Two of our Penn State colleagues join us this week to discuss their recent findings on the connection between state-mandated civics tests and voter turnout. Jilli Jung, a doctoral student in education policy and Maithreyi Gopalan, assistant professor of education and public policy, recently published the paper “The Stubborn Unresponsiveness of Youth Voter Turnout to Civic Education: Quasi-Experimental Evidence From State-Mandated Civics Tests” in the journal Education Evaluation and Policy Analysis.

In the paper, Jung and Gopalan study the Civic Education Initiative, a framework adopted by 18 states since 2015 that requires high school students to take a test very similar to the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services Civics test. They found that voter turnout among 18-24 year olds largely did not increase in states that adopted the Civic Education Initiative compared to states that did adopt it. The reason for this, they argue, is that the knowledge of civic facts alone is not enough to motivate someone to vote for the first time.

In this episode, we discuss how to structure civic education that could increase voter turnout and lead to more engaged democratic citizens. For more information on this work, check out the CivXNow coalition, which is made up of hundreds of organizations across the country that are working to strengthen civic education.

Jung and Gopalan also recommend the following books and papers to anyone who wants to take a deeper dive into the role of civic education in a democracy:

Making Young Voters: Converting Civic Attitudes into Civic Action

Refocusing Civic Education: Developing the Skills Young People Need to Engage in Democracy

I  Will Register and Vote if you Teach Me How: A Field Experiment Testing Voter Registration in College Classrooms

The Impact of Democracy Prep Public Schools on Civic Participation

Michael Berkman

From the McCourtney Institute for Democracy on the campus of Penn State University. I’m Michael Berkman.

Chris Beem

And I’m Chris Beem.

Jenna Spinelle

I’m Jenna Spinelle, and welcome to Democracy Works. This week, we are talking with two of our Penn State colleagues, Jilli Jung who is a doctoral student in educational policy. And Maithreyi Gopalan, who is Assistant Professor of Education and Public Policy. And they are the authors of a new study, which looks at the effects of a mandated civic education test for high school students in many states across the country and how that translates to voter turnout does requiring this civics exam, increase voter turnout, and spoiler alert, it doesn’t. We’ll we’ll talk with Jilli and Maithreyi about that. But before we get to that, I thought it might be helpful to just take a step back and talk about why we even think about civic education in democracy in the first place.

Chris Beem

As we’ve talked a number of times, the founders were nervous about popular sovereignty about giving, you know, so much power to people who were, you know, most people at the time, didn’t want to give power to right. And so one of the ways that they saw as being a remedy to the problem was education. Right. And so you have almost every founder that I know of talking about how education generally, and education in politics and civics, specifically, was essential, right. And I just found this one little quote from Madison, which I think is representative knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and the people who mean to be their own governors must armed themselves with the power which knowledge gives? So I don’t think that’s a distinctive quote, I don’t think you know, I really do think it’s kind of representative. But, you know, in United States and in democracies, generally, civic education is broadly understood as a way to prepare people for the burdens and privileges of sovereignty.

Michael Berkman

Yeah, I would not actually have taken this back to Madison, because there was no particular discussion of public schooling among the founders. And of course, they didn’t really think of the public in broad popular terms, they thought about politics as being restricted to landowning white people. And they had a very elitist view. And true, they were all highly educated. But I don’t really pick up much in what I’ve read about the founders, to say that they saw this as important for the population at large I, I really trace it more to the development of public schooling in the United States, which was really in the 1800s. And public schools were set up to be controlled by their communities, not by the parents, but to be controlled by their communities. And that it was seen that one of the responsibilities of public schooling had to be to help to create train, nurture democratic citizens. And so I would trace it more to the public school movement than I would to the founders. But you know, we’re basically saying the same thing, I guess, which is that we think that there is reason to believe that in the past, there was a belief and there continues to be that students needed to learn about their country and about their system of government than about what it means to be a part of a democracy.

Chris Beem

I would just say, you know, civic education in this regard is no different than just about any other question about the curriculum in public schools, right. I mean, you know, in the library’s in, how do we read, what do we teach? What’s the right way to teach math? I mean, every question about the curriculum is contentious. I mean, Michael, nobody knows more than you about how it’s impacted science curriculum.

Michael Berkman

It’s very contentious. And and, you know, I mean, it comes down to fundamental questions about who should decide, right, but students learn.

