Is Civics Really Not Taught Anymore? A High School Teacher’s Perspective and Practical Tips
I was folding voter registration forms at my desk after school last month when a 16-year-old junior stopped by to ask for a college recommendation letter. We wrapped that up quickly, and he nodded at the stack of bright pink forms on my corner and asked what they were for. When I explained any 17-and-a-half-year-old can register early to vote in the fall election, he blinked and said, “Wait, our city council actually decides how much property tax goes to our school budget? I never learned that.”
Earlier that week, I’d asked my 10th grade combined U.S. history class to name one of our state’s two U.S. senators, and less than a third could raise their hand. By the time parent-teacher conferences rolled around a week later, I’d gotten the same question three times: Is civics really not taught anymore?
I’ve been teaching at this public high school in suburban Ohio for 18 years. When I started, every 10th grader took a full year of civics, separate from U.S. history. Now, that full-year class got cut more than a decade ago, when the state added a mandatory end-of-course exam for U.S. history that counts toward our school’s overall rating and state funding. Now civics gets squeezed into a 9-week segment at the end of the year, right after we finish covering everything from Reconstruction to the Vietnam War, just in time for the exam. There’s barely time to memorize the three branches of government, let alone talk about how local government actually works.
At conferences last week, a dad who works as a local carpenter pulled me aside after we talked about his son’s writing grade. He said his oldest just graduated two years ago and couldn’t explain the difference between a primary and general election when they were talking about the governor’s race last fall. “What are you guys even teaching over here, if not that?” he asked. I didn’t have a good quick answer for him. It’s not that we don’t want to teach it. It’s that when every minute of class time is tied to a test score that determines whether we keep our reading intervention specialist or our after-school tutoring program, something has to give.
I have a 12-year-old daughter in middle school, so I’ve been figuring this out at home too, not just in the classroom. Civics doesn’t have to be a full semester class to stick, I’ve learned. You don’t need to buy a textbook or do a big unit on the weekend. You just have to point it out when it’s right in front of you. Last spring, we drove past the new playground going up at the end of our street, and I told her the $1.8 million for that playground came from a bond issue we all voted on three years ago. The city council picked this spot after 40 people showed up to a public meeting to complain that the only existing playground was two miles away on the other side of town. She just nodded, but I saw her file that away.
Last month, the school board voted on whether to cut the middle school soccer budget to pay for emergency roof repairs at the high school. My daughter plays JV, so we went to the meeting. She wrote out a two-minute statement asking the board to take the money from the planned new administrative office suite instead of cutting soccer. She got up and said it in front of 20 people, and when they voted at the end of the meeting, that’s exactly what they did. On the drive home, she said, “I didn’t think just talking would actually change anything.” That’s the whole point of civics, right? That’s the thing you can’t learn from a textbook.
For parents, it’s the small, low-effort things that work best. Next time you get a candidate flier in the junk mail, don’t throw it away immediately. Sit down for two minutes with your kid and point out what office they’re running for, and one thing they say they want to change. When you go vote, bring your kid along even if they’re too young to cast a ballot – show them the check-in process, explain what you’re doing and why. Most kids have never even seen anyone vote in person, and that small experience sticks way more than a lecture.
For teachers who are squeezed for time, you don’t have to rearrange your entire curriculum. Steal 10 minutes a week for a quick local civics check-in: pull up one story from your local news site about a decision that affects your students. Last semester, I did 10 minutes on our school board’s vote on later start times for high school, and my students talked about it for the whole rest of the period. They care way more about that than memorizing the date of the 17th amendment, anyway.
So is civics really not taught anymore? For the most part, it’s not taught the way it was when I was a student, or even when I started teaching. Most public schools don’t have the time or the funding to dedicate a full year to it anymore, and that’s a problem. But it’s not a lost cause. Civics isn’t just memorizing facts for a test. It’s understanding that the people who make the decisions that affect your daily life are regular people, and that you can be one of those people if you want to be.
That junior who asked me about the school budget ended up registering to vote that day. He told me he’s going to spend 20 minutes this month looking up each candidate’s position on school funding before he casts his ballot next year. That’s a small win. We still don’t have that full-year civics class back, and I still have to squeeze my civics lessons in between test prep. But that’s okay. Civics doesn’t have to be perfect to matter. It just has to show up, in the small, everyday moments, when kids realize they already have a stake in how things work.
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