Student-Run Start-Up Takes On Civics Education
When you pull up the front page for LexGen, it looks like many other slick, professional websites. It’s clean and open and focuses attention on the organization name and their goal— “to make civics education simple, fun and accessible.” Scroll through the site, and you see that LexGen has big goals. They are concerned about the level of civics education in this country and their rallying cry is nothing less than “Let’s change America.” Their goal is to create student-friendly curriculum materials and to set up chapters of the organization throughout the fifty states. Like most education start-ups, this one has a bold vision.
When you look at the pictures of the team members, however, you might be struck by how young this group of leaders looks—even for an ed tech start-up. That’s because they are all high school students.
LexGen founder Abhi Desai shared that he had become interested in politics and government in 8th grade, but as a high school student became discouraged at how little his peers knew and understood about civics and government. He spent last summer as a research intern at the William Monroe Trotter Collaborative for Social Justice at the Harvard Kennedy School. Last April, he launched LexGen.
The timing is propitious; just in the last month, education critics have pointed at the low history and civics marks on the National Assessment of Educational Progress and tried to explain the cause. For the last few years, there have been increasing calls for more civics education for K-12 students.
Desai is a student in Phoenix, Arizona; he started LexGen as a smaller community initiative. With only a few similarly-interested teens at his own school, Desai reached out over social media and five other civically-engaged teens contacted him. A leadership team and a broader vision were born. LexGen’s leadership team comes from across the country, from California to Illinois.
Their focus is on the 21st century concerns CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: Student-Run Start-Up Takes On Civics Education