Six Things State Leaders Can Do to Invigorate US Civics and History Learning

As the nation’s 250th birthday nears, civics education is once again a hot topic, and deservedly so. It hurts to see how little American young people know about the country’s past, its core principles, and how its governments are designed to work. It hurts more to confront evidence that many appear to be losing faith in democracy itself—a worsening problem as domestic discord and conflicts deepen over the role of government itself.

Education leaders face a heavy lift: The National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the “Nation’s Report Card,” last tested eighth graders in civics and US history in 2022. The grim results showed just 22 percent reaching “proficient” in civics and a dismal 14 percent attaining that level in history. At the same time, a 2023 survey reflects generational differences in confidence in democracy in general: Just 37 percent of those ages 26–41 strongly agreed that democracy is the best system of government, compared with 62 percent of those ages 58–64 and 75 percent of those older than 77.[1]

Nobody should expect schools to do it all, but they have a clear role when it comes to knowledge and skills and a substantial role when it comes to the formation of attitudes and values. And state education leaders—especially state boards—have a role, too. They must sort through some fervent disputes and make good decisions: on standards, assessment and accountability, as well as incentives for districts’ selection of quality curricula and professional development.

Lively disputes surround what schools should teach and children should learn about how governments work, their own rights and responsibilities, and the attributes of good citizenship in 21st century America. Such disputes typically involve both civics and US history, sometimes the entirety of social studies. They usually center on one or both of these sets of questions:

• Is America’s saga a tale of success—the creation of sound principles followed by ever-improving implementation—or a sorely flawed story of failures, exclusions, and inequality? Closely related, should lessons in civics (and history) aim to foster patriotism or skepticism regarding one’s own attitude toward the land in which one resides?
• Should lessons in civics and history concentrate on core information (e.g., how a bill becomes a law, what federalism is, what President Lincoln did) or on attitudes, concepts, and skills? Closely related, should such lessons emphasize what one knows about government or how one participates in it (sometimes termed “knowledge civics versus action civics”)?

These are important differences, to be sure, especially in a time of political polarization, and it is possible they could lead to radically different curricula and instruction in various parts of the land—a “red state civics” and a “blue state civics,” diverging most on topics such as race and gender.

Today’s “culture wars” undoubtedly make the job of teachers and school leaders harder, as they try to navigate conflicting pressures from parents, officials, and interest groups. In more than a dozen states, lawmakers have been seeking to limit what can be discussed in class, even as the airwaves, social media, and official missives signal from Washington that national officials are “cracking down” on topics and practices they do not favor and teachers are reported to be “censoring themselves” to avoid criticism and controversy.[2]

Reasons for Optimism

There is ample reason for concern but no cause to panic. Conflicts like these need not paralyze those seeking to strengthen the teaching and learning of civics and history in 2025, the semiquincentennial year of the Declaration that follows, and the decades thereafter.

Much of the curricular Sturm und Drang in civics and history appears to be the handiwork of a relatively small number of “conflict entrepreneurs” whose daily fare consists of hurling brickbats and stirring up trouble and whose visibility and income are derived from the same. By overwhelming numbers, ordinary Americans agree to a great extent about what schools should teach and children should learn about civics and history.

In February 2025, the University of Southern California’s Dornsife Center for Applied Research in Education reported widespread agreement (71 percent) that US schools are doing a mediocre or poor job of preparing students to be good citizens. But they also found strong, often bipartisan agreement about what schools should teach their pupils in this realm as well as what civics-related activities students should engage in and schools should encourage. Agreement is not total, but it is sufficient for the analysts to conclude that

Contrary to political rhetoric, there is high overall support—and a recent narrowing of the partisan divide—for students learning civics topics in school. There is high overall and cross-partisan support for students learning about civic education topics through a wide range of instructional activities.[3]

