Whatever Happened to Civics Class?
Dear Leading Ladies,
Before November’s Election Day, we wrote about the importance of voting in local elections. We stressed the important role that local officials such as mayors, school board members, sheriffs, and state representatives have in making decisions that affect everything from the curricula taught to our children to the way our criminal justice system works. The case seems airtight to us: We need to look locally when we consider how to effect change in policing, educating, imprisoning, housing, and caring for ourselves and our neighbors.
And yet.
Only 7.1% of the voters turned out for the September primary and 27% for the November election in Beverly. That’s a sorry commentary on the importance our citizenry puts on local government.
What could make this change?
Of course, we can support efforts to end voter suppression and to increase voter registration. We can hold signs and write letters about the impact of local elections on our everyday lives. We can lobby for a federal Election Day holiday to make it easier for working people to vote.
But there is something else, something long term, that we can do. We can support and invest in school curricula that teaches our children how government works and how they can participate in it.
Civics education has significantly waned since the 1960s. Where it does remain, it appears as a high school class late in a student’s education. What long-term effect might a well-planned civics education program, starting in elementary school, have on voter turnout? Several recent studies have tackled this question.
LA Johnson/NPR
According to the PEW Trust in May 2021, the United States simultaneously “disinvested in civics education and poured money into science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) coursework.” The U.S. now “spends a thousand times more per student on STEM education than on history and civics,” according to the Center for Civic Literacy at Indiana University.
The lack of investment shows: A quarter of Americans cannot name a single branch of government, according to a 2020 national survey by the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.
A renewed interest in civics education in schools has emerged from the events of January 6, 2021. “The deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol in January and the continuing misinformation about the presidential election have left many Americans deeply worried about the state of their democracy. Some legislators on both sides of the aisle say the extreme political divisions spring in part from a fundamental lack of understanding about the country’s history and how its government works,” according to the PEW report.
While it might seem encouraging to learn that 42 states and the District of Columbia require at least one course related to civics, according to a 2020 report from the Brookings Institution by Rebecca Winthrop, most of these courses are in high school and many are only for a semester. More upsetting is that “70% of 12th graders say they have never written a paper to give an opinion or solve a problem and 30 percent say they have never taken part in a debate—all important parts of a quality civic learning.”
Abby Kiesa, director of impact at CIRCLE at the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts University, believes civic education is a matter of equity in access to democracy. “In order to really make access equitable, and to make participation more equitable, schools should integrate civic education, high-quality non-partisan teaching for elections and voting into their schoolwide culture,” Kiesa said in 2018 in the California School Board Blog. “Civic education is a learned behavior, and when a young person turns 18, there’s nothing automatic that happens. So we actively need to support systems and opportunities for young people to learn what it means to be civically engaged, or to have space to be civically engaged, and learn how to navigate the voting election system.”
But how do we know if this works?
Kelly Siegel-Stechler, now at Tufts Tisch College of Civic Life, writing in the Journal of Social Studies Research in 2018, reports that a study she conducted showed “a significant positive association between taking a civics course and extracurricular participation in high school, and likelihood of voting as a young adult, even after adjusting for other determinants of civics education and voter turnout”.
Referencing early educational reformers such as John Dewey, she notes, “An underlying purpose of public education has always been to support the functioning of our society by creating informed and engaged citizens who contribute to the public good, in part through the democratic process. Citizens, and especially participatory citizens, are necessary for democracy to function, and therefore public schools, as a state institution, have an interest in preparing youth for active citizenship.”
Her survey, of 4,483 respondents, aged 18–24, went beyond measuring intent to vote and linked “adult voting to their recall of high school experiences.” Since the “study suggests that taking a civics course in high school does have an association with political engagement, specifically the likelihood of voting, later in life,” Siegel-Stechler concludes that civics education is an “important component of education for democracy.”
Further corroboration comes from a CIRCLE/Tisch College 2020 Student Survey which found that “Students who had not received encouragement to vote from teachers in high school were more than twice as likely to agree with the statement ‘Voting is a waste of time’ as those who had been encouraged: 26% vs. 12%.” In addition, young people were “more likely than their peers to know if their states had online voter registration, and at least 10 percentage points more likely to respond that they had seen information on how to vote by mail, and to state that they would know where to go to find information on voting if their state’s election was shifted to all mail-in ballots.”
Not your high school civics class
What is recommended for today’s civics classes does not look like what many of us may remember from high school. One of the newer models comes from CivXNow, a bipartisan coalition of more than 100 academic and research institutions, learning providers, and philanthropic organizations. They want civic education to include:
“Civic knowledge and skills: where youth gain an understanding of the processes of government, prevalent political ideologies, civic and constitutional rights, and the history and heritage of the above.
Civic values and dispositions: where youth gain an appreciation for civil discourse, free speech, and engaging with those whose perspectives differ from their own.
Civic behaviors: where students develop the civic agency and confidence to vote, volunteer, attend public meetings, and engage with their communities.”
Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg of Tufts University’s Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement believes civics education should begin at a young age. In a 2018 article in The Atlantic, Alia Wong references Kawashima-Ginsberg as describing middle school students undergoing “dramatic developmental and intellectual changes that render them particularly ripe for understanding the importance of civics.”
Wong also promotes the idea of civics education crossing into other disciplines. “Early civics education might connect with students more easily if it’s woven into the existing fabric of everyday schooling—for example, into a science lesson on pollution, or a history class where students are learning about Native Americans.
Alisha Kirby, the California School Board Blog’s author, concurs, suggesting math classes where “lessons on stats or analytics can be taught using local, state or national voting data.” She also points to a course designed by CIRCLE and UC Riverside to supply K–12 teachers with strategies to engage students, even when vast resources are not available.
What can we do?
Find out what your local school district is offering as civics education for students. If there is nothing or only a semester in high school, find out how you can share the research and options cited here with your local superintendent and school committee. Suggest that students be required to pass the US Citizenship Test, or something similar, as a requirement for graduation. By the way, take the test yourself and see how you do. You may gain a deeper respect for what new Americans must master in order to gain citizenship. Just one in three Americans would pass, according to a 2018 report released by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation and referenced in an article in The Atlantic.
We also recommend exploring civiceducator.org, which posts articles about civic education programs in schools around the country.
Enjoy the coming holidays. And think about putting a game or two about civics on your gift list for at-home fun and education! Some suggestions are Politicraft – An Action Civics Card Game; Mapmaker: The Gerrymandering Game; Constitution Quest Game; The Agenda Game; Super-PAC$: The Game of Politics About the Game of Politics; The Presidential: The Most Powerful Game in the World; and Election Night.
With hope for peace and light during this holiday season,
Therese
Judy
Mary
Beth
Leading Ladies Executive Team
ladies@leadingladiesvote.org
leadingladiesvote.org