Civic education, at its best, helps prepare young people to be the next stewards of America’s constitutional democracy. But today’s political environment increasingly asks it to do something else: Save democracy itself. For many, civic education has become a shorthand for producing better citizens according to one political vision or another, rather than its classical purpose of equipping young people to think, deliberate, and participate.

To this end, the central question, then, is not simply how we expand civic education, but what we believe it is ultimately for. Too often, advocates treat civic education as a solution, or even the solution, to democratic dysfunction itself, rather than as one institution among many that prepares citizens for democratic life.

Clear evidence exists that the subject has been systemically deprioritized in our K-12 schools and universities in recent decades. In a recent New York Times op-ed piece, Harvard professor Danielle Allen attributes this decline primarily to political polarization, arguing that, “adults could not agree on what should be taught about our country’s political history, and as a result the kids had been taught nothing at all.”

Danielle is right that the renewed attention to civic education is encouraging, and that the Educating for American Democracy initiative represents one of the field’s most significant achievements in recent decades. By bringing together scholars and practitioners from across the ideological spectrum, the effort demonstrates that meaningful common ground remains possible even amid deep disagreement.

But even if we succeed in bringing civic education back into our schools, foundational challenges remain. Political disagreement today is not only about what happened in history or which facts students should learn. More fundamentally, many Americans disagree about the very purpose of democracy itself. The challenge runs deeper than polarization over curriculum. It reflects competing understandings of what the American system of democratic self-government is ultimately designed for.

For some, democracy is primarily about protecting individual liberty. For others, it is about advancing equality. For others still, it is about preserving a moral and cultural inheritance grounded in religious character. These are not gaps in knowledge- they are fundamental disagreements about what democracy is for — and no curriculum can close that gap.

I co-founded a civic education organization, Generation Citizen (GC), in 2008, when it was still difficult to persuade funders and policymakers to take the field seriously. I led the organization for 12 years, and continue to support its work. Having spent more than a decade leading GC, I’ve watched the field’s resurgence with both appreciation and unease. The appreciation is genuine: Efforts to promote pluralism, collaboration, and engagement across differences are sorely needed. The unease stems from what that resurgence has revealed about why so many people began to care.

Prior to 2016, civic education struggled to attract sustained attention. After Donald Trump’s election, that changed almost overnight. Our organization’s budget quadrupled in less than a year. But the flood of interest belied a basic assumption that many of our supporters implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, would note: Americans could only have voted for Trump because they lacked an adequate understanding of democratic institutions and norms. Civic education was less a tool for developing independent civic thinkers than a corrective — a way to bring misguided citizens back to the right conclusions.

That assumption has not gone away. In the work I lead today, focused on broader democracy reform, civic education almost always emerges as a societal corrective from both the left and right. When concerns arise about executive overreach, the weaponization of government, or threats to electoral institutions, from divergent partisan perspectives, a common reflex is to bemoan the lack of civic knowledge and capabilities amongst young people and call for more civic education. The logic is straightforward: If Americans better understood democratic institutions, they would be more likely to support them. But understanding how an institution works and trusting it are not the same thing.

Recent research we conducted with colleagues at Johns Hopkins and ReD Associates illustrates this distinction. In deep interviews with conservatives across the country, we found that skepticism toward democratic institutions often stemmed not from ignorance of how those institutions work, but from a belief that they had become disconnected from the purposes they were meant to serve. Participants could often describe institutions in considerable detail. Their challenges with these institutions focused on whether they remained legitimate, trustworthy, and aligned with their understanding of the common good. These individuals didn’t lack civic education. They had civic grievances — and those are not the same problem, and do not have the same solution.

Effective civic education can help young people understand institutions but it cannot, by itself, persuade them that those institutions deserve their trust. Conflating learning about institutions and asking young people to trust them asks civic education to solve problems that are ultimately political rather than educational.

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This temptation to use civic education as a political corrective is not confined to one side of American politics. The Trump Administration recently announced the America 250 Civics Education Coalition, a partnership of organizations largely aligned with the Make America Great Again movement, many of which advocate a “patriotic education” emphasizing national pride and shared civic inheritance. Where the post-2016 progressive impulse was to use civics to rebuild faith in institutions, this coalition’s goal is seemingly to use civics to instill a particular national identity. The ultimate goal is different, but the assumption underneath is similar. Both approaches begin with a vision of what an ideal democratic citizen should believe, and work backward to a type of civic education designed to produce that citizen. Both treat the outcome as settled and the education as a means of getting there.