A second source of optimism for civics-education boosters is the emergence in recent years of worthy consensus-seeking efforts at curriculum development. These generally start with the well-founded conviction that the correct response to the “big choice” questions above is some version of “yes, both.” There are several examples:

• The Educating for American Democracy “roadmap” spans K-12 civics and history. It contains a comprehensive roster of probing questions (but not answers) that students and teachers should grapple with at various grade levels.[4]
• The Civic Literacy Curriculum developed at Arizona State University starts with the 100-question US naturalization test but goes far beyond it.[5]
• A model K-12 social studies standards called American Birthright was developed by the conservative-leaning Civics Alliance.[6]
• The exemplary Advanced Placement course in US Government and Politics, developed by the College Board in collaboration with the National Constitution Center.[7]

In addition, groups such as iCivics, the Bill of Rights Institute, and the Jack Miller Center have amassed sizable collections of resources (including games) to deepen educators and students’ knowledge and understanding of American history and government.

Structural Challenges

These efforts do not resolve all the challenges that await conscientious policymakers who want their schools to help young people grow into good citizens who are well informed, principled, and engaged. But the toughest challenges are not hot arguments and angry politics. They are structural, involving priorities, accumulated negligence, and institutional rigidities. I count six main ones.

Academic Standards. By themselves, standards do not teach anyone anything. Rather, they describe a desired result, usually one grade at a time. They thus serve as a starting point for curricula, assessment, teacher preparation, and more. To quote George Harrison, “If you don’t know where you’re goin’, any road will take you there.”

At least since enactment of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) in 2002, state leaders have taken standards seriously in the federally mandated subjects of reading, math, and science. Civics and history do not typically get the same attention.

My colleagues at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute reviewed state standards for those two subjects in 2021, examining their content, rigor, clarity, and organization. The reviewers gave “honors” grades to civics standards in just 18 states and to US history standards in 17. Only five were “exemplary” in both. Twenty were rated “inadequate.” The authors dinged standards that “[p]rovide overbroad, vague, or otherwise insufficient guidance for curriculum and instruction; omit or seriously underemphasize topics that are essential to informed citizenship and historical comprehension; and make poor use of the early grades or fail to revisit essential content in later grades.”[8]

Standards are malleable—and entirely within the control of state leaders. Several jurisdictions have revised their standards since publication of the Fordham study, and others are working on them. However, changes do not always improve the result.

Instructional Time. The second big challenge is the trivial place those subjects occupy in most states’ curricula and graduation requirements. RAND reported in 2023 that the typical US elementary school devotes just three hours a week to social studies.[9] The Council of Chief State School Officers reported in 2018 that almost half of US school districts had reduced the time given to this subject in the aftermath of NCLB’s failure even to mention it, much less to measure student and school performance in this realm.[10]

Middle schools tend to give one period a day to social studies, but that may also encompass world history (or global studies), geography, economics, state and local history, and perhaps a bit of sociology, psychology, and anthropology. In Maryland, for instance, the state’s sixth- and seventh-grade social studies framework describes it as “a two-year experience in which students employ geographic, economic, civic, and historical tools to understand how big geographic questions link the past to the present.”[11] All worth doing, to be sure, but quite a lot more than US history and civics.

In high school, students are usually required to take such courses as American History and Civics (or American Government)—but just once. Civics often lasts just half a year if there is a separate course at all, although some states require students to pass a civics exam. My team at the Hoover Institution tabulated graduation requirements in civics in 2024:

• Eight states—Alaska, Delaware, Kansas, Maine, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Wyoming—require neither a civics course nor a civics test.
• Four states—Idaho, Louisiana, Virginia, and West Virginia—require a full-year civics course and the passing of a standard civics test.
• Sixteen states require a half-year civics course and passing a civics test.
• Sixteen states and the District of Columbia require a half- or full-year course but no test.
• Pennsylvania and Wisconsin have no course requirement but require students to take a civics assessment—although Pennsylvania does not require passing it.[12]

Bear in mind that those half-year and one-year requirements are typically the only civics requirements during a typical high school education, though schools may offer electives such as the AP class “United States Government and Politics.”

