Civic Education Requirements

Shawn W. McCusker is director of professional learning at Digital Promise, a nonprofit dedicated to closing the digital learning gap and supporting teachers in schools across the United States. Shawn has twenty-five years of experience as a teacher and leader in public, private, and alternative schools. He is passionate in his belief in student-centered, experiential learning and the power of student storytelling. He was an early innovator in the creation and organization of online learning communities via Twitter, such as #sschat and #1to1techat.

Shawn works with schools across the United States developing teacher capacity in technology use, blended learning, creativity, and engaging civic education strategies. He regularly presents on these topics at conferences across the United States.

As an expert in technology integration, his lessons and student products have been featured in The Journal, Educational Leadership, and Education Week. In 2006, he was recognized as a finalist for the Golden Apple Award for Excellence in Teaching. In 2016, he was named a Top Trailblazing Educator on Twitter by eSchoolNews.

Shawn received a bachelor of arts in history from Northern Illinois University and a master of arts in educational leadership from Concordia University Chicago.

To learn more about Shawn’s work, visit https://gowhereyougrow.wordpress.com, or follow him @ShawnMcCusker on Twitter.

To book Tom Driscoll or Shawn W. McCusker for professional development, contact pd@SolutionTree.com.

Introduction

What is civic education?

According to the Annenberg Classroom (n.d.), civic education is “teaching the knowledge, skills, and virtues needed for competent citizenship in a democracy.” One way of interpreting this definition is that civic education is providing each student with what they need to live in a democracy. Another is that we are preparing students to understand democracy so they can ensure it survives for future generations. Democracy and the skills to nurture it are not as easy to come by as you might think. Democracy is hard work. It demands a lot from its citizens in order to function properly.

It is for exactly this reason that Canadian psychologist Shawn Rosenberg (2019) predicts in his paper, “Democracy Devouring Itself: The Rise of the Incompetent Citizen and the Appeal of Populism,” that democracy won’t survive. His core argument is that democracy asks citizens to respect people with different backgrounds and beliefs. It requires them to sift through large amounts of information to determine what is right and what is wrong, and what is true and what is false. Democracy requires that citizens be thoughtful, disciplined, and logical (Shenkman, 2019). In Rosenberg’s (2019) opinion, American democracy has a basic structural flaw. It has not successfully created the citizens it needs to survive. If it is to survive, it needs to immediately create citizens who have the cognitive and emotional capacities that democracy requires.

While we do not agree with Rosenberg that it’s too late for democracy in the United States and the world, we do agree that we are not doing enough to prepare citizens. We need to fundamentally change how we approach the task. Most government instruction takes place in the form of lecture or discussion,

without any interactive participation. In the United States, 70 percent of students will never write a letter, share an opinion, or help solve a problem as part of their civic education. Fifty-six percent of students will never take part in a mock trial or government simulation; fifty-three percent will never take a field trip or venture out of their classrooms; and thirty-one percent will complete their civic education without ever taking part in a debate (Hansen, Levesque, Valant, & Quintero, 2018). It seems that something key is missing from modern civic education—the part in which students get to actually be citizens.

If you wanted to teach someone to swim, how would you do it? How would you have him or her begin? The obvious answer—get him or her in a pool—seems pretty simple, right? Each year, millions of people learn to swim by getting in a pool, holding the side, and kicking furiously. Each year, parents and swim instructors get in a pool, hold out their arms, and beckon a soon-to-be swimmer to jump in. Eventually, these swimmers will have the confidence to take that leap for themselves.

Every day in the United States, on average, eleven people die from drowning, and twenty-two more people drown but are saved from death by a rescuer (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2021). The main reason for these drownings, both fatal and nonfatal, is the lack of swimming ability. A contributing factor is the lack of access to pools and swimming instruction and the fear of deep water that results (Denny et al., 2019). African American children are more than five times more likely to drown than White children in the same age group due to a lack of basic skills that are the direct result of limited access to pools and swimming instruction in their communities (Gilchrist & Parker, 2014).

Similarly, the overall voting rates of Americans ages eighteen to twentyfour have been falling since 1964. The erosion and devaluation of civic education programs in schools are a contributing factor (Duer, 2016). Whether in pools or in politics, limited participation results in limited experience. Students with experience behave differently compared to those without it. To continue with the analogy, those with access to pools are more likely to swim. Those who receive high-quality civic education are more likely to vote, discuss politics, contact the government, and take part in other civic activities like volunteering (Guilfoile & Delander, 2014).

The trick is being able to get in the water. But let’s say we, as educators, didn’t have access to water. How would we teach students to swim and never once get in a pool? We could create lessons. We might have to rely on lectures. We could create a PowerPoint lesson on proper breathing and effective kicking. We could show them videos of Olympic athletes swimming and analyze their form. Advanced students who do well on the tests might take an advanced course on diving, and we could create a completely land-based course on lifeguarding.

Ridiculous, right? Would you want a student who had been through this type of training to jump into a pool? No, of course not.

And yet, this is exactly the model that we now use in schools to teach government and civics classes that are supposed to prepare students to become active, participating citizens in the world’s greatest democracy. As you will see in chapter 1, the majority of civics instruction takes place in the classroom in the form of lecture or discussion. In most cases, schools are not required to have students participate in the processes of government or in any meaningful way. Much like in the swimming example, students merely hear about citizenship before they are asked to jump in and participate in democracy. It’s as ridiculous as jumping in the pool after virtual swim lessons.

It doesn’t have to be this way. We can do better. We know what better looks like. In simple terms, we need to “get students in the pool” and teach them what to do by having them do it.

The Need for Civic Education Reform

As of 2018, nine states in the United States did not have a civic education course requirement, including Alaska, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Montana, New Jersey, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington (Hansen et al., 2018). Consider the level of confusion and frustration this could cause students who are not required to receive instruction on the structure, principles, and mechanisms of democracy and how it would prevent them from being able to engage in the processes of democracy in even the smallest way. Citizens won’t value and respect democracy if they don’t understand how the structure of the U.S. system was established to divide power and keep the reins of government in the hands of citizens rather than the hands of those who rise to power.

In 2003, the Carnegie Corporation of New York and Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) published The Civic Mission of Schools, which lays out a vision of a richer, more meaningful approach to civic education in the United States. It identifies a growing trend of cynicism toward government institutions and civic engagement among U.S. students and, in general, U.S. society. The report states that schools have the powerful potential to address this trend by providing high-quality civic education programs and addressing the inequalities of civic and political education, and identifies six promising approaches to civic education (Carnegie Corporation of New York & CIRCLE, 2003). The report was well received, but its vision of renewed civic education never came to be, largely because of bad timing.