The work of Danielle and her colleagues on Educating for American Democracy illustrates the most promising path forward precisely because it does not pretend these disagreements can be resolved. The EAD framework invites students into enduring debates about patriotism and solidarity, equality and liberty, rights and responsibilities. Its ambition is not to eliminate disagreement but to prepare students to engage it thoughtfully. That strikes me as the right aspiration.

Yet even a framework as carefully constructed as EAD cannot answer the larger question that continues to shape our politics: what and who is democracy ultimately for? No curriculum or framework can resolve that debate, because it is itself one of the central questions democratic citizens inherit.

The answer, then, is not to expect less from civic education, but to expect something different. Schools should absolutely teach students how American government works, how elections function, what constitutional principles have shaped our history, and how citizens can participate effectively in public life. They should expose students to competing traditions of American political thought, like those that argue for limited government versus a more expansive state. Students should study moments in history when our institutions strengthened democracy and moments when those same institutions fell short. In other words, they should prepare students to think politically, not simply to think alike.

But what should change is how we judge the long-term effects of civic education. Right now, both sides of this debate — supporters who helped to quadruple our budget after 2016, and the coalition building “patriotic education” today — risk measuring success the same way: By their perception of the health of democracy. In other words, they assess the effectiveness of civic education by asking whether students end up trusting the right institutions, or believing the right story about the country. These implicit metrics are not about good education, but about political persuasion and conversion.

A better standard of effective civic education may be both more narrow and more demanding. Can a student accurately state the strongest version of a political position they themselves reject? Can a student explain why others might not trust an institution they themselves trust? This type of civic education focuses on the disagreements that have always defined American democracy, and always will.

Civics education cannot save democracy. It can, however, prepare citizens capable of renewing it.

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Also worth watching is this panel from the National Constitution Center with Danielle, Colleen Shogan, and (the surprise jokester) Jon Meacham, which was also the opening event for the National Conference of Mayors — a context that gave the conversation about democracy and civic education a lot of added relevance.

From Democracy 201, don’t miss this great essay about First-Year Writing programs and civic learning (and don’t forget to activate your subscription to Democracy 201):

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And Stanford’s Eva Lacy wrote a great piece about the Civic Profile self-assessment — take the quiz and get yours!

Lessons for the 250th:

• 250 Reasons This Is the Time for a Renaissance in Civic Education: Virginia embraced an effort to renew students’ patriotic zeal that could be a blueprint for other states, by Aimee Rogstad Guidera for Education Next.

• How Can We Talk to Kids About Patriotism? A conversation with Declaration of Independence expert Danielle Allen by Lori Hough for Harvard’s Graduate School of Education blog.

• Reflections on Teaching the Declaration by Danielle Allen for the Jack Miller Center.

• Teaching the Declaration of Independence with hashtags 250 years later By Cara Tabachnick for CBS News.

• Don’t Let America’s 250th Pass You By, By Vince Stango and Julie Silverbrook for The Fulcrum

• The forgotten lesson from 1776 that could rescue democracy in 2026, By Rutgers’ Nicholas V. Longo and Elizabeth C. Matto for NJ.com, calling for “a revitalization of public-spirited institutions.”

• America Is a Story We Tell Ourselves: How do we reconcile the promise of the Declaration of Independence with everything we know about our country? By Kaitlyn Greenidge for Harper’s Bazaar.

• At 250, the Declaration of Independence Still Sparks Hard Questions in Class: Teachers say debates over citizenship and equality are reshaping how students read the declaration today. By Greg Toppo for The 74 and The 19th.

• Talking to Young Children About America 250: Considerations and Strategies, By Megan Pamela Ruth Madison for Teaching for Change.

• America’s 250th is an invitation to help kids understand exactly what this country is all about: being “the founders of today,” by Lindsay Cormack for the New York Post.

• Students Without a Country? By Andrew D. Carico for RealClear Education on “informed patriotism.”

