civic education

Educating for Democracy

• Posted October 19, 2020
• By Gianna Cacciatore

With less than a month before a pivotal presidential election, democracy is on every educator’s mind. To shine new light on what civic engagement can look like today — and on the role of education in promoting healthy democracy — three new leaders in American civic education came together on Wednesday, October 14, in the latest installment of HGSE’s Education Now, a series of webinars seeking to address the unique challenges facing educators today.

Amber Coleman-Mortley, director of social engagement at iCivics  and founder of Let's K12 Better ; Noorya Hayat, Ed.M.’15, a civic engagement and equity researcher at CIRCLE at Tufts University; and Jessica Lander, Ed.M.’15, teacher, journalist , and cofounder of We Are America were hosted by Senior Lecturer Richard Weissbourd, director of HGSE's Making Caring Common intiative, for a discussion that focused on the urgency with which educators must approach civics education. As Weissbourd said in his introduction, “Democracy is on the ballot.”

Throughout, participants outlined practical strategies for rethinking civics education and promoting equity.

Takeaways for Teachers and Parents

• Let young people take the lead. “The future of civic engagement should be student led,” said Coleman-Mortley. Teachers and parents should make space for student activism through project-based learning, games, simulations, and even through simply going out into the community. “The role of adults is to facilitate that space, serve as a resource hub, connect students with the levers of power, and get out of the way – we love to feel in control, but we need to allow the process to unfold organically,” Coleman-Mortley explained. Only when we trust in youth leadership can true civic engagement begin.
• Expand your teaching. Don’t just teach civic knowledge – teach “action civics,” said Lander. Beyond lecturing on the branches of government, educators need to ask, “what concrete skills do my students need to make change in the community?” In addition to civics knowledge, educators should focus on teaching civic skills, civic motivation, and civic efficacy — a student’s ability to see himself as a maker of change.
• Stay local. Students are eager to engage in the issues they care about, but “it has got to be local and action-oriented,” explained Lander. Focusing on the issues young people see every day, the issues in their communities, keeps things concrete. In addition, explained Hayat, it fights cynicism. “Kids might be cynical about national politics, but they care about community issues,” Hayat explained. Connecting to the local will prepare students to tackle issues on a small and large scale.  
• Advocate for structural change. Civic education has declined as a result of the focus on other subjects, like STEM. This is beginning to change — legislation mandating state-wide civic initiatives was recently passed in Massachusetts and Illinois — but high- quality, equitable civics standards need to be adopted everywhere. Joining this fight can lead to large-scale change.  

The panelists agreed: Democracy matters, to young people and adults. Bringing the voices, lived experiences, and communities of young people into the civics conversation can lead to concrete engagement and powerful change. In today’s turbulent reality, where students are persevering remotely despite political vitriol, the increased visibility of racialized violence, and the challenges of COVID-19, finding strength and value in our shared democracy is more important than ever.

Fresh Approaches to Civic Learning

Strengthen the ecosystem for equitable K–12 civic learning.  Civic education and civic educators can’t exist in a vacuum in a school. They are part of an ecosystem that directly connects to parents and communities, including local community organizations and nonprofits, culture and arts organizations, local media, faith-based institutions and congregations, and local policymakers. For equitable access to civic learning for all students, connections and trust among those institutions should be strengthened.

Elevate the youth voive : Adults must engage in active listening. By listening, adults show young people know that their voice matters and that they are valued contributors to their communities.

When it comes to young people and voting, support access and awareness.  Young people are not apathetic when it comes to civic and political engagement, but they but face systemic challenges to voting. In 2018, young people (ages 18–24) recorded the highest midterm youth turnout in decades. What young people need is outreach and awareness about how to connect their commitment to social change to casting a ballot. 

