Is Civics Really Not Taught Anymore? A Middle School Teacher’s Small, Doable Tips
Dismissal bell clangs through the hallway, and I’m kneeling to pick up crumpled mock election ballots off the linoleum. Javi from my homeroom hangs back to help stack chairs, orange Cheeto dust crusted on the cuff of his gray hoodie. He pauses mid-stack, tilts his head, and asks, “Wait, my mom keeps talking about voting for senator next month. What does a senator actually do? All I see them do is yell at each other on the news.”
A week before that, I sat across from Javi’s mom at parent-teacher conferences, and she asked me the exact same question, just phrased differently. She sipped lukewarm PTA coffee, flipped through Javi’s progress report, and said, “Is civics really not taught anymore? I had a whole class every year growing up. I had to memorize the articles of the Constitution and put on a mock town hall for parents. Javi says he hasn’t done anything like that since fifth grade.”
I gave her the honest answer most public school teachers will give you these days: No, we don’t usually have standalone, required civics classes in middle school anymore. Our district cut ours two years ago to add 20 minutes of daily reading intervention, because state funding is tied directly to ELA and math test scores. It was that or cut the art program. It’s not that anyone doesn’t care; it’s just a trade off most districts have had to make. Most of us squeeze what we can into other classes. I’m an ELA teacher, so civics fits neatly into reading and writing, but it’s never the structured, consistent experience people remember from their own school days.
Last month, I proved that gap to myself when we read a short local news article about the city debating whether to turn the empty lot two blocks from school into a parking lot or a community park. Half the class raised their hands to ask if they got any say. They had no idea that city council holds public meetings where anyone can speak, even kids. They thought all the big decisions got made by people far away in Washington, with no input from regular people like them.
What a lot of people don’t get is that civics doesn’t have to be memorizing the Preamble or quizzing kids on how many senators each state has. The whole point is to help kids understand that the rules affecting their bus route, their lunch price, their soccer field bleachers get made by people, and that they can have a say in those decisions if they want it. You don’t need a full semester class to teach that, if you build small habits around it.
I started shifting my own lessons a few years ago to fit this in, without adding extra work for me or the kids. When we practice argumentative writing, I skip the generic prompts like “should students have homework” and use real, local issues that actually affect them. Last semester, kids wrote arguments for or against the district switching to a later middle school start time, which every single kid had an opinion on. Then we mailed the top 10 letters to the school board. Two of my kids got a personal reply back saying the board was already considering their points. That’s civics, way more useful than memorizing the three branches of government for a quiz you forget a week later.
For parents, it’s even easier to fit this into daily life, no lesson plans required. You don’t have to turn dinner time into a political lecture. Just slip small, connected questions and observations into your existing routine. When you’re driving to soccer practice, point to the new stop sign they just put in at the end of your street and say, “Did you know the city council voted to put that here after a bunch of parents asked for it? A kid got hit here a couple years ago, so people spoke up and it got done.” That takes 10 seconds, and it sticks way better than a textbook definition.
When you go vote, bring your kid with you, and explain what you’re doing as you go, step by step. I do this with my own 10-year-old: when I fill in the bubble for county commissioner, I say, “This person is in charge of fixing the potholes on the road we take to your grandma’s house, so I voted for the person who said they’ll fix them this year.” No quiz after, no homework, just a simple connection between the name on the ballot and something he cares about. When the sample ballot or voter guide shows up in your mailbox a week before election day, spend 5 minutes flipping through it with your kid. Point out 1 or 2 things that matter to them, not just the big presidential race. “This question here would pay for new playground equipment at the elementary school down the street. That’s why I’m voting yes on it.”
After Javi asked me what a senator does, we pulled up his local senator’s webpage on my classroom computer. We scrolled down to the section on local projects, and saw that the senator had helped get state funding for the new bleachers we got on our soccer field last year. Javi’s eyes got big. He’d sat on those bleachers every week for a year, and had no idea the person his mom was voting for had anything to do with that. A week later, Javi and three of his friends wrote a short letter to that senator asking for more water fountains by the practice field. They haven’t heard back yet, but that’s not the point.
I still wish we had that dedicated, year-long civics class for every middle schooler. There are still huge gaps, and too many kids never get these small moments if their teacher doesn’t have time to squeeze them in, or their parents don’t think to bring it up. But it doesn’t have to be perfect. Civics isn’t something you teach once in a big unit. It’s something you build, one small conversation at a time. Right now, that’s what’s working for the kids in my room. We’ll see where it goes.
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