CIRCLE

CIRCLE (The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement) conducts research on the civic and political engagement of Americans between the ages of 15 and 25. CIRCLE provides reliable data and analysis that help Americans to understand the strengths and weaknesses of civic education, broadly defined. Our research has been cited in most national newspapers, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Los Angeles Times, and on CNN, NPR, PBS, MTV, and Fox News. CIRCLE was founded in 2001 with a generous grant from The Pew Charitable Trusts and is now also funded by Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Ford Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, and several others. It is based at the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service at Tufts University.

Peter Levine is Director of CIRCLE, The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement and Research Director ofTufts University’s Jonathan Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service. Levine graduated from Yale in 1989 with a degree in philosophy. He studied philosophy at Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, receiving his doctorate in 1992. From 1991 until 1993, he was a research associate at Common Cause. In the late 1990s, he was Deputy Director of the National Commission on Civic Renewal, chaired by Senator Sam Nunn and William Bennett. Levine is the author of The Future of Democracy: Developing the Next Generation of American Citizens (University Press of New England, June 2007), four other scholarly books on philosophy and politics, and a novel. He co-edited Engaging Young People in Civic Life (forthcoming) with James Youniss and The Deliberative Democracy Handbook (2006) with John Gastil, and co-organized the writing of The Civic Mission of Schools, a report released by Carnegie Corporation of New York and CIRCLE in 2003. He serves on the boards or steering committees of AmericaSpeaks, Streetlaw, the Newspaper Association of America Foundation, the Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools, the Kettering Foundation, the J. Paul Aicher Foundation, and the Deliberative Democracy Consortium.