Chris Beem

I think that’s a very good segue to the Civic Education Initiative. Right? It’s not particularly old, like it’s what about 10 years old? Right. And it was driven by the Foss institute at Arizona State. Michael, do you want to say any more about that?

Michael Berkman

This civic education test that they have gotten many states to adopt is modeled either exactly, or very closely on the American citizenship test? And I have to say, as I read about it, read some articles about it, and keep coming up with sort of two possible reasons that they wanted to do this. Okay. One is a sense, and you see rhetoric around this very much so that the sense that there’s some kind of national embarrassment, that when kids or many Americans, I guess, are given the citizenship test that citizens have to take, they get much lower scores, and that this is considered a great national embarrassment. I don’t fully get this, because it’s not like the immigrants that come to the United States are randomly selected somehow. So I always have found that comparison, absolutely silly. But when you do read about this, it comes up quite a bit. The other is that there is research that’s out there in the education world, that having a more solid knowledge of the nuts and bolts of American government and American history and American institutions, American processes matters, that you have a higher level of engagement for it.

Chris Beem

I mean, I think it is fair to say a matter of fact, they do say right, that this is understood to be the bare minimum, that students should know, this is the model that has been adopted very quickly by a number of states. And they’re, you know, these two researchers are looking to say, is it doing what they hope it would do? Right,

Jenna Spinelle

Right. Yeah. So let’s go to the interview. We’ll hear Jilli and Maithreyi explain their research and their findings and their methodology in a bit greater detail, then maybe we can come back in and pick up the question of, if not this, then what are you know, what, where do we go now with this information? So let’s go now to the interview.

Jenna Spinelle

Jilli Jung and Maithreyi Gopalan, welcome to Democracy Works. Thank you for joining us today.

Jilli Jung

Thank you for having us.

Mathreyi Gopalan 

Thank you so much for having us, Jenna

Jenna Spinelle

Excited to talk with you about your new paper, which explores the connection between civic education and voter turnout among young people. And before we dive into the specifics of that work, I’d just like to talk for a minute about that connection, or the perceived connection between civic education and voter turnout, jelly, it seems like kind of an obvious point on some levels that of course, if you have more civic education, voter turnout will be higher. Right. I wonder if you could just talk a bit about where that assumption comes from and what underlies it?

Jilli Jung

Yeah, that’s a good question. Because it’s like, kind of untested assumption that we have had for a long time. And I think it comes from like, a political scientist view, educators view and then other citizens view. And it’s usually suggested as a solution to solve low voter turnout, because like civic education is kind of designed to prepare students as engaged citizens. And, um, like, for a long time, political scientists has concerned of low youth voter turnout. And then they have often mentioned civic education as a solution to this low voter turnout. And that’s the like, first thing we usually think of when he comes to like, how to fix our low voter turnout is especially among young people. And they like school is the like a great resource where we can start with, you know, like sometimes of intervention to improve those type of civic participation thing. So that’s the like, first thing that people think of, but at the same time, like, it’s not, like certain that civic education actually works well, to improve voting participation.

Jenna Spinelle

And so is the thought here that the more information people have or students have, the more confident they’ll be or the more motivated they’ll be to go out and vote when they’re old enough to do so.

Mathreyi Gopalan 

I think that’s just the traditional approach of like educators and political scientists and a lot of them, right. So it’s the traditional model for education itself, you just transfer knowledge, and somehow you hope that our children just take that knowledge, and then go and apply it everywhere. And I think that kind of has translated to this setup to thinking that if we give them civic knowledge, political knowledge and factual knowledge, it will translate to them using it, and to going and being more engaged citizens and in voting. So I think that’s kind of the traditional line that people are hypothesis people have about civic education affecting voter turnout.

Jenna Spinelle

Yeah. Yeah. And I’m glad that your work is testing that hypothesis, at least in one specific way. And that is based on the something called the civics education initiative. Can you tell us what that is and what It was intended to do.

Julli Jung

It’s a civic state level civics test the policy, it requires high school students to take or pass the exam. And the exam itself is about like, basic US government, politics and history. And questions for the test comes from the US naturalization test, which is for immigrants. So like immigrants, if they want to become a US citizen, they have to take that test. So the policy supporters argue that it’s a bare minimum that, like US citizens has to have. So that’s the format of the test. And like states have really kind of like various forms, they how they implemented it, but like, basically, they use the same set of question and answers for the test. And it is for high school students. And some states require this is a graduation requirement. So they have to take or pass this test to get a high school degree. And like many states allow students to take multiple times. So it’s not a high stakes test. And because students also can see all questions and answers before.

