Nearly seven in 10 of the nation’s public schools offer opportunities for students to participate in community-service projects, or give them credit for doing so, with the trend on the upswing, a new report says.
Despite that growth, however, fewer schools—less than one-fourth this year, compared with nearly one-third a decade ago—connect service activities to learning.
The study by the Corporation for National and Community Service is based on a survey of a national sample of 2,000 K-12 schools.
High schools are most likely to emphasize service learning, which has been linked by research studies to a greater likelihood of civic participation among students who have had such opportunities. Schools in low-income areas are less likely to offer service-learning activities than other schools.