• America at 250: A birthday letter to my refugee students, by Adam Sudmann for the Syracuse Post-Standard.

Civic learning in the spotlight:

• Making Democracy Flourish in the Classroom: A Karsh Institute fellowship for K–12 educators is exploring how civic learning can prepare students for democratic life. By Natalie Ermann Russell.

• Why Faculty Need Experiential Learning Too, by Dara N. Byrne, Dean, Macaulay Honors College (CUNY) on the the Faculty Civic Academy, a faculty externship model.

• From The Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley:

  • This Grad Season, the Future Might Be in Good Hands After All: At a time of uncertainty, Gen Z’s creativity, compassion, and commitment to change offer reasons for optimism, By Katherine Reynolds Lewis on Oberlin students.

  • How Do You Learn to Care When Caring Is Your Job? See how a pharmacy school is teaching students to step outside their comfort zones and care for patients with different backgrounds, beliefs, and access to power, By Juliana Tafur and Kelly Rafferty.

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Hear from young civic leaders:

• Made By Us is continuing to publish Letters to America — I really enjoyed Sofia Segarra’s, about including women and immigrants in American constitutional democracy: Can America Keep it?

• What will Philly look like in 25 years? These kids wrote plays about the changes they want to see. “It’s freaking amazing,” one student playwright said of seeing her work on stage, brought to life by professional actors. By Kristin A. Graham for the Philadelphia Inquirer, on Philadelphia Young Playwrights’s Civic Theater Project.

• Can We Choose Democracy? By Isabel Papp for The Fulcrum: “Democracy is not a fixed state but a continuous negotiation. It means having a voice and fighting to keep it in the conversation, even when things seem to be going well.”

• From Anguish to Action: How I supported my campus community during ICE crackdowns. By Anthony Marquez, then a student at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, for Liberal Education.

• 5 Practical Lessons from Gen Z Changemakers: The Andrew Carnegie Foundation and Baratunde Thurston join forces on DIY Civics, a new series featuring Citizens & Scholars’ Carnegie Young Leaders in action.

Learning from history:

• The Declaration of Independence: A Radical Document (with Danielle Allen & Mary Bilder) on Stay Tuned with Preet, with a bonus subscriber-only clip on “Trump against civic education.”

• Sojourner’s Truth, by Jocelyn Frye for The Fulcrum.

• As the US turns 250, a forgotten founding influence helps explain its current unease: University of Maine professor Robert A. Ballingall explores Montesquieu’s Enlightenment philosophy about freedom on The Conversation.

• How the Story of Young George Washington Offers Some Important Civic Lessons: A new movie connects with a civics curriculum that goes beyond memorizing dates and places to consider whether Washington made the right decisions. By Martin Slagter at The 74 - shouting out the Bill of Rights Institute, Stand Together, and Mount Vernon. You can also check out Historian Roundtable’s video on the accuracy of the film.

• What Minnesota taught a Buddhist-Catholic immigrant about America at 250: The promise that brought a young exchange student from Sri Lanka to Minnesota is the same one that inspired the Founders nearly 250 years ago. By Patrick Mendis for the Minnesota Post.

• Ask the expert: The ‘pursuit of happiness’ 250 years since America’s inception, an interview with Michigan State U. political scientist Raul Rodriguez.

Civic education in the states:

• ‘Crucial’: New Maryland law lets public school students earn a civic excellence seal on their diploma, from ABC WMAR in Baltimore.

• America’s 250th Birthday Is a Test for Civic Education, By Joshua Dunn and William Lyons for RealClear Education, about the Institute of American Civics (IAC)’s Civics Academies in Tennessee.

• UNC’s School of Civic Life and Leadership partners with rural high school for Adulting 101: The pilot class at J.F. Webb in Granville County included a civics unit led by Carolina faculty.

• As America marks 250 years, Iowans highlight an inclusive view of history, and America’s 250th birthday prompts rethinking of historical markers, from the Iowa Capital-Dispatch and States Newsroom.

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Civic learning resources

• Emma Humphries and Joseph Kahne: Measuring civic education, a recording from iCivics also available as a podcast from Spotify or Apple.