Jenna Spinelle

Yeah, so if I read correctly, this initiative was launched in 17, or 18. States over the course of a few years, just as kind of a side bar, it seems wild to me that that many states implemented a new policy in such a short period of time. Did that seem kind of quick to both of you coming from your background in education policy? Yeah,

Mathreyi Gopalan 

I was kind of surprised, just like within a period of like four to five years, like close to 18 states adopted it. But I think it goes back to what Judy mentioned just a minute ago that it is was not a high stakes test. States also had power to implement it differently across these different states, this own State Department’s of education, or the school districts kind of implemented this policy in a very, very ad hoc fashion. And those are all I think, the reasons why this policy seems to be widely adopted. But I think implementation varies dramatically. And that will be key, in some way for us to keep an eye out on how this policy gets implemented and rolled out. And multiple states are thinking about it, including Pennsylvania, which we might talk about. But yeah, that’s, that’s kind of the surprising thing about how this was quickly adopted in many states.

Jenna Spinelle

Let’s come back to the implementation. I don’t want to bury the lede too much here about your findings from this research, to ask the question simply, did participating in the civic education initiative lead to an increase in voter turnout in the states that had adopted it?

Jilli Jung

No. It’s too obvious for us. I mean, like, even before us, there are many scholars who argue that this policy wouldn’t work. And there are many like educators, scholars arguing there like this learning basic facts about like civics and government wouldn’t increase any types of civic engagement among students. But there was no research empirical research on there. So that’s why we look at it. And then we use like rigorous methods to see the causal effect of the policy on Bora Tana, and with a lot of like, alternative methods, we use a lot of alternative methods to make sure our conclusion, and our conclusion is that the civics test policy did not improve young people’s vote on turnout, at least in the short term, we couldn’t see the long term effect because we only look at the 120 20 presidential election and one midterm election, post implementation.

Mathreyi Gopalan 

So we do look at that 20 year panel and look at how the voting rates have changed and states that had adopted it versus not. And we can talk about the method in detail later. But in terms of the post adoption outcomes, we only had very limited short term outcome results. And so yeah, in the short term, it looks like this approach does not work.

Jenna Spinelle

So you said you weren’t surprised by that. Angela, you mentioned that, you know, even before this CEI policy was rolled out, it was kind of questioned. Do you think that this is basically just I don’t want to call it a bad policy design. But uh, you know, is this a problem of the way that this particular policy was structured, rather than a comment on the power of civic education as a whole to impact voter turnout?

Jilli Jung

Yes, it says like specifically about this policy. I still do believe that civic education is super important and it’s grateful and then it’s almost like only thing that we have, like, as a educator to improve students voter turnout, because so many things come from, like family background, but like we can improve things through public education that I still believe civic education, but this policy specifically was not designed well.

Jenna Spinelle

So, you know, knowing that there was this kind of there was this difference of opinion or the skepticism going into it? Why did the people behind the Civic Education Initiative think that this might be a useful thing to do? Or what were you able to find about their rationale for wanting to implement it in the first place?

Jilli Jung

I think basically, their argument was that its minimum test students should know. And it’s doesn’t cost much it doesn’t customers, it’s not a high stake test. So and the students take the test multiple times. So people can implement the policy without worrying too much about on intention or consequences. And I think that convinced legislators alike, because, you know, if it doesn’t work, okay, but if we work is great

Jenna Spinelle

Yeah, there’s really no downside.

Jilli Jung

Yes, but like some scholars actually concerned of negative impact of it. Because we have really limited instruction time in school for civic education. And if we implement this policy, it means that students have to learn about this. And it means that it takes up some time of civic education that could be used for other more important civic related activities that might improve civic skills, like, for example, like mock election, or discussing like interesting and important social issues. But rather than doing that people, students just like learned, like, really basic history stuff, and they memorizing answers. And it’s not a good use of time. And given that we don’t have much time for civic education at school, it was concerning

Mathreyi Gopalan 

In the world of limited time and instructional time and schools and opportunity costs of Vegas, other policies, taking the space, there is always a downside, when you adopt a policy like this, if it’s not designed well, in the sense that what else could you have done, what else that might have been effective could have been done. And so I think that’s something that these trade offs, we should be thinking about both policymakers, researchers, as well as practitioners, because there’s always an opportunity cost when you’re adopting a policy, what else are you not doing?

