School Leaders Say Civic Learning Marginalized by Test Pressures in Other Subjects

by Shawn P. Healy, PhD, Democracy Program Director

In June, I recapped an administrator academy that Lead Teacher Mentor Mary Ellen Daneels and I delivered for Springfield (IL) Public Schools. The academy was designed to build greater support for school-based civic learning among administrators, familiarizing them with new state policies impacting civics, but also making the empirical case for doubling down on civic learning.

Education Week has increased its coverage of civic learning in the wake of the 2016 Election and Parkland tragedy earlier this year. This spring and summer, respectively, they conducted and reported on a national survey of school leaders’ views on civic education (n=524). More than half of school leaders (52%) said that their schools provide “too little” civic education. The remaining 48% said there was just the right amount (one administrator said there was “too much”).

These leaders are seemingly well-positioned to support expanded civic learning opportunities for students, so what’s holding their schools’ back? As evident in the chart below, civics does not suffer from a lack of student interest. And contrary to the contention of many educators with whom we work, teacher training opportunities are a challenge in only 16% of cases. Similarly, there are few reported shortages of curricular materials to teach the subject.

Current and controversial issues endemic to high-quality civic learning fail to scare off the vast majority of administrators, and only 15% report challenges making civics a school or district-wide priority.

All of these challenges cast aside, the remaining, glaring obstacle is “pressure to focus on subjects other than civics because they are tested and emphasized.” More than half of school leaders suggested that this is challenging to very challenging (51%), and another 28% considered it somewhat challenging.

These findings are helpful as they allow us to focus our energies on breaking down civics’ marginalization by other prioritized and/ or tested subjects. One strategy centers on district and state policies, as civic learning and the social studies more generally should be treated as core subjects with credit and/ or hours of instruction requirements coequal to math, English language arts, and science.

Some states like Florida have had great success in pairing a civics course requirement with a high-stakes exam. For political and economic reasons, this option was and is not on the table in Illinois, but we must not punt the assessment question. Civic knowledge, skills, attitudes, and behaviors can be measured, and a consortium of states, Illinois included, is currently developing instruments to this end.

A second strategy encompasses both research and communications. There is some empirical evidence that high-quality civic learning opportunities correlate with student success across the board, but more must be done to examine the relationship between civic learning and students’ social and emotional development, related impacts on school climate, and potential links to student attendance, engagement, and graduation.

I’m confident that further research will affirm what we know anecdotally and experientially, and these findings should be paired with an effective communications strategy. We have long made the case for civic learning on the basis of preparing young people for informed, effective participation in the civic life of our communities, state, nation, and world. But reading, math, and science are ascendant because they have been successfully linked to preparation for college and careers. Civic learning has much to add here too in terms of both “hard” and “soft” skills. The field must therefore employ the advocacy skills we teach to elevate civic learning to its rightful place at the center of schools’ missions.