Do Schools Still Teach Civics?

The kids are heading back to school as the Trump administration threatens criminal charges against our state and city officials and broadcast his eagerness to bring federal troops to our streets. So it is not a coincidence that I get asked this question by friends and neighbors who know I study civic education in schools.

The question comes wrapped in hope and fear. We know that education is the lynchpin of democracy, a thin rope holding up our fragile political system. We know that new forms of ignorance are loudly on the march today. And we know that demagogues rely on popular ignorance to turn resentment into “solutions,” which are then used to end the democracy that got them elected. It’s an old story.

The founders of our politics knew this—they had read the Greeks, Locke and Montesquieu. They knew, as Madison wrote in the Federalist, that men are not angels. Accordingly, they built structures into the Constitution in hopes of preventing tyrranical concentrations of power: the checks and balances and separation of powers you probably learned initially in school. Is this curriculum still taught?

The short answer is Yes, schools in Washington and across the US do still teach civics but not as much as they used to and not as much as they could.

Let me elaborate by sketching civic education at the three grade levels—elementary, middle, high—and then peer into a gaping problem in the lower grades. I’ll end with some low-hanging fruit that could strengthen civic education in our state.

First a definition. “Civics” is the study and practice of democracy, and here are its basic questions:

1. How is our government organized?
2. How did it get that way?
3. What makes it a constitutional democracy (aka a republic) and how is that different from the alternatives?
4. What are the rights and responsibilities of members (citizens)?
5. What are the main political debates and compromises now and in the past?
6. How do we sustain the patriotism—Lincoln’s “bonds of affection”—needed to hold ‘We the People’ together in a common union?

Here’s a tip: To see the civics curriculum at school you must look for it in the “social studies” curriculum. This is school jargon for a group of four subjects: history, government, geography and economics.

In elementary schools, you should find state and national social studies at grades 4 and 5. If a school has decent resources and good leadership, you’ll also find something like Communities or Geography in grades 2 – 3. This grades 2-5 sequence is customary (it goes back about a century), teachers around the country in past decades were accustomed to teaching it, it laid in lots of basic civics vocabulary, and it’s what our state education office in Olympia still recommends today.

In middle schools, the 6th grade social studies curriculum is typically world history and geography. This provides an important comparative perspective, so it is not to be dismissed as non-civics just because its reach is global rather than local. Then we have 7th-grade state social studies and 8th-grade national social studies. Notice that this is the second cycle of state, national, and world social studies.

In high schools, students get another cycle of world history (10), national history (11), and US government (12). In some schools (larger, better resourced) there will also be electives in Economics and Comparative Government.

But there’s a problem. It starts in the elementary grades and bubbles up from there. In the two decades since Congress passed an act called No Child Left Behind, we have robbed Peter to pay Paul. The grades 2-5 social studies sequence has been starved to feed instruction in reading and math. NCLB mandated testing in these subjects with stiff penalties for what were dubbed “failing schools.” Its furious focus on reading and math led to the near exclusion of social studies and therefore civics in the elementary curriculum.

Washington state participated fully. Social studies administrators were let go, curriculum materials weren’t purchased, professional development for teachers was focused on raising scores in reading and math. It continues today: The director of social studies instruction at the state education office is gone as of last month, and none of the state’s mostly rural Educational Service Districts now has a social studies leader.

This matters because the decimation of elementary social studies undercuts later learning. That’s because learning is, if anything, cumulative. The things you know well—whether your vocations or hobbies—are things you have learned over time, cyclically. Civic learning in middle and high school is built atop a foundation that was laid earlier. Facts, concepts, and skills learned roughly in the lower grades are then revisited, revised, and fleshed out in the upper grades. This isn’t repetition, it’s spiral learning and it leads to subject mastery.

This learning progression is now broken. The bedrock of civic learning has been squeezed out of elementary schools and the effect—the ignorance—flows upward from there. How far? Maybe all the way to the civic mess we are in now.

The path to strengthening civic education in Washington schools is clear enough. First, restore robust social studies education to the elementary grades. The easiest way to do this is to reestablish the curriculum that was extant in our elementary schools before NCLB: the grades 2-5 sequence described earlier. This can overlap the elementary reading curriculum since students don’t read reading; they read content. Why not civics? Second, restore a social studies manager to the state office in Olympia and to the nine service districts. The state’s nearly 300 school districts can’t be expected to accomplish this restoration without someone coordinating the effort. Surely this much we can afford. Our republic depends on it.