“My group of friends and I were really excited,” Ruiz said, a sophomore at Miami Dade College who serves as student government president.

Ruiz and her friends are just a few of the millions of young Americans newly eligible to vote in the 2022 midterms.

Still, that excitement didn’t smooth over some of the uncertainty Ruiz experienced when it came time to actually cast her ballot.

“I felt, I’m not going to lie, a little bit lost on some of the things that were on the ballot,” Ruiz told NPR. She said she was mostly motivated to vote because she disagreed with the conservative social policies of Florida’s current Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, who ended up winning reelection.

“I do identify more towards the Democratic Party, but I still felt like I didn’t really know everything that was on the ballot,” Ruiz added. “I just was excited to vote.”

Ruiz is part of Generation Z, which is still just getting its feet wet in politics, since the oldest members of the generation turn 26 this year. Along with millennials, Gen Zers turned out in historically high numbers for a midterm election, second only to the 2018 election.

Read more.

Guests: Senator Chris Coons, John Bridgeland, Cecilia Mo

With so many Americans out of work and few job options, there’s been a renewed call to expand voluntary national service. The intention is to create more opportunities for young people to help the nation combat, and recover from, the devastation of the pandemic. Advocates of programs like AmeriCorps point to the essential skills and experiences young people could gain. These programs aim to expand individual’s sense of purpose and bridge community divides, and assist rebuilding our country. This hour, we look at the call to national service and what an expansion of opportunities would look like. We start off talking with Delaware SENATOR CHRIS COONS about the bill he’s introduced which would increase the AmeriCorps workforce to 750,000. Then, we speak with JOHN BRIDGELAND, a CEO of Civic Enterprises who has worked to expand national service for two decades. And, we’ll hear from CECILIA MO, a University of California, Berkeley, about the impact service programs have on the participants and our Democracy.

Listen here: https://whyy.org/episodes/the-call-for-national-service/

New-teacher numbers are way down in states producing many of the nation’s teachers, reports Eric Westervelt for NPR. In California, teacher-training enrollment fell 53 percent in the last five years, with similar declines in New York state and Texas. In North Carolina, enrollment fell 20 percent in three years. This may reflect a strengthening U.S. economy, or the sense that teaching’s no longer a stable career. Potential teachers know they’ll have less control professionally and will work in a politicized environment whose flashpoints include ideological fights over the Common Core, high-stakes testing, and linkage of student test results to teacher evaluations. Also, tenure protections have eroded, and recession-induced budget cuts have eliminated classroom and school resources. “There’s a sense now that if I went into this job, which doesn’t pay a lot and is hard work, it may be I’d lose it,” says Bill McDermott of the School of Education at University of North Carolina. The nation may also be over-producing the teachers districts don’t want, and under-producing teachers they do. Shortages vary by specialty, but the highest vacancies are in science, math, and special education. One solution would be more pay for in-demand specialties, but efforts in this direction across the country have stalled or been scrapped.

http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2015/03/03/389282733/where-have-all-the-teachers-gone

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the passage of the Civil Rights Act, NPR has put together an interactive explanation of the act with commentary from writers, scholars, and legal experts.

http://apps.npr.org/behind-the-civil-rights-act/#/annotations