Midterm election coincides with calls for more civics in school

What are the three branches of government? If you answered, “legislative, executive, and judicial,” congratulations! You did better than three-quarters of Americans in a survey by the Annenberg Public Policy Center. In fact, nearly a third of those surveyed couldn’t name even one branch.

That study and others like it sparked a call for more civics education in the public schools from editorial writers, columnists, talk show hosts, and political figures across the nation and the political spectrum. Annenberg lists well over 100 articles and broadcasts that referred to those survey results in the past two years. Deep political divisions in the nation, combined with expectations of high voter turnout in next week’s election, fed into a renewed sense of civics’ importance.

This week the Massachusetts Legislature passed a bill titled “An act to promote and enhance civic engagement.” One of its provisions specifies that public schools must provide for at least one student-led civics project in eighth grade and another in high school. To showcase the eighth-grade projects, the Legislature called for a commonwealth civics challenge to be in place by the 2022-2023 academic year. The bill also called for a Civics Project Trust Fund to promote civics education and teachers’ professional development. As of Tuesday, the bill was awaiting Governor Charlie Baker’s signature.

From the early 20th century into the 1960s, many high schools had year-long required courses in American government or civics. But those requirements dwindled as the Cold War faded away. And the emphasis on testing math and reading competency under the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 led schools to spend more hours on those subjects. The result was less time for social studies, including civics and government.

Currently, only nine states and the District of Columbia require a full-year civics course. Ten states have no required civics course at all. The other 31 officially require a half-year course—and Massachusetts is a new member of this group.

Massachusetts’ civics requirement is part of a new curriculum framework for history and social science from the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE). The framework, adopted last June, calls for “increased emphasis on civics at all grade levels, including a new grade 8 course on civics.”

The DESE standards for the eighth-grade course require it to include both federal and state government structures, the rights and responsibilities of citizens, a long list of Supreme Court cases on civil liberties and equal protection, and a section on freedom of the press and media literacy.

Eighth-graders at the Bromfield School now take a full year of American history, covering the period from exploration through Reconstruction. Ninth-graders follow up with a year of U.S. history from Reconstruction to the present (or as close to the present as the class can get). Bromfield also offers a one-year course in American government, but it is an Advanced Placement elective, not a course required for graduation. Electives in current events, civil law, and criminal justice provide other opportunities to discuss government and political issues, but only for students who choose to take them.

Kathleen Doherty, the curriculum coordinator for social studies at Bromfield, wrote in an email that Harvard’s curriculum already incorporates much of the state-mandated civics content. Asked about the possibility of changing the eighth-grade curriculum from U.S. history to a half-year civics course, she wrote, “We as a department frequently discuss civics; we have discussed a stand-alone civics course for years, but have always come back to the idea that this subject is best done when embedded into the content of other courses.”