On Civic Education and Teaching for Democracy:

• CIRCLE resources for equitable K-12 Civic learning
• Teaching For Democracy Alliance: A national alliance working to strengthen student learning about elections and informed voting that is coordinated by CIRCLE at Tisch College of Civic Life, Tufts University
• CivXNow, a new coalition to improve civic education; watch a short documentary on  school transformation through civic engagement .
• Educating for American Democracy

On Youth Civic Engagement:

• Making Caring Common's " Get Out the Vote " mobilization and peer training initiative
• CIRCLE’s  Youth Voting and Civic Engagement in America  is a data tool that offers a way to explore the relationships between voting and other forms of civic participation, and some of the conditions that shape such engagement. 
• Generation Citizen  and its Kick Start Action Civics project (to learn civics by doing civics)
• CIRCLE’s Youth Electoral Significance Index (YESI) is a tool for assessing/increasing youth political engagement. The index provides a data-driven ranking of the top 10 Senate and House races where young voters have the highest potential to influence the 2020 election, as well as the top 10 states where youth could determine the presidential race.

Civic Engagement at Home:

• Let's Talk About... the Election and the Debates — a podcast episode in Coleman-Mortley's Let's K-12 Better series, where she models a discussion with her children. 

Education Now

A webinar and newsletter series to shape new approaches to challenges in education

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Redrawing the civics education roadmap.

New standards prioritizes depth of knowledge over quantity of facts

Manisha Aggarwal-Schifellite

Harvard Staff Writer

State standards for civics education in the U.S. usually require that K-12 students learn hard dates and facts, like the events of Shays’ Rebellion or the details of the Stamp Act.

A group of scholars and educators wants to change that approach by prioritizing knowledge over the number of facts, and asking “driving questions” that integrate information, conceptual reasoning, and critical inquiry. In a report released today, “A Roadmap to Educating for American Democracy,” researchers at Harvard, Tufts, and other institutions laid out this strategy and other recommendations for a large-scale recommitment to a field that has seen investment decline during the last 50 years to the point where it now attracts just 1/1000 of the money spent on STEM subjects.

“We pose thematic questions that come from history and civics. The two are integrated and complementary, and they both need to be addressed,” said Peter Levine, a professor of citizenship and public affairs at Tufts University and a member of the project’s executive committee, during a conference call with the media last Thursday. “For example, what were the experiences with the British government of British colonists of indigenous Americans, of enslaved Americans, and of indentured Americans? That’s a much deeper, richer, question.”

This educational shift from “breadth to depth” is one of several plans laid out in the report, developed as a roadmap to reconsider and support civics and history education at the K-12 level. As part of an interdisciplinary and cross-ideological mission, the researchers consulted with more than 300 scholars in history, political science, and education, as well as teachers, education administrators, civics providers, students, and policymakers.

“The goal is to tell a full and complete narrative of America’s plural yet shared story,” said Danielle Allen, James Bryant Conant University Professor.

Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard file photo

The roadmap is “unprecedented in its scale, in terms of the number and diversity of people who have been brought together … with the goal of developing a strategy to provide excellence in history and civic education for all students,” said Danielle Allen , James Bryant Conant University Professor, director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, and a corresponding principal investigator on the report. Other members of the leadership team included Jane Kamensky , Jonathan Trumbull Professor of American History and Pforzheimer Foundation Director of the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, as well as colleagues from Tufts University, Arizona State University, iCivics, and more.

The researchers saw an urgent need for their work amid ongoing diminishing investments in the field at the national, state, and local levels, combined with growing polarization in American political culture.

“The country is very divided [and] we know from repeated high-quality surveys and studies that there’s widespread loss of confidence in our very form of government, in the American civic order. America, we think, is in this bad place in part because the American education system — not only in schools, but in higher education — has neglected the teaching of civics and American history,” said Paul Carrese, a principal investigator and founding director at the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership at Arizona State University.

Compared with STEM education, which is funded at a rate of $50 per student per year in the U.S., civics and history education are funded at a rate of just 5 cents per student per year, and “as a consequence, we now have a citizenry and an electorate that is poorly prepared to understand our form of government and civic life, and to appreciate it and actually use it to be informed and engaged citizens,” he said.

