voting officials. The Civics Alive! lesson plans contain such activities as school registration days for kids and adults alike, discussion questions about how to “encourage adults to vote” and “influence” people to register to vote, and so forth. Daintry O’Brien, the state head of Kids Voting, is glad the program gives parents the chance to get involved in the lessons. O’Brien welcomes the opportunities for “parent-child discourse.”

North Carolina subsidizes Kids Voting

For the past few years, the N.C. General Assembly has appropriated small sums of money for the use of Kids Voting in North Carolina. This year’s budget bill includes a $250,000 appropriation for the group. Some private schools, including religious schools, participate in Kids Voting activities in North Carolina, making the legislature’s appropriations for Kids Voting a possible instance of public-private partnership in education.

Although Kids Voting officials in North Carolina, as well as the authors of nationwide Civics Alive! curriculum, seem to make a great effort to avoid political partisanship, there is some evidence that might make conservatives suspicious of the program. Karen T. Scates, then president of Kids Voting USA, said in 1998 that she had discussed Kids Voting with Marian Wright Edelman of the Children’s Defense Fund. Scates was quoted in this 1998 interview as calling Edelman “divinely inspired.”

The Destination Democracy lesson plans involve kids doing volunteer work for candidates or groups, as a form of “service learning” that gets kids involved in the political process. The author of the Destination Democracy lesson plans, Rahima Wade, a professor in curriculum instruction at the University of Iowa, is a nationally prominent figure in the service-learning field. She is also an advocate for “social justice education,” teaching students to engage in advocacy for “equal opportunities and equal rights.” However, Wade said that Destination Democracy lesson plans are meant as nonpartisan civic education, and do not have the “value base” of “social justice education.”

One high-school level activity in the Civics Alive! curriculum provides a (defunct) link to the “Rock the Vote” Web site. “Rock the Vote” is a left-wing anticensorship organization that tries to register young voters. Another Civics Alive! high-school level exercise is entitled “Rock the Vote: Get Psyched, Get Angry, but Get Busy!” In this activity, students take a quiz to find out their ideology. Then they are divided into two groups. One group reads an appeal by Nelson Mandela to the youth of America, asking them to help build a better world. The other group reads a 1988 newspaper op-ed piece by Elliot Rosenberg, a New York social-studies teacher who said that he tries subtly to sabotage a voter-registration drive at his high school because he doesn’t think all teen-agers are well-enough informed to vote.

Longley is a contributing writer to Carolina Journal.