Jenna Spinelle

Can you give us a sense of how states and schools within those states implemented this test? You said it’s, you know, kind of an open book sort of thing there. It’s very low hanging fruit. But what does that actually look like in the classroom? To the extent that you are able to look at that information?

Jilli Jung

Yeah, that’s good question. This policy implementation varies a lot across state. So some states even doesn’t require to pass the exam. Some states require students to take and pass the exam to grade your high school by like in other states thick, you know, you can just take and then you don’t need to pass the exam. And then you can take multiple times, but it varies across like state law. And there’s some states does not even track students record at the state level, they just let school district or school implement the policy, and they just provide some guidance, or you can use these questions, you can, you know, follow this instructor like to implement the test. And you can’t have this, you can scoring with following this. And you can record your scores based on this. But then many states allow schools to stick to like, whatever they want. So it kind of varies a lot across schools and across school districts.

Jenna Spinelle

So let’s talk a bit about the research and the methodology that you use to match up these different sets of data. Right. You know, on the one hand, you have the state that that implemented CEI, but then you have, you know, the voter turnout data over here, and, you know, students may go to high school in one state, but go to college in a different state. There’s a lot of moving around that happens at this particular point in someone’s life. So how did you attempt to reconcile those things or how did you go about comparing these different data sources in your work?

Jilli Jung

That’s a great question. We mostly relied on Current Population Survey data, which is a nationally representative data or the US citizen, and it has self Polit voting, participate and information. And we used from 1996 cycle to 2020 cycle that has presidential elections. So we compared. So like, let’s talk about, like design itself first to understand why this method works. So let’s say Pennsylvania implemented this policy in 2008. And we compare, we can compare a voter turnout in 2016 to 2020. So after the policy implementation, does voter turnout has increased, we can look at that. But the problem is that it’s possible that 2020 election was just, you know, like, really, like interesting election that many people go for both. So we cannot know that it’s because of the policy, or is the election specific thing. So that’s why we needed other states that did not implement the policy, but probably experienced the same 2020 election event. So that’s why we need a treatment group which implement the policy and then we need control group that did not implement the policy. And then we can compare whether this golf before and after the policy are differ. So that’s our basic setup. So we calculate we captured like, we aggregated and gathered all individual level voter turnout in each state across 1996 to 2020. And we use the difference in difference to see whether this change comes from policy, not other factors. And you ask the great question that what if people move around? Because our data is from like, 18 to 22 years old? So they already graduated high school when we capture their, like voter voting participation? And our assumption was that, okay, let’s conservative Tivoli assume that they did not move because the previous research show that they people don’t move a lot, and they can move within states, but across this move is quite small. So we based on that assumption, we just linked the high school policy at state level and then 80 to 22 years old voting participation.

Jenna Spinelle

Can you give us a sense of of some of the questions that are on the Civic test? What what kinds of things does it ask?

Jilli Jung

So I have two examples. First, the name of the territory the United States purchased in 1803. The second example, is that the name of the longest reverse in the United States?

Jenna Spinelle

Yeah, so not, not necessarily things that are connected to voting in any way, or the things that you mentioned at the very beginning, right, like, how to vote why voting matters? You know, none of those questions are on our ballot, and I could see how, for a high school student, it might be difficult to make the connection between these seemingly random questions and what they’re expected to do as citizens in our democracy.

Jilli Jung

Yes, and it is important to this, say that, like specific politic or knowledge really helps actually, like there are some previous studies finding, find that if you give students really specific information on how to register, how to vote, like, you know, like those type of intervention helped students to go out for vote. So like specific targeted knowledge intervention, helps improving voting participation. However, this just broad, general political knowledge that is not related to voting participation does not help. That’s yeah, that’s the takeaway.

Jenna Spinelle

And so that leads us into, you know, what, what do we do next? Or what follows from this? Is the Civic test still on the books in the states that adopted it? And is it still growing? Or is there is there still a push to get it into even more states?

Mathreyi Gopalan 

There are other groups that are really trying to add to what we can do to implement this policy in a more effective way? So maybe changing the kinds of knowledge they get the kinds of knowledge students get tested in these civic s policies. So we’ve been talking to organizations like PS civics, where they think knowledge is just one of the three pillars to improve civic participation, right, but their skills but there’s also action, and so maybe they will add on other layers to this policy where students might Get a more direct feeling of what civic engagement really means by like, say mock elections are participating in other local volunteering activities. Maybe if they add some of these other components in this test, maybe it will be useful in improving their knowledge and changing their actions. But I think adopting the policy acids, it’s probably not a good idea.