“… what were the experiences with the British government of British colonists of indigenous Americans, of enslaved Americans, and of indentured Americans? That’s a much deeper, richer, question.” Peter Levine, Tufts University

The report was organized around seven essential themes: Civic Participation; Our Changing Landscapes; We the People; A New Government and Constitution; Institutional and Social Transformation — A Series of Reboundings; A People in the World; and A People with Contemporary Debates and Possibilities.

The group explained that these themes provide an intellectual framework for more specific pedagogical activities in the classroom. The report says that the roadmap is not a curriculum or mandate for state standards in education, but rather an ambitious guide for educators, practitioners, and policymakers to change the current approach to civics and history education at every level of government.

“The goal is to tell a full and complete narrative of America’s plural yet shared story. We’re trying to celebrate the compromises needed to make our constitutional democracy work, [and] cultivate civic honesty and patriotism, while leaving space both to love and critique this country,” said Allen.

Equally important to the style of civic inquiry is the content, and the researchers emphasized the need to weave diversity and plurality into all aspects of civics and history education, inspired by methods common in university-level civics education but not fully integrated into K-12 models. They also stressed the importance of interpersonal civic engagement and disagreement while also emphasizing civic virtues of respect, honesty, and “moving forward together,” which has become more urgent in an age of growing misinformation online.

“All of us, young people and adults, now need both digital literacy and digital mastery — strong understanding of how to sort material found online,” said Allen. Strong civics education, she added, should teach students “how to read laterally and check the sourcing of information, and how to understand the perspectives framing the provision of information and argument as well as competencies in contributing to the public sphere productively through our own use of digital tools.”

The group also published five “design challenges” articulating the structural and content dilemmas that educators may face when following the roadmap, such as simultaneously teaching the “dangers and values” of compromise in self-governance and supporting responsible student civic action.

“These are the rich, complex challenges that confront educators at all levels in civics,” said Levine. “What we do is name them and make them explicit, so that the whole community can work on them over time.”

The report marks a first milestone in a multiyear implementation plan, which the researchers want to achieve by 2030. In the coming decade, they propose three goals: to provide access to high-quality civic education to 60 million students (roughly the same number of children in U.S. schools now); to make 100,000 schools “civic ready” through resources and learning plans; and to equip 1 million teachers with the tools to implement the roadmap through professional development.

“This is a long-term project to rebuild the heart of excellence in history of civic learning,” said Allen.

The Educating for American Democracy project was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the U.S. Department of Education. Educating for American Democracy was led by the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University, the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership at Arizona State University, Tufts University’s Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life, and iCivics, the country’s largest civic education provider.

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A portrait of civics education in the United States: The 2018 Brown Center Report

Subscribe to the brown center on education policy newsletter, louis serino ls louis serino communications manager, governance studies - the brookings institution, managing editor - brown center chalkboard.

June 27, 2018

American schools found themselves immersed in politics this year. A wave of anti-gun violence demonstrations swept the nation following the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, controversial federal policies aroused fear and concern for undocumented students, and teacher rallies and strikes flared up across the country. This occurred amid broader unrest and polarization, with many Americans expressing concern about the state of our politics and the cohesiveness of our society.

In this environment, are U.S. schools equipping students with the tools to become engaged, informed, and empathetic citizens? Are they equipping some students—or groups of students—better than others?

The 2018 Brown Center Report on American Education endeavors to answer these questions, and others, with three separate analyses of issues related to civics education. Chapter 1 analyzes trends in students’ civics scores (as well as math and reading) on the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP); Chapter 2 examines state policy related to civics education; and Chapter 3 provides a look at the nation’s social studies teachers. Read on for highlights of the report.

