Students’ service motivation alarming

When Lew Friedland and a colleague recently studied the civic life of high school students in and around Madison, Wis., one theme popped up again and again: The students were doing volunteer work because they thought it looked good on their resumes.

This attitude didn’t come only from affluent, ambitious kids as they jockeyed for a precious place in an elite university. It came from young people of all classes, races and ethnic backgrounds. They all needed “something” on their resume for college or future employment, and that something was service.

“Clearly, service has no deeper civic meaning for many of them,” says Friedland, a professor at the University of Wisconsin’s Center for Communication and Democracy.

America, we have a problem. About one-third of the nation’s schools say they offer service learning, and many districts, cities such as Philadelphia and Chicago, and the state of Maryland have service requirements for graduation.

Yet a number of these programs are so divorced from learning, so removed from real community involvement, that they may end up creating cynics instead of citizens.

“I’m hearing from students who say that service learning is neither service nor learning,” says Judge Marjorie Rendell, who as Pennsylvania’s first lady is crisscrossing the state to promote citizenship education. “Schools are devaluing something that is supposed to be there for a purpose.”

The answer isn’t to say that community service has no place in education, as some traditionalists may argue, but, rather, to make it what it should be: an innovative educational tool that can help prepare students for active citizenship. It’s a necessary antidote to the teach-to-the-test mentality gripping too many schools, and a proven way to combat the civic illiteracy and disengagement that could cripple American democracy if left unchecked.

Besides, in purely market terms, this is a product with a huge potential upside.

“Over the last three years, volunteering has been going up, to the point where the demand for participating is outgrowing the capacity to serve,” says David Eisner, CEO of the Corporation for National and Community Service and, far as I know, no direct relation to me.

Which is why now, as the end of the school year approaches, you find students scrambling to fulfill the “service hours” required of them to graduate or be promoted to the next grade. Many of those hours are spent building houses for the homeless and ladling soup for the hungry.

But some are filled with activities whose civic and educational value is highly doubtful. In one case, the director of a Baltimore nonprofit designed to link schools and charities found that her own daughter received service credit for performing in a synchronized-swimming show.

At the heart of this situation is the faulty premise that if we simply require students to volunteer a certain number of hours outside the classroom – doing almost anything – and if they fulfill those requirements, they will magically understand the broader issues they confront, connect to the community, and develop lifelong citizenship skills. Instead, as Friedland’s research shows, too many students come to see it as one more system to be jobbed for personal gain rather than community service.

“If it’s just based on hours, most students view it as mere compliance and a way to make themselves more attractive to colleges and employers,” says Kenny Holdsman, managing director of the National Service-Learning Partnership. “It puts service into an individual achievement domain, and puts teachers into the role of clock manager and out of the role of educator.”

Switch the requirement from punching a clock to completing a project with real relevance for the community, and service becomes far more effective and meaningful. Holdsman and others argue that the hourly measurement ought to be dropped for a projects-based approach integrated into the classroom and evaluated by outcome.

So instead of simply cleaning up a trash-strewn park, students would find out what local government, neighborhood groups and individual residents were doing about the mess, and develop a plan to institute systemic change that would go beyond a onetime activity. This way, students can learn about government and the environment, and fulfill actual needs in a community rather than reinforce the stereotype of volunteering as noblesse oblige.

Or a way to pad the resume.

In some places, the focus is indeed shifting from hours-tallying to project-building. Finding that “counting hours became more important than the experience itself,” the school district of Chicago is making the transition to a projects-based approach, says Jon Schmidt, the district’s service-learning manager. Some of the city’s 95 public high schools will be allowed to exempt incoming students from the 40-hour requirement, requiring them, instead, to complete two service projects before they graduate.

It will take time and plenty of creative energy to embrace this new model. When service equals hours, schools can say to community organizations: “Here are our kids. Give them something to do.” It’s cheap, efficient, and requires little or no training. Who cares whether anything’s actually accomplished?

Truly educating students to be active citizens demands more from students, teachers and communities. It can’t just feel good, although worthwhile, effective service often can. It can’t just provide free labor.

“Nobody does community service to serve the community,” one especially cynical student told Lew Friedland. Changing that mind-set ought to be everyone’s goal.