Jenna Spinelle

I guess I just wondered too, about like layering on the culture war aspect of this. I know that wasn’t something that came up in your specific paper. But just as people who study education policy and who worked with future teachers, I could see a scenario in which a school might say, well, given how much controversy there seems to be over, anytime we bring up history or civics or you know, maybe this test is all that we’re really able to do, or we don’t want to go any further, because we’re afraid I might make some people mad.

Mathreyi Gopalan 

Education and public education in this country is constantly polarized. There are wars about everything, not just culture, like there are reading wars. What’s the best way to teach kids how to read? Are we providing them the right kinds of knowledge? What kinds of maths teaching works, what kind of math knowledge works? And so I think education across the board is just a very politically charged environment. And my hope, as an educator, is to promote research and other kinds of ways in which we can look at data look at policies and effects in as nonpartisan a way as possible. And which is why I think policies like this and data like this should be broadened, and people should have access to such data to do more such analysis to try and ask in a nonpartisan way does it work? If this works, we would have come out and said it works. And the provision just is, I guess, popular and picked up by some groups. But I think we should use good data and good research methods to ask in an, in a nonpartisan way, what works and what doesn’t. And it’s been a deeply problematic issue in very many education related topics. And I think we’re hoping that our work can encourage more researchers to come and study policies and topics like that in a dispassionate fashion as they can.

Jenna Spinelle

To bring things to a close here. So we are heading into an election year. What do each of you, you know, how should educators and people who support civic education which I would love anyone who listens to a podcast about democracy as a supporter of civic education, what should we all be thinking about or striving to do to make sure that our young voters have the information that they need to be, you know, informed and successful in this coming election and to set them up to be lifelong voters?

Jilli Jung

I think just giving them like basic information of how to vote and they How to Register vote is super important. It seems very, you know, easy and Meinl but like previous research shows that that actually increase voter turnout. And like voting participation in all the age impacts their like, lifelong voting participation pattern. So I think those small interventions that teachers can inter, you know, help us to help implement, can have huge effect in the long term. So I would encourage teachers and principals at school to have a like little session of like, giving really specific targeted information to students how to vote how to register.

Mathreyi Gopalan 

If there’s one takeaway from our study, it’s not that civic education doesn’t work, but civic test policy does not work. And we want to be really, really clear about that distinction. And I think we should rethink how we educate our kids, to get them to get excited and engaged in the political process. Either side, I mean, you can decide to vote, whichever side you want to go, but you want to be energized about the causes and the issues at stake in the democracy. And so civic educators already know this, many of them. If you talk to social studies, teachers, they’ll be like, this study is not telling us anything new. We knew about this. We didn’t think that policy is going to work. And so I think social studies educators already know this, and I want to encourage the public, the wider public to force schools and policymakers and school districts to rethink their civic education. of curriculum to move away from rote memorization and test based approaches to engaging their students in the political process in the debates that matter in our democracy.

Jilli Jung

Previous research mentioned that young people are fully like politically motivated enough, because I can one credit toward young people is that they don’t care about politics. That’s why they don’t vote. But that’s not true. previous study found that they are motivated enough, but they just don’t have much experience to transform those motivation, intention to rear action. So I think it’s important for us as a society to give them a tool and the power and like, you know, kind of like non cognitive skills to like, transform those motivation to rear action. And that’s what civic education should go for.

Jenna Spinelle

Thank you both for joining us today.

Mathreyi Gopalan 

Thank you so much, and I really appreciate you having us.