Trends in NAEP math, reading, and civics scores

The first chapter explores trends in student performance on NAEP assessments from the late 1990s through the most recent year in which results are available: 2014 in civics, 2017 for math and reading. Math scores climbed sharply in No Child Left Behind’s (NCLB’s) early years, but scores have largely plateaued since then. Scores follow this pattern in fourth-grade reading, but eighth-grade reading scores show slight gains recently after remaining flat initially.

Despite social studies not featuring prominently in NCLB testing requirements, scores on NAEP civics assessments have remained steady or climbed slightly. However, analysis shows that there are wide and persistent gaps by race, ethnicity, and income in civics. As of 2014, the white-black gap was 0.83 standard deviations (SD), the income gap (based on free and reduced-price lunch eligibility) was 0.82 SD, and the white-Hispanic gap was 0.71 SD. These gaps equate to multiple years of academic learning.

“The size of these gaps is disconcerting,” the authors write. “Civic participation affords political power, and broad participation is essential for a healthy, inclusive democracy.” Recent U.S. education policy has focused narrowly on student performance in core academic subjects, specifically math and reading. However, the Every Student Succeeds Act, which replaced NCLB in 2015, has the potential to change that, granting greater flexibility to states in designing their accountability systems.

Read Chapter 1 in full here.

A 50-state inventory of state civics requirements

In the second chapter , the authors analyze the extent to which states have incorporated recommended practices into requirements for civics education, compiling an inventory that spans all 50 states and Washington, D.C. After review, 42 states plus Washington, D.C., require at least one course related to civics education as a high school graduation requirement; most states require two or three. However, only about half have incorporated participatory elements of learning or community engagement, such as mock trials, into their standards. While discussion and knowledge-building components of civics education appear frequently across states, participatory elements and community engagement appear less common.

In addition, the authors look at survey data to investigate whether student experiences reflect these practices. About 63 percent of 12th-grade students report discussing current events on at least a weekly basis. But only 24 percent report taking part in debates or panel discussions on a weekly basis, while 31 percent report never participating in this type of activity. This is a concern, the authors write, “given the sentiment among civics education experts that a high-quality civics education is incomplete without teaching students what civic participation looks like in practice and how citizens can engage in their communities.”

Read Chapter 2 in full here.

Understanding the social studies teacher workforce

The final chapter of the 2018 Brown Center Report focuses on the state of America’s social studies teachers. By presenting statistics on the demographics, qualifications, responsibilities, compensation, and satisfaction of high-school social studies teachers, the authors reveal how these educators differ from other subject-specialized teachers.

Synthesizing existing research with original analysis of nationally representative survey data, the authors make several discoveries about the nature of American social studies teachers. Well over half—58 percent—of social studies teachers are male, compared to 41 percent of natural science teachers, 38 percent of math teachers, and 20 percent of English language arts (ELA) teachers. They also take on responsibilities outside of the classroom more often, including coaching. In fact, 35 percent report having coaching responsibilities, versus 23 percent of natural science teachers, 21 percent of math teachers, and 15 percent of ELA teachers. “These patterns suggest schools may often be looking for candidates that can fill multiple roles beyond the classroom when hiring social studies teachers, which seems less the case for vacancies in other subjects.”

Despite several differences, social studies teachers are similar to other teachers on a number of dimensions, including teachers’ age and experience levels, course load, working hours, and satisfaction with their school. Therefore, it is important not to overstate these disparities to truly understand America’s social studies educators. The authors conclude, “By understanding the teaching force we have in social studies and comparing it with the teaching force we might need, we can better answer questions about which policies and practices would strengthen the social studies teacher workforce.”

Read Chapter 3 in full here.

The full report

These chapters provide a portrait of how complex and varied civics education is in the United States, using student performance, state policies, teacher characteristics, and survey results as windows into students’ experiences. Overall, the 2018 Brown Center Report argues that education policy and practice in the United States should place greater emphasis on schools’ role in supporting and strengthening American democracy.

Read the full report here.

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