Accountability. Few states incorporate civics learning into their assessment and accountability systems for students, teachers, or schools. The main exceptions are the 20 states that require high school pupils to pass a civics test before graduating, although in most of them the passing bar is low and the test deals only with basic knowledge, usually drawn from the naturalization test. As RAND researchers observed:

[S]tudent achievement in social studies remains largely absent from states’ accountability frameworks … and, in the rare cases in which states do factor in social studies achievement, it is weighted at much lower levels than student achievement in other core subjects…. One factor that severely limits states’ ability to include indicators of social studies achievement in their accountability systems is a lack of social studies assessments…. [O]nly a handful of states use a statewide summative assessment in social studies like they do in ELA and math. Typically, states do not assess at all in this subject area…. Furthermore, some of the states that historically assessed students in social studies suspended their assessments because of the COVID-19 pandemic—while retaining test requirements in other subjects—a signal that social studies is seen as a lesser priority.[13]

Teacher Preparation. The fourth challenge is the slipshod preparation of civics instructors, who typically get certified as “elementary” or “middle school social studies” teachers with minimal obligation to have studied civics, American government, or US history, nor any requirement to pass a proficiency test in those fields. One can often elect to major in psychology or sociology while taking few courses in history or American government, emerge with a generic social studies license, and then teach those key subjects.

Unsurprisingly, many teachers report feeling ill prepared. RAND analysts concluded this from a 2020 survey:

We asked teachers to tell us, on a scale from “not prepared at all” to “very well prepared,” how prepared they felt to promote their students’ civic development within their classes. A little more than 60 percent of all teachers indicated they felt “somewhat prepared,” and only 19 percent responded that they felt “very well prepared”.… About one-quarter of all elementary teachers indicated they felt that they were “not prepared” or “not very well prepared” to teach civic development.[14]

Civics Learning Everywhere. Citizenship is not something one learns in a single class. It is shaped by so much that one learns and experiences in school and the rest of one’s life—or fails to experience. Learning in literature, science, and the arts also shapes civics learning, as does what happens on playing fields, in student government, and in other extracurricular pursuits.

Role models also matter greatly: teachers, coaches, neighbors, preachers, team captains, and, of course, parents and family members. If the adult influencers in one’s life seldom vote, do not scrupulously obey laws and rules, seldom engage in civic or neighborhood activities, pay scant attention to current affairs, ignore or berate those who disagree with them, and fail to treat others with civility, even the finest civics class likely cannot compensate. The formal education system must do its part, but it occupies only a portion of childrens’ lives and cannot do it all.

Curriculum. All the solid curricula, frameworks, standards, and supplemental materials for teaching civics and history will not matter if they are not widely used. Surveys show that social studies teachers, especially in the earlier grades but frequently in middle and high schools, too, are scrounging, improvising, and piecing together lessons rather than deploying top-notch curricula for which they have received suitable professional development and ongoing support.[15]

What Should a State Policymaker Do?

State education leaders and policymakers who are serious about civics learning have several powerful levers within their grasp—and even more that they can do by way of leadership and suasion in realms where they are not entirely in charge.

The starting point should be the state’s academic standards, ensuring that these do a solid job of specifying the K-12 system’s desired outcomes in civics and US history. They should be rigorous and content rich. Skills and dispositions matter too, and it is good to give students experience in the real world, possibly via student government or community service.

One may start by checking Fordham’s five-year-old review of the state’s extant standards.[16] Consider the criteria used as well as what the reviewers found and recommended. Perhaps look at the standards of states that aced that review and what can be learned (or borrowed) from them.

Consider the Educating for American Democracy roadmap, which has the makings of exemplary K-12 standards in both subjects, and take a look at the Civic Alliance’s model. Oversimplifying, the former asks the right questions while the latter supplies much factual content that students will need to develop thorough answers to those challenging questions.

