The survey came out Monday, and I’ve been carrying one number from it since my walk. The iCivics organization polled 2,197 K-through-12 educators across the country and found that 58.7 percent of civics teachers worry about teaching the subject the “wrong way.” Not wrong in the sense of getting a date wrong or misquoting the Fourteenth Amendment. Wrong in the sense that someone will decide the way they explained how a representative democracy functions will cost them their job, their peace, or both.
That’s a majority. More than half of the people whose job it is to explain American self-governance to the next generation are afraid to do it.
The study also found that 35 percent of civics teachers have already changed or removed lessons because of the political climate in their school or community. Twenty-one percent are thinking about leaving the profession. Those numbers are bad on their own. But the one underneath them is harder. Only about 20 percent of the surveyed teachers have actually experienced backlash. The fear is running three times larger than the incidents.
That isn’t a comforting gap. That’s what a successful chilling effect looks like from the inside. When the fear works well enough, the confrontations don’t have to happen. The lesson gets revised quietly, between Monday and Wednesday, by a teacher who has decided that what she was going to say about the Voting Rights Act isn’t worth what it might cost her. Nobody calls the principal. Nobody has to.
I want to be careful not to make this simpler than it is.
We’ve been arguing about civics education in this country for longer than I’ve been covering politics, and the arguments have been real ones. How much weight to give the founding documents versus the people they left out. Whether a teacher has an obligation to what gets called neutrality on questions where neutrality requires ignoring the historical record. Whether the point of a civics class is to explain how the government works or to instill a particular feeling about it. Those fights aren’t settled, and I’m skeptical of anyone who thinks they should be. I spent nine years covering Congress and I can report from experience that adults who attended excellent schools hold genuinely incompatible theories of what American self-governance is supposed to produce.
But there’s a difference between arguing about content and a profession that’s learned to be afraid.
The scores tell part of the story. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, 22 percent of eighth graders are proficient in civics. Fifteen percent in U.S. history. The two lowest-performing subjects in the entire assessment, in exactly the subjects that explain how all the others connect to a functioning country. Meanwhile, the federal government spends $66 billion annually on education and sends $23 million of it to civics. Less than a tenth of one percent for the course that explains what the rest of government is for.
Right now, 240 bills in 40 states are touching civic education. They aren’t the same bills. Some states are adding requirements. New Hampshire and nine others are passing civic seal legislation for high school diplomas. Some bills are trying to protect teachers from political interference. Others are the source of it. They’re fighting with each other, which would be instructive if the students were watching.
The real problem with the civics fight isn’t that people care too much. It’s that the fight has become a proxy for other arguments that don’t belong in a classroom, and the teacher in the middle pays the price. The calls that reach principals aren’t usually about whether students can explain how a conference committee works. They’re about which version of American history gets told, and whose discomfort gets protected. Those are real disputes, but they’re landing on a subject that already has proficiency scores in the low twenties.
Karen and I talked about this at dinner on Thursday. She spent thirty-five years as a court reporter in Hamilton County, watching professionals find the line between what their job required and what the room would allow. She said: “It’s not the Constitution they’re scared of. It’s the phone call.”
She’s right about the phone call. Here’s what it looks like in the versions I’ve followed.
A teacher explains the Voting Rights Act. The act exists; it has a text, a legislative history, a Supreme Court record. A parent decides this is political. The call goes to the principal. The principal has a budget and a board and a school board election ahead. The teacher, who earns $52,000 a year and has her own family to think about, looks at the lesson plan and makes a calculation. Nobody fires her. Nobody has to. The unit is quieter next year.
I’m not describing one side’s version of what goes wrong. The pressure runs in both directions depending on the school and the ZIP code. I’ve seen teachers lose that kind of fight for being too conservative and for being too progressive, and I’ve watched administrators protect the wrong one for ideological reasons in both cases. What the iCivics survey captures isn’t an assault from a single direction. It’s an atmosphere, and atmospheres don’t require incidents to do their work.
The hollowing out of public institutions tends to happen exactly this way. Not in one decision but in a hundred small ones, each defensible on its own, none of which announces itself as the moment something essential disappeared.
My mother read the newspaper every morning for sixty years. She argued about what was in it with anyone willing. She had opinions about the city council, the state legislature, and every president who came and went while she sat at the kitchen table. She didn’t need a course that taught her to do that. But somewhere, at some point, she’d learned that the argument was worth having. That understanding what was happening in the country was both possible and her business.
That’s what I mean when I say citizenship is something you learn. Not the mechanics alone, though the NAEP scores say we’re failing at those too. The conviction that the country is yours to understand, that its workings are your concern, that you have both the right and the obligation to know what’s being done in your name. We saw earlier this spring that the conviction can survive a great deal of pressure when people choose to act on it. The other side of that story is what happens when we stop handing it down. A democracy where the people charged with that work have become afraid to do it has a problem that goes past any curriculum debate.
The fear is doing its work. Somewhere in a school in a city I can’t name, a teacher is looking at a unit on equal protection and making a calculation about what next Tuesday will cost her. I don’t know what she decides. But what she decides is part of the answer to a question this country has been deferring for a long time about what we actually mean when we say it belongs to all of us.