• From the Pew Research Center, a new tool for civic self-reflection: Where do you fit in the political typology? Are you Unconventional Right? Loyal Liberal? Or something else?

• Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum’s new exhibit explores ‘Second American Revolution’ from Illinois Public Media’s The 21st Show.

• Recording available of “Purposeful Pluralism” in Higher Education from the American Enterprise Institute with panelists Angela Hawken, Vice Dean for Research, School of Government and Policy, Johns Hopkins University; and Jenna Silber Storey, Codirector, Center for the Future of the American University, American Enterprise Institute. They highlighted the collaborative efforts between their two institutions to cultivate intellectual pluralism in higher education, including the Civic Thought Project, the JHU-AEI Fellowship Exchange Program, and the Graduate Student Intellectual Diversity Initiative.

• America’s Immigration Waves: 250 Years of Arrivals, from Newsweek. Also from Newsweek, Indiaspora’s 250 at 250 Highlights the Indian Americans that Built America.

• America 250: A Republic Built on Native Land, a series from Native News Online.

Upcoming Events:

1. Unfinished Revolution: Social Movements, Freedom Struggles, and American Democratic Development, for APSA’s Engaging America’s 250th Webinar Series. Tuesday, July 7, 12:30 PM – 2:00 PM (ET).

2. Our Declaration: “We the People” and the Declaration of Independence, a course for educators from the Civic Learning Institute taught by Danielle Allen, beginning July 8.

3. Teaching Difficult Issues in K-12 Schools-Summer Virtual Workshop Series from Penn State’s Hammel Family Human Rights Initiative, begins July 8.

4. Teaching250: Civics Renewal for America’s 250th and Beyond from The Center for Civic Education In Partnership with the National Constitution Center, July 9, 7:00-8:30 pm EST.

5. The American Political Science Association’s 2026 Institute for Civically Engaged Research (ICER) will be held in-person at UCLA in Los Angeles, CA from July 13-16, 2026.

6. Institute on Experiential Learning and Engaged Dialogue, AAC&U, July 14 – 17, 2026: a four-day, online, team-based institute for colleges and universities committed to strengthening applied learning, dialogue across difference, and civic preparation.

7. Smithsonian National Education Summit—Together We Thrive: Towards a More Perfect Union July 14–16, 2026, in person and online.

8. Faith, Freedom, and the Classroom: Navigating the First Amendment and Religious Literacy, an online workshop from the Institute for Curriculum Services (ICS) and the National Constitution Center (NCC), August 25, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm EST

9. International Association for Research on Service-Learning & Community Engagement (IARSLCE) 2026 Conference at Loyola University New Orleans, October 11-13, 2025.

Young people should care about America’s 250^th birthday out of gratitude for those who came before us for advancing this project of self-government. Holding a critical eye to your government is an important aspect of patriotic citizenship, but that criticism is most productive when it comes from a genuine desire to make things better.

College campuses, even — or perhaps especially — the most elite, can function as bubbles around the students inside. Students can become oblivious to the goings-on in the broader community, the state, and the nation. I myself am guilty of ignoring the news headlines that cross my phone screen, or choosing to discuss my upcoming weekend plans and homework instead of the most recent SCOTUS ruling. Obviously, we all do this from time to time, but on my campus, it is the standard.

By the end of my freshman year, I was craving something to pull me out of the bubble. I felt my disconnect with the wider community growing and my sense of civic duty slipping. I applied for and received a student fellowship with the Hoover Institution’s Working Group on Civics and American Citizenship, within the Center on Revitalizing American Institutions (RAI). I found myself suddenly surrounded by other student fellows who shared similar frustrations about our lack of attention to the state of the nation and the world around us. I had the privilege of working alongside faculty and fellows who have devoted their lives to thinking, writing, and leading efforts to increase democratic participation and strengthen our education system. My work with Hoover and RAI drew me out of my campus bubble.

Our largest project has been creating the Civic Profile, a three-part online self-assessment, built to provide individuals, educators, and organizations an opportunity to explore civic knowledge, values, and engagement behaviors. You can take the Civic Profile quiz right now, and based on your responses, you’ll get a report about what kind of values and principles shape your particular civic identity, and how your profile compares to others.

