What to Look for In a Good Civics and U.S. History Curriculum: Recommendations From a Middle School Teacher
The coffee I spilled on my lesson plan folder bled through the edge of Jake’s progress report halfway through our fall parent-teacher conference. The smell of leftover PTA microwave popcorn hung in the room, and Jake leaned against the wall outside the door playing a game on his phone, while his mom twisted the strap of her canvas tote. “He came home last month crying that all history is just a bunch of old men who owned slaves and no one ever talks about what happened after,” she said. “Is that… all there is to it?”
I get that question at least once a month, from parents of my students and from other homeschool parents who follow my small education social media account. I’ve been teaching middle school social studies for 12 years, and I’ve tested more civics and U.S. history curriculums than I can count, both for my classroom and my own 10-year-old at home. Right now I have a stack of them on my dining room table, one chewed at the corner by our golden retriever, and I’ve got a pretty good idea of what works and what doesn’t.
The first thing I tell people is that a bad curriculum doesn’t just bore kids—it makes them think history is irrelevant, that civics is just a list of rules they’ll forget after the test. The first textbook I was required to use when I started teaching devoted 12 pages to the Constitutional Convention, two paragraphs to the 19th Amendment, and one single sentence to redlining. Most kids checked out by October, and I couldn’t blame them. I started supplementing with my own materials, and eventually testing full alternative curriculums that actually meet kids where they are.
For public school teachers working on a tight or non-existent budget, I always point people to the free civics and U.S. history curriculum from the Stanford History Education Group first. Every unit is built around primary sources instead of pre-written textbook summaries, so kids get to work with the actual words people wrote at the time instead of just memorizing someone else’s takeaway. When we teach the New Deal, for example, kids don’t just memorize the names of alphabet agencies. They get a handwritten letter from a Black sharecropper in Alabama explaining how he was excluded from most New Deal housing and work programs, and a memo from a white FSA administrator justifying that exclusion. Then they have to debate the question: Was the New Deal a success? There’s no right answer printed in the back of the book, and kids get to build their own opinion from the evidence. Last semester, Jake led that 25-minute debate, and he stayed after class to talk about how his grandma had grown up sharecropping in Mississippi and had never talked about what programs she did or didn’t get. That’s the point of history, right? It connects to them.
For homeschool parents looking for an all-in-one option that doesn’t break the bank, the one I’ve used with my own son is The American Story by Jennifer Armstrong, paired with the free Civics 101 curriculum from the Center for Civic Education. A lot of curriculums split civics and history apart, shoving civics into one end-of-year unit on the three branches of government. That’s useless to kids, because they don’t care how a bill becomes a law if they never see how it affects their daily life. Good curriculums weave civics into every unit of history. When you teach the Voting Rights Act of 1965, that’s both history and civics: you talk about how voting access is still being debated in your state today, how your local school board members are elected, and how to register to vote once you turn 18. That’s the stuff that sticks.
If you’re stuck with a school-approved curriculum that’s out of date, you don’t have to overhaul everything to make it better. There are low-lift things you can do as a parent to supplement at home. I tell parents to pick up a copy of The 1620 Project workbook for elementary or middle schoolers, which costs less than $20, and it centers Native American and Black experiences from the start of colonization instead of adding them as afterthoughts. For older kids, pair their textbook units with 20-minute episodes of the Throughline podcast, which connects historical events to current news for free. And for civics, just do one small thing a month: go sit in on a 30-minute open portion of your local city council meeting, or pull up the agenda for your next school board vote and talk about one issue your kid cares about, like dress codes or new playground equipment. It doesn’t have to be fancy.
I’ve had parents ask me if curriculums that center multiple perspectives are “too biased” for kids. The truth is, every curriculum is biased. The old textbook that ignored redlining and Indigenous displacement was biased towards a narrative that made one group of people look good, at the expense of everyone else. A good curriculum doesn’t tell kids what to think—it gives them the sources to think for themselves.
Last week, my son came home from outdoor ed, mad that the park ranger talked about the “founding” of the local state park without mentioning that the state kicked the Cherokee nation off that land to build it in the 1930s. We pulled out the primary source collection I use for my class, read a letter from a Cherokee leader written at the time, and looked up the current fight to get tribal land returned in our state. It’s not perfect. I still add extra materials to even the best curriculums every year, and there’s no one option that checks every box for every family or every classroom. But the good ones stop treating kids like empty vessels that need dates stuffed into them, and start treating them like the citizens they already are. We’re still figuring it out, unit by unit, year by year. But these recommendations haven’t let me down yet.
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