To Reverse the K–12 Civics Crisis, We Must Reform Higher Ed

C ivics education in America is in bad shape. Every four years, the Department of Education administers a National Assessment of Educational Progress exam that tracks students’ scores in civics and history. The 2022 scores released a few months ago are grim, demonstrating significant declines for eighth-graders from four years ago. In fact, after a small increase, civics scores have returned to 1998 levels, showing that — despite over two decades of civics reform — little progress has been made.

Those of us in the civics space frequently hear about the dire state of civic knowledge of students and average citizens, accompanied by a call to action. The solution that civics-education reformers typically provide is to focus on civics practices that foster engagement, including classroom instruction, service-learning, and discussion of current issues. Given the results, however, it seems worth considering what might be missing from current reform efforts, and whether anything can be done to save us from pushing the boulder up a hill, only for it to roll back down again.

We should be clear about one thing: The poor results cannot be attributed simply to a failure of states to take action on civics. An organized national movement to reform civic education has been afoot for at least 20 years, going back to the Civic Mission of Schools report in 2003. In the last ten years, 19 states have passed legislation establishing civics courses or strengthening K–12 civics requirements. Twenty-two states have passed laws requiring students to take a civics test, typically based on the test offered by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

It is possible that the fruits of such reforms have yet to be revealed. But we must also consider whether such reforms neglect a more fundamental problem: Our colleges and universities are inadequately educating future teachers in the fundamental knowledge of citizenship. This breakdown in higher education has filtered down to K–12 education, impacting everything from curriculum to classroom instruction.

The problem is not, of course, that universities don’t do civic education at all. Hundreds of centers and offices committed to civic engagement exist on university campuses today. But as Johns Hopkins University president Ronald Daniels has put it: “Service learning, on its own, is not an education in democracy. It generally does not seek to explain why democratic values matter or ask hard questions, such as why democracies have fallen short of values they proclaim.” According to Daniels, it has become “a crutch: a way for university presidents to celebrate civic engagement without explicitly having to provide a civic education.”

Faculty echo worries about this abandonment of the traditional civic mission of the university. Professor James Ceaser of the University of Virginia has written that “the topics of America’s regime principles and of the Constitution are of little or no interest to the mainstream of modern academic political science.” Professor Lee Trepanier of Samford University recently noted that political science offers little to the public as “professors want to teach hyper-specialized and esoteric topics that almost nobody is interested in.”

This aversion to civic education is not limited to the field of political science. In his book A Student’s Guide to U.S. History, Professor Wilfred McClay of Hillsdale College contends that “for most of today’s professional historians, the suggestion that their work might be so written as to address itself to a general public is unthinkable.” History scholarship is becoming narrow and inaccessible, and it is not surprising that the field is in free fall.

As the dismal NAEP scores suggest, higher education’s neglect of civic education has consequences for the K–12 system. The emphasis in higher education on civics as service-learning has had a strong influence on K–12 civic educators. As a recent RAND study demonstrated, the vast majority of U.S. public-school teachers think of civic education primarily in terms of the development of skills. Only 23 percent identify “promoting knowledge of social, political, and civic institutions” as among their top three aims of civic education. And the abdication of civic education by political scientists and historians has, in many cases, left educators unprepared. In a December 2020 report, RAND found that only 20 percent of public-school social-studies teachers felt well equipped to teach civics.

Some trends in higher education suggest that a reversal is afoot. State legislatures are recognizing that universities have largely abandoned their civic missions and, in response, are creating new institutes, colleges, and schools specifically dedicated to foundational texts and ideas of American democracy, viewpoint diversity, and civil discourse. The first of these was the School for Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership (SCETL) at Arizona State University. But a number have followed at the University of Tennessee–Knoxville, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Florida, five Ohio campuses (including Ohio State University), and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Such independent academic units are created with the explicit purpose of strengthening civic education in the K–12 system. As SCETL director Paul Carrese has detailed, one of its three primary missions is to “support K–12 education and schools in restoring a rigorous American civic education in civic knowledge and virtues about our constitutional democracy.” SCETL offers a graduate program for teachers that is “devoted to the deep study of American civics, history, and constitutionalism.” It also offers a wealth of resources and programs for teachers and students. Other such institutes and schools are likely to follow suit.

It is right for us to lament the recent NAEP scores, but if we concentrate our response on practices such as service learning, we are not likely to see the improvement we desire. Teachers need opportunities to deepen their understanding of the fundamental principles that are the heart of civic education. Higher education has led us to our current state, and it will have to lead us out. New university academic units dedicated to civic education are an essential part of the solution. An enormous effort will be required to make these successful. But if we think that simply staying the course is the way to higher test scores, we should not be surprised if the next 25 years of NAEP results look like the last 25.