Students want more civics education, but too few schools teach it

Three weeks before a ferociously contested U.S. election, the views and voices of students should be heard louder than ever – even those of young people who aren’t yet eligible to vote. Trouble is, many won’t have learned enough about the issues to develop informed and thoughtful opinions.

That’s partly because civics education in schools has significantly declined, a conundrum we’ve followed for years at The Hechinger Report. Many teachers say they are afraid to teach these topics in these sharply divided times while principals, too, fear discussing civics is simply too divisive.

Yet consider some of these startling, oft-repeated statistics:

Only 49 percent of students who took the most recent NAEP exam said they have a class that is mainly focused on civics or the U.S. government;
Only 29 percent said they had a teacher whose primary responsibility is teaching civics;
And more than 70 percent of Americans failed a basic civic literacy quiz; 1 in 3 couldn’t name or explain what our three branches of government do, a 2024 study from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce found. Most Americans could name only a single right guaranteed by the First Amendment in a recent Annenberg survey, and our civic knowledge has not improved since 1998.

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Still, our schools have never made teaching civics a priority, Louise Dubé, executive director of iCivics, a nonpartisan organization dedicated to advancing civic learning founded by former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, told me, echoing what I hear from countless advocates and educators.

“Teaching the election should be the Super Bowl of this re-engagement, as all eyes are on our single most important democratic process,” Dube said. “The K-12 education system is a reflection of what our society judges as important, and citizenship is low on the list.”

What’s happened in the age of social media is even more concerning: Young people share a distrust of the media no matter what their partisan bias: Half of 18- to 29-year-olds in the U.S. say they have some or a lot of trust in the information they get from social media sites, the Pew Research Center found, while 4 out of 10 young adults get their news from TikTok.

Clearly, there is enormous work to be done, and schools must do their part. The Sandra Day O’Connor Institute for Democracy will hold a virtual conversation about potential solutions this week.

Many students, meanwhile, want to be more informed and engaged in the issues, one reason why The Hechinger Report is teaming up with Retro Report to highlight the lack of civics education in the U.S., along with solutions, resources and ideas for solving it.

Students make the most convincing argument of all in Retro Report’s new four-part series “Citizen Nation,” which premiered on PBS on Oct. 8. The series follows teenagers from across the country competing in We the People, the nation’s premier civics competition. The competition stacks teams of students from 48 states against one another, and they must argue their points before a panel of judges acting as members of Congress.

“We don’t actually listen to one another,” — Elias Wallace, Wyoming high schooler training for military service. Credit: Retro Report

“Citizen Nation” introduces us to public school students from Las Vegas to suburban Virginia and rural Wyoming. Theirs are the voices that will shape our future — and they are filled with determination. Watching these students learn about our constitution, answer tough questions and prepare to compete in a national contest is a reminder of what is at stake in our country — and gives me hope for the next generation.

“People nowadays don’t sit down and talk. We don’t actually listen to one another,” says Elias Wallace, a Wyoming high schooler aiming for a computer engineering degree on an ROTC scholarship, at one point during the series. “Instead, we just say no, no, no, you’re wrong. We don’t say — here’s why. … I feel that if we communicate, life would be a whole lot better for everyone.’’

Then there is Elizabeth (Eli) Fakoya, daughter of Nigerian immigrants in Las Vegas, who hopes to study law and grew up in a house where the news is constantly on. She prepares for the upcoming competition with a ferocious intensity.

“I’ve just learned that I really like debating politics, and I like to give speeches on it, and I like to discuss it. So, I’m always prepared for any topic,” she says.

Lessons in Civics

The Hechinger Report and Retro Report partnered to produce work about how students are participating in civic life and how they are being taught the significance of that activity.

Hearing from teachers and students throughout the series is a breath of optimism in these fraught times. David Kendrick, who teaches government and history at Loganville High School in Loganville, Georgia, often reminds his students that they are experiencing an election like no other.

“It’s very important that our up-and-coming adults, meaning our students, are aware and ready for their chance to take over and to ‘do it right,’ which we have struggled with doing here in the past,” Kendrick said.

“This is the most important class you will ever take in your high school career because you need to know your rights,” teacher Erin Lindt tells her students in Cheyenne, Wyoming. “You need to know if there is an issue, how to solve a problem. I think our world is headed in a really scary direction, and my generation has shown that they’re not going to solve it. But we can get the next generation to.”

It’s going to take a lot more than conversations in classrooms, at conferences and during one annual competition, though, to change the trajectory for civics education, even at a time when some state legislatures have passed bills to enhance civic education.

After the last 2020 contest between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, Scott Warren, the founder of Generation Citizen, lamented that students aren’t learning “meaningful discourse, or how to discuss controversial issues. … When we fail to properly prioritize and fund civics education holistically, our discourse and democracy erode.”

To be sure, there are plenty of encouraging efforts, as Dubé notes, pointing to the iCivics games and videos played more than 9 million times a year.

And Michael Rebell argues in his book “Flunking Democracy” that failure to teach civics is a violation of both federal and state constitutions that can only be addressed by the courts, as some are now doing. (Rebell is the executive director of the Center for Educational Equity and a professor at Teachers College, Columbia University, where the Hechinger Report is an independent, nonprofit unit.)

In the months to come, we’ll be updating our project to include more student voices, essays and ideas on how to improve civics education. We welcome yours: Write to editor@hechingerreport.org

I’ve already reached out to a few experts who have spent years pushing for change, wondering how they are finding optimism.

“What gives me hope is that, despite the lack of formal efforts to reform civics education, so many of our kids are finding ways to go out into communities and get their hands dirty,” said Jonathan Collins, a writer, political scientist, and education policy scholar, also based at Teachers College, Columbia University. “They’re starting new organizations dedicated to addressing our society’s most pressing problems. We’ve left them in the dark, but they’re finding their own lights. It’s beautiful to see.”

There will be many other efforts and court arguments in the months and years to come no matter who wins in November, but let us hope for now that the voices of students will carry the day.

“I’m not satisfied with the way the world is right now,” Ethan Bull, a Las Vegas student activist whose parents work in the casino industry notes, while preparing for the competition. “But I try not to let all the negativity in the world get to me. Because if I let it consume me, then maybe I might become just another generic person who’s complacent with the system.”

Contact editor in chief Liz Willen at 917-690-2089 or willen@hechingerreport.org.

This story about civics education was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our newsletters.