Michael Berkman

Yeah, well, that was an interesting interview. And really cool work being done by our colleagues up in the ed school here at Penn State. I wanted to pick up Zina from something that came up right at the end of the interview, and that was where they talked about how when they restricted this analysis, as I understood it, to basically information that’s provided to students about how to vote, like where to go. And, you know, where’s your polling place, how to manage mail in voting, all of this kind of Federal Register, where do you not exactly how to register, they’re very clear here that if you want, that’s what increases voting. And I thought this was really quite telling and set a lot about the states that adopted this Civic test as well, because the states that adopted the Civic test are not, from my analysis of it, all that particularly interested in increasing voting, because many of the states that adopted this test actually do as much as they can to make voting difficult. And so some of the states that adopted this, for example, don’t even allow students to use their IDs, to vote their student IDs to vote in states that have strict voter ID laws. They make registration very difficult. You could go on and on. But there’s a big analysis called the cost of voting. And we’re a state gets a score for how difficult they make it to vote. And states that adopted this, with a couple of exceptions tend to be Republican controlled Trifecta states. And they tend to be states that make voting very difficult. And if you want more people to vote, but their analysis shows is that you need to give them information on how to overcome the hurdles that states set up to make voting difficult. So that’s not what’s happening here at all, because they understand that’s the thing that makes voting difficult. So I thought, you know, the real nugget of interesting information was at the end there. And it does make you wonder why states adopted this, if their interest is really not in increasing engagement and voting, because I don’t believe that it is. I think it’s more to do with some notion of citizenship or something where you have a responsibility to know all of these details, every single detail that somebody trying to get citizenship would need to have.

Chris Beem

My assumption was very different. My assumption was that because we are in an era of such controversy, and because there is a, you know, despite all this controversy about what we teach in terms of civic education, there is a fairly universal notion that we should teach something about civic education. And so here comes this very basic, very bland, very uncontroversial set of criteria that the Jo sauce Institute has produced. And is that right, Jo? Sauce Fosse, sorry, Foster. Jo sauce is a professor at Minnesota anyway, here comes a solution, right? And so everybody can just kind of implement this and all these issues go away. But your argument is that that’s not at all what’s going on that this is a decision where we can press present this curricula around civic education that has that, you know, crosses all the T’s and checks all the boxes, but doesn’t move any student any closer to be an actual voting citizen.

Michael Berkman

To me, this is symbolic politics. So these are states that make it as hard as possible. Not all of them but as a, you know, on average, these are states that make it as difficult to vote as possible. Both who are now saying, Look how much we want our young people to vote, we’re requiring them to take this test before they get out of high school. Yeah, I think that it has nothing really to do with voting. And so we shouldn’t be surprised, even though these researchers know exactly what will improve voting, which is giving people the information to come up with the hurdles to overcome the hurdles that the states are setting up.

Chris Beem

So here’s what I would want to see in a civics education curriculum, I would want to see, I mean, very briefly, I would want to see them talking about controversial issues, and then practicing argument, right practicing how you listen and how you evaluate and how you talk about these things with people who don’t disagree with you. Yeah, that don’t agree with.

Michael Berkman

Democratic skills rather than

Chris Beem

Right. And, but I think that’s an incredibly cheap, far more challenging thing to do. And I also just think in this in the current climate, there’s just no way that’s going to happen. It’s going to be agreed to.

Chris Beem

So that’s what we’re left. And so if that means the only thing we can do, that we that we can plausibly get past and, you know, in a red state is to say, here’s how you register, here’s how you find out where you vote, here’s a website that you can go that’s run by the government that will tell you all of this information. If you can’t even agree to that, well, then then your agenda is laid bare. I think that’s I think it’s just pretty much fair to say.

Michael Berkman

Yeah, well, another way of thinking about this is at the state level is just the wrong place. And so states to set up these tests that we know that tests affect what’s taught in the classroom, so I understand why they you know, why states want to set up a test because it’s going to direct classroom instruction, whether or not tests determine what students learn or not. I don’t know that literature well enough, but it does. It does lead teachers to teach to teach differently. But I wonder if you know, some of the political heat on it could be pulled down a little bit, if these kinds of decisions were being made at the local school district level rather than the state. Awesome. Yeah, so different school districts could come up with all kinds of different ways of teaching democratic skills that fits their community. And that fits with, you know, what they want, that they want to do. By, you know, once you take it up to the state level, like with this, then you’re getting right into the middle of partisan politics. And I mean, I understand school district politics have become quite controversial as well, but not everywhere, not on all things. And it’s still nothing like a State Capitol.

Chris Beem

And you’re talking about 1000s talking about

Michael Berkman

10,000 school districts.

Chris Beem

And there is evidence of that.

Michael Berkman

Laboratories of democracy.

Chris Beem

I mean, his paper is, as you say, Michael, a very solid research agenda and presents the data really well. And the conclusions, even as a negative are extremely important. And it’s you know, it’s fun to, to talk about it from the context of political science, you know, with a paper that’s really written by education’s kudos to Julie and Maithreyi. All right. Okay. So for Democracy Works, I’m Chris Beem.

Michael Berkman

I’m Michael Berkman

Chris Beem

Thanks for listening.