I’m back from a very inspiring meeting of civic activists, civic educators, and students in the White House. It was convened by the Domestic Policy Council along with Civic Nation and the Beeck Center, with support from Tisch College and others. Committed and skillful teachers and students attended from selected schools across the country. These students are not just learning about civic engagement, practicing to be citizens, or developing civic skills. They are at the forefront, right now, of addressing the most serious issues in their communities. We need them, and many more like them, to govern the republic better than it has been governed and to achieve justice that has eluded us so far.

We learned that US Secretary of Education John King is sending a “letter of guidance” to all state education agencies about new federal support for the humanities as part of the “well-rounded” education mandate of the Every Student Succeeds Act. As a humanities person, I am glad about that direction, and as a civics advocate, I’m pleased that civics is included among the humanities. 

The US Department of Education has also made civics a core component of the Department’s “Blue Ribbon Schools” program, which recognizes excellence. 

Meanwhile, the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor/HHS and Education recently passed the 2017 appropriations bill, which includes the first funding for civics and American History in years. The appropriation includes $6.5 million for competitive grants to improve instruction in American history, civics, and geography, particularly for schools in under-served rural and urban communities. It also includes nearly $2 million for American History and Civics Academies: professional development opportunities for teachers of these disciplines. For now, it’s just a House appropriations bill, but it’s an important step toward actual dollars for civics.

Washington (DC): I am on a civics road trip: the First Annual Civics Literacy Conference in Massachusetts, an advisory board meeting for iCivics inside the Supreme Court building, and then a meeting with executive branch people.

The public discourse about civic education often takes the form: “Why don’t people (meaning adults) know basic facts about politics? Why do 10% of college graduates think Judge Judy is on the Supreme Court? We should teach schoolkids these facts!”

But almost all students study and face some kind of tests on facts like the number of US Senators. The problem is, adults don’t remember what they learned as kids.

That is because adults are not obligated to retain or update their civic knowledge. You spend 13 years of school learning to read and write. Then, if you have a job that involves written words, you must constantly update your literacy skills. You spend a few dozen hours in school learning about politics, and then you’re a citizen—but that role comes with no rewards or penalties. Nothing bad happens to you if you forget what you learned. Yes, politics affects us all. It is interested in you even if you aren’t interested in it. But just because it affects us all, each of us can let others take care of it.

Some of us do update and even dramatically expand what we learned as kids about civics. The reason is: we’re interested. Something made us feel that politics was intriguing, important, dramatic, and rewarding for us as individuals. I conclude that the main purpose of civic education in k-12 schools is to increase the proportion of young people who reach that conclusion.

One of the most exciting current efforts in civic education–which also has applications far beyond civics–is a project on reinventing the high school civics course led by Walter Parker with Jane Lo and others.

Typically, a civics course involves presenting and explaining a whole lot of material to students, who then face a test to see what they have understood and remembered. Walter has noted that, all around the world, the final-year of high school tends to be dominated by courses that are fast-paced surveys of information, known for being difficult mainly because they cover so much ground. It doesn’t seem likely that students obtain advanced skills or remember much of the content from these classes.

Walter and his colleagues worked with teachers of the American Government AP course to redesign it so that projects become fundamental. The redesign process was a collaboration with the teachers and involved iteration: trying projects, evaluating, and changing the design. In the fully redesigned courses, activities–such as a mock trial, or a model Congress–come first, and students learn the content that is tested on the AP because they need to know it in order to succeed in the projects. As Parker and Lo write in a very valuable new overview article, “Projects carry the full subject matter load of the course. They are not culminating activities that come at the end of an instructional sequence nor lively interludes inserted periodically into traditional recitation.”

As reported in earlier articles, students in the redesigned AP course “did as well or better on the AP test than students in comparison groups, and … found the course and projects personally meaningful.” That means that there is no tradeoff between learning to be an active citizen by participating in simulations and mastering the content tested by the AP. If teachers use this redesigned curriculum, they can achieve both outcomes together.