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I wouldn’t have anticipated my highest Civic Profile value to be “constructive patriotism” or my lowest to be “civic solidarity,” but there were many moments where I surprised myself with my choices when the Civic Profile quiz asked me to grapple with two compelling and competing ideas. This pioneering project opened my eyes to the variety of civic identities that exist, and how rarely we have discussions about our views. This lack of conversation can weaken our engagement and strengthen the bubble. We need to think about what we believe and learn about other perspectives, especially as young people actively developing our civic identities.

My Hoover experience inspired me to seek other bubble-breaking opportunities, which led me to spend the winter quarter last year interning for my Congressman in Washington. I began each morning collecting press clips to send to the rest of the office team. This mainly meant summarizing news from our district, along with general news from national sources. After 55 straight days, I expected the news habit to continue back on campus in the spring. Yet within a few days of returning to the dorm and classroom, I felt my newfound public-affairs mindset begin to fade. Fortunately, I was given an opportunity to continue my work with RAI and the Civic Profile.

Civic engagement doesn’t just mean keeping up with current events and voting every few years, although I need to keep pushing myself to do that. It also means holding our government accountable and working to correct the flaws that we see in our immediate communities and beyond – something that feels particularly important to me, with a high score for “constructive patriotism” in my Civic Profile. It means connecting with our neighbors and engaging respectfully with those who hold different views — an example of being a “community builder,” from the engagement section of the Civic Profile.

Working on the Civic Profile, I have been constantly reminded that being engaged can also look like volunteering at a local food bank, being part of clubs on college campuses, or boycotting a specific brand for the way they make their clothing. It means, particularly for my fellow young people, struggling with the complicated reality that we inherited a deeply flawed system, but one that affords us something genuinely rare in human history: relative security, legal protection, and the freedom to dissent. It is up to us to ensure we move it closer to the ideals articulated in the Declaration.

Becoming involved in this project has broadened my perspective on civic engagement, and I hope it has made me a better citizen in the long run. But most importantly, this experience made me realize how important civic education is as a part of my education and college experience. If we don’t learn about the history of winning our rights to vote, or practice disagreeing respectfully in a class seminar, how will we exercise these skills in the real world? The Civic Profile opened my eyes to the plethora of civic identities and to the importance of civic education to help us each cultivate our own.

I encourage others—not just fellow college students—to try the Civic Profile themselves. Yes, take it in observance of America’s 250^th birthday, but please take a bit more time to reflect not just on your own results but also on what it means to be engaged in keeping our “Great American Experiment” afloat. Each of us has a slightly different Civic Profile, a different set of interests, values, and principles. We don’t all have to participate in democracy in the same ways or for the same reasons, but we all owe it to each other – and to those who came before – to get out of our bubbles and do something.

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Eva Lacy (’27) is a rising senior at Stanford University studying Economics and Public Policy. She is passionate about strengthening our democratic institutions through increasing civic engagement and has furthered this passion through a Student Fellowship at Stanford’s Hoover Institution for the past two years. Outside of Stanford, she enjoys spending time outdoors, creating community events, and listening to live music.

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We’re off to a great start with our new Democracy 201 feed! Zachary Cote of Thinking Nation outlined a new minimum standard for history education, and we’re sharing an updated version of Peter Levine’s remarks from the National Summit on Civics in Higher Education held at Tufts in April.

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From Zachary Cote:

From Peter Levine:

I’ve read many tributes to the late historian Gordon Wood over the past weeks, not only to his field-defining work but to his character and his influence as a mentor. ’s for The UnPopulist celebrates how Wood “Explained the True Meaning of the Revolution to Americans.”

The Youth250: Letters to America initiative is collecting wonderful videos and writing from young people. Emiliana Korin’s letter, “America the Brave,” also appears on the Latino News Network:

What I found, every time, was that service was the answer to the questions I kept asking. Not service as performance. The kind that shows you that your presence matters, that you are not a guest in the project of democracy, but an active contributor to it.

Grace Khan’s essay, “Silence Won’t Save The American Dream, So I’m Speaking Up,” appears on Her Campus:

No one loves America more than those who were willing to leave behind everything they’d ever known to come to America, to pursue the American dream. Why should any of us settle for anything less than that?

