- Education
- Revitalizing American Institutions
This essay is adapted from The American Civic Education Ecosystem, a report by the Hoover Institution’s Center for Revitalizing American Institutions and its Working Group on Civics and American Citizenship. Click here to download the report.
A common narrative about civic education in the United States is that it has steadily declined over recent decades. The “anemic” state of civic education, as one participant in our research described it, has in recent years sparked an influx of concern, resources, and ideological debate—amounting, in effect, to a sudden flood of attention. While this renewed momentum offers opportunity, educators attempting to revive civic education face challenges presented by the abundance of resources and ideological fragmentation within the civics landscape: challenges that are exacerbated by a lack of funding, commensurate professional development, and explicit attention to bridging and building common ground.
There is broad agreement that civics does not receive the attention it deserves across the educational ecosystem, including K–12, higher education, and civil society. We heard
repeatedly that standardized testing requirements prioritized other subject areas, squeezing resources for civic education. This is aptly conveyed in the 2021 Educating for American Democracy report, which states that “recent waves of federal education reform from the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 to the Race to the Top grants of 2009—have largely neglected [civics and history].”
Additionally, an increasing focus on STEM has tended to crowd out other educational priorities, notably civics. And still, while relatively greater attention is now being given to civic education, the funding has yet to follow. Ted McConnell, the executive director of the Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools, highlights the 2019 US government expenditures at approximately $54 per student to further STEM learning and a “paltry” 5 cents per student for civic education—a number low enough for the Orrin G. Hatch Foundation to call for a hundredfold increase in federal funding for civic education in its “Commonsense Solutions to Our Civics Crisis” (2020) policy brief.
The effects of insufficient investment in civic education for our youth are well documented. As shared in a recent Institute for Citizens and Scholars report surveying more than four thousand young adults (ages eighteen to twenty-four), almost half of respondents (40 percent) can correctly answer only one out of four standard civics questions.
This has consequences for civic participation. The same study reports that 35 percent of youth do not feel informed enough to participate politically. As another indication, 80 percent of respondents who score high on civic knowledge plan to engage in at least one civic activity in the upcoming year, whereas only 40 percent of low civic knowledge scorers intend to be civically engaged.
This “generational marginalization of civic education,” as described by Shawn Healy of iCivics in “Momentum Grows for Stronger Civic Education Across States” (2022), is not only affecting our youth but has led to a nation that is in “civic crisis,” as described in a recent Time article. These sentiments of civic crisis were acknowledged by numerous participants in our landscape assessment and are reflected in the data. Reports from the annual Civics Knowledge Survey at the Annenberg Public Policy Center have varied in recent years (with new methods), but estimates in their 2023 report suggest that somewhere between a half to a third of all adults are not able to identify all three branches of government. This and multiple other measures taken into account by the Annenberg Public Policy Center underscore the troubling reality that “one is unlikely to cherish or work to protect freedoms one does not know,” as reflected by Director Kathleen Hall Jamieson.
Moreover, the lack of shared civic knowledge likely contributes to broader ills in our society. In their 2024 Every Student, Every Degree report, the Civic Learning and Democracy Engagement (CLDE) Coalition drew from several sources to demonstrate a variety of dimensions in which confidence in democracy itself is declining.
Civics without tribalism
The overwhelming majority of participants across our focus groups and interviews embraced the idea that civic education is foundational to the American Republic and democratic governance, and that it must transcend ideology. While we anticipated ideological divisions in civic education, participants blurred the lines of the civics culture wars much more than expected. By this we mean that some progressives shared opinions typically attributed to conservatives, some conservatives shared opinions typically attributed to progressives, and so on. Participants largely embraced pluralistic views and emphasized that high-quality civic education is not a partisan endeavor. They saw it as essential to rebuilding our shared capacity to engage constructively across differences and to uphold democracy.
This perspective is perhaps best captured in the 2021 Thomas B. Fordham Institute report The State of State Standards for Civics and US History in 2021: “There is no such thing as ‘progressive civics’ or ‘conservative civics,’ because if you have to put an adjective in front of it, it isn’t really civics.”
Unfortunately, this does not shield civic education teachers and faculty, particularly at public institutions, from the impacts of ideological differences in the public and among policymakers, and the impacts of affective polarization. As one of our interviewees noted, some ideologically motivated and polarized policymakers are eliminating civic education programs and efforts across the country, especially ones that “appear to influence students to think a certain way.” Takeovers of state curricula are one indication where content expertise and educators are being replaced by political ideology and politicians. As one civics expert and former public official shared: “I am aware of a lot of theater.”
Some advocates and pundits, too, have had outsized voices, drumming up views at the margins. Several interviewees described a phenomenon of “conflict entrepreneurs”: those who are exacerbating ideological divides and causing us to over-index on our differences in spite of research that suggests widespread public agreement on the need for civics and many shared elements of core civics content (for example, the USC Dornsife Center’s Understanding America Study). In other words, the culture wars and conflict entrepreneurs have perpetuated an “unnecessary false dichotomy,” as one interviewee at a private university stated.
Perhaps the most well-known manifestation of the culture war is the duel between theNew York Times Magazine’s “1619 Project” and the first Trump administration’s “1776 Report,” but there are many others. Chester E. (“Checker”) Finn, Jr., Volker Senior Fellow (adjunct) at the Hoover Institution, sums it up in a piece on the “civics war ceasefire” saying, “The civics conflict is unnecessary, driven more by cultural combatants and politicians than by vast divides among parents and citizens regarding what schools should teach and children should learn.”
A concerning empirical study shows that we are punished by our ideological in-group for any sense of fraternizing with our ideological out-group. In other words, there are strong incentives not to recognize the validity of others’ experiences and ideas. By contrast, again and again in our conversations we heard messages foregrounding commonality, and a desire to move beyond partisanship and politics to restore both trust in and the efficacy of institutions of education. But we need explicit and persistent efforts to uplift our common ground.
Searching for coherence
There is undoubtedly renewed momentum. There are numerous frameworks, reports, content resources, platforms, scholarly articles, and organizations contributing to, even flooding the current landscape.
This renewed momentum is, however, not without its challenges. The landscape is quite noisy and often seen as incoherent. Additionally, some of it is ideologically driven, and the incentive structures, implementation support, professional development, and funding within traditional education systems are not yet sufficient. Throughout our research, educators and civic leaders emphasized the need for greater support and coherence to help them more effectively, and with less confusion, interpret and implement the many resources available to them.
We therefore ought to consider the important roles we all can play to nurture that shared national conversation. Indeed, our highest-level observation and corresponding set of proposed opportunities relate to the imperative to leverage the resources and renewed energy to elevate our common ground in advancing civic education. We heard, over and over, that our nation’s shared concern about our civic health requires, first and foremost, a civic learning ecosystem that is ideologically pluralistic yet fundamentally rooted in democratic values and principles.