When the standards are in good shape, state leaders should ensure that their schools have access to high-quality curricula aligned with the standards. Though local discretion is needed in the touchier elements of these subjects, any state-sanctioned (and paid-for) materials should focus on top-notch content from the earliest elementary grades through high school.

Yet exemplary standards and curricula do not accomplish much unless schools have ample space in their days and years to give these subjects their due, whether in distinctive social studies classes, infusing this content across the curriculum, or both. (There is room within English language arts, for example, for many history and civics topics and examples.)

Nor can this work be accomplished unless states also ensure that schools successfully teach it and students successfully learn it by building civics and history into results-based accountability and report cards for elementary, middle, and high schools. State leaders might also consider an end-of-course exam or something similar for students at least once during the K-12 years. The naturalization test, focused as it is on basic information, is a starting place, but a sophisticated assessment and accountability plan contains much more.

For any of these reforms to succeed, teachers must be well prepared to help their students learn civics and history, which means policymakers—including those responsible for higher education—should review certification and licensure requirements with these subjects in mind. They should also ensure that high-quality professional development is delivered to those already teaching to boost their knowledge and pedagogical skills.[17]

Finally, state leaders would do well both to ensure that ample attention gets paid—in school and out—to the upcoming semiquincentennial of the Declaration of Independence in 2026 and then build on it. View it not as a one-time celebration but as the beginning of a decade in which Americans recall the nation’s founding and its grand if unfinished saga. This renaissance in civics and history education might culminate in the 250th anniversary of that hot Philadelphia summer of 1787 that produced the Constitution. State leaders, as well as educators and students, should bear in mind Benjamin Franklin’s response when asked what sort of government was forged at that time: “A republic,” he said, “if you can keep it.”

Notes

[1] McCourtney Institute for Democracy, “Mood of the Nation: Americans’ Belief in Democracy,” poll, January 18, 2023.

[2] See, e.g, American Historical Association, “Teaching History with Integrity: Freedom to Learn,” web page.

[3] Anna Saavedra et al., “Agreement across the Aisle: Schools Should Prepare Students for the Rights and Responsibilities of Citizenship,” report (University of Southern California, February 2025).

[4] Educating for American Democracy, “Educating for American Democracy: Excellence in History and Civics for All Learners,” report (iCivics, March 2, 2021). (Full disclosure: I’m on EAD’s steering committee.)

[5] Arizona State University, Center for American Civics, “The Civic Literacy Curriculum,” website.

[6] Civics Alliance, “American Birthright,” web page.

[7] College Board, “AP United States Government and Politics,” web page.

[8] Jeremy Stern et al., “The State of State Standards for Civics and US History in 2021,” report (Fordham Institute, June 2021).

[9] Melissa Kay Diliberti, Ashley Woo, and Julia H. Kaufman, “The Missing Infrastructure for Elementary Social-Studies Instruction: Findings from the 2022 American Instructional Resources Survey,” research report (RAND, 2023).

[10] Chief State School Officers Association, “The Marginalization of Social Studies,” infographic (2018).

[11] Maryland State Department of Education, Grade 6 and 7 Social Studies Framework, September 2023.

[12] Sophia Craiutu and Jed Ngalande, “State Civics Requirements in 2024,” essay (Hoover Institution, December 2024).

[13] Diliberti, Woo, and Kaufman, “The Missing Infrastructure.”

[14] Laura S. Hamilton, Julia H. Kaufman, and Lynn Hu, Preparing Children and Youth for Civic Life in the Era of Truth Decay: Insights from the American Teacher Panel (RAND, 2020), 48.

[15] Diliberti, Woo, and Kaufman, “The Missing Infrastructure.”

[16] Stern et al., “The State of State Standards for Civics and US History in 2021.”

[17] Educating for American Democracy, “Pedagogy Companion to the Roadmap to Educating for American Democracy.”