And Sara Abdulla’s essay, “Letter to America From the First-Generation of Breaking a Cycle,” appears on The Fulcrum:

For America’s 250th birthday, I picture a recommitment to what the founders sought in the revolution and wrote in our founding texts, even when they couldn’t always live up to it. No kings; dignity and respect for individuals; economic flourishing for all, not just aristocrats.

Hear more from young civic leaders:

• Nothing about us without us: youth solutions now, by UP Leaders of Tomorrow Fellowship for the San Antonio Report

• DC Teens Imagine the Future They Want from Everyday Democracy with the DC Public Library

• Teenagers took over Philadelphia city government for a day. Here’s how it went. By Carly Sitrin for Chalkbeat.

• Students Give Hope—For the Country and Its Constitution: Young delegates to the Model Constitutional Convention model the civility and courage needed to tackle America’s toughest constitutional challenges. By Rick LaRue for The Fulcrum.

• To Save Our Schools, Trust Young People: Young people have done more than enough to earn our trust. Policy makers not so much. By Kaya Henderson for the Stanford Social Innovation Review on co-creating education systems with students.

• What Youth250: Our Declaration Taught Me About Youth Leadership, by Omaer Naeem for the Aspen Institute: “we must foster the intergenerational trust that allows a young person’s internal pull to become a public practice. We must stop asking young people to prove they are capable and start building systems that trust they already are.”

Civic learning in the spotlight:

• Americans believe they aren’t being taught enough about democracy:

  A new NBC News poll shows that Americans remain committed to the nation’s founding ideals — but widely feel that schools are not adequately teaching what’s needed to sustain them.

• Engaged citizens built America. Today, civics education is coming back. By Scott Baldauf for the Christian Science Monitor, including quotes from Danielle, Shawn Healy, Nick Longo, and Donna Phillips.

• Brookings Institution Discussion on Civics Education and Democracy: Scholars participated in “Brookings on the Hill: Civics at 250” along with Senators King, Lankford, and Kaine.

• What do donors expect from nonprofits? Civic education! New survey data shows broad, bipartisan support for nonprofits that educate voters, protect elections, and speak up for democracy. By Miranda Carter and Sarah DiJulio for Candid.

• Civic education builds democratic skills for N.J. students, by Aruna Patel for NJ.com on work by the Center for Civic Education and the New Jersey Center for Civic Education

Goals for civic learning

• Civil Dialogue Alone Won’t Prepare Students For What’s Next, By Rajiv Vinnakota for Forbes: “We don’t need a generation of polite debaters. We need young people who are prepared to navigate a world where truth is contested and solving problems across differences is vital.”

• Want better civic education? Improve college teaching. By Jonathan Zimmerman for The Hill.

• At the West Texas A&M Civil Discourse and Civics Education Symposium, pastor and educator Dr. Howie Batson delivered a lecture examining the causes of growing division and incivility in American culture, arguing that civil discourse depends on virtues such as humility, forgiveness, and genuine engagement with those who hold different views.

Stories of success in civic learning:

• Sustained Professional Learning is Key to the Successful Implementation of New Civics Curricula: Interconnected evaluation efforts among CIRCLE, DESE, and the One8 Foundation have provided valuable insights into how the Investigating History curriculum has been implemented. By Maya Williams, Sarah Burnham.

• It’s Elementary: Civics and Literacy, A look inside one of the We the People National Symposium on Civic Education Research’s key conversations.

• From the ballot box to a career: What do we know about the long-term impacts of student civic engagement work? How does the movement for 100% student voter participation shape the next generation’s professional choices? By for State of the Student Vote.

• How Libraries Are Rebuilding Civic Connection through multipartial facilitation with the Urban Libraries Council, from Everyday Democracy.

Civic education in the states:

• Michigan Organizations Boost Voter Engagement and Civic Empowerment, by Hugo Balta for The Fulcrum.

• ‘Founding Voices’ initiative to bring immersive civics education ahead of America’s 250th anniversary: Florida State University’s Institute for Governance and Civics is launching a $1.7 million program to bring live historical interpreters to middle and high schools statewide.

• The American Cornerstone Institute (ACI) announced they are partnering with the state of Arkansas to bring new civics resources to teachers in honor of America’s semiquincentennial. The effort is part of the American Cornerstone Institute’s Little Patriots Initiative. The American Cornerstone Institute is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded by Dr. Ben Carson that advances America’s founding principles of faith, liberty, community, and life.

• President’s House exhibits should be restored in time for July 4, another federal judge rules, but only a few days later, Court ruling clears way to replace slavery exhibit in Philadelphia at President’s House Site, handing Trump a win.

• As you read in our last roundup, Iowa’s state legislature has mandated a civics requirement in higher ed. At the University of Iowa, that requirement must be fulfilled with courses from the Center for Intellectual Freedom, also created by the state legislature. The Iowa Capital-Dispatch reports on curriculum planning at the center, the Des Moines Register takes a critical view, one state rep celebrates that “Iowa makes history and civics great again,” and KTIV reports on the requirement’s price tag.

• Auburn requires faculty to upload syllabi, adds mandatory civics classes: Williesha Morris on AL.com notes that the civics requirement was passed at a Board of Trustees meeting that also saw the faculty senate dissolved.

• IU Southeast Hosts New Civic Dialogue Initiative with Council on Foreign Relations and College Debates & Discourse Alliance.

Civic learning resources

• Elizabeth Evans is wrapping up her “Civics in a Year” podcast for Arizona State University’s School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership (SCETL), to coincide with the 250th.

• SHEAR Civics Exchange: A site to connect members of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic who can speak to your organization, club, or institution about the history that has shaped our civic institutions and civic culture.

• The Revolutionary City: A Portal to the Nation’s Founding from the American Philosophical Society is a central hub for students, educators, scholars, and the public to learn about diverse stories of the American Revolution from the perspective of early residents of America’s revolutionary city. Also from APS, check out videos from their recent conference, America’s 1776: Independence and Its Enduring Legacies.

New publications

• Public Schooling in America: Measuring Each State’s Commitment to Democratically Governed Schools (2026) from the Network for Public Education.

Upcoming Events

1. #TogetherTuesday Potlucks & Perspectives: A community story share activity where participants can contribute the community’s story of service to Our American Story, a national storytelling initiative highlighting America’s culture of service for the 250 & Beyond milestone. The National Museum and Center for Service has a toolkit for setting up a gathering in your community.

2. Designing and Conducting Community-Based Research, from the International Association for Service-Learning and Community Engagement (IARSLCE), June 25 at 10am Eastern.

3. Reflection, Reckoning, and Recommitment: Student Voices at the 250th from Campus Compact on Thursday, June 25th at 1pm ET

4. America at 250: A Conversation with Adom Getachew, Aziz Rana, and David Waldstreicher. The panelists will discuss their recent pieces in Boston Review and Dissent on the legacies of the American Revolution at home and abroad, its gutted promises, and how its ideals might still inform our politics of resistance and solidarity today. June 29th at 12:00 PM EDT.

5. UPEN Question Time: Is Evidence Facing a Trust Crisis? What does it mean to produce evidence that people actually believe? And what responsibility do researchers and knowledge mobilisers have in building that trust? From the Universities Policy Engagement Network, University College London, Tuesday 30 June, 3:30 PM - 5 PM (5 hours ahead of Eastern Time in the US)

6. The National Assessment Governing Board is looking for civic educators to serve on the NAEP Civics Framework Development Panel. Apply or nominate by June 30.

7. Independence Week Town Hall: The American Idea at 250, from the National Constitution Center, in partnership with In Pursuit and More Perfect. Featuring Jon Meacham, Colleen Shogan, and Danielle Allen. In person and online, July 1, 6:30 PM Eastern.

8. Story Seeds: From Personal Narrative to Public Practice, a webinar series from Campus Compact featuring author Megan Lovely. Sessions include “A blueprint for cultivating community,” “A pedagogy of belonging,” “The responsibility and ethics of storytelling in community-engaged scholarship,” and “Growing practices of collective care.” Tuesdays in July.

9. Our Declaration: “We the People” and the Declaration of Independence, a course for educators from the Civic Learning Institute taught by Danielle Allen, beginning July 8

10. Teaching Difficult Issues in K-12 Schools-Summer Virtual Workshop Series from Penn State’s Hammel Family Human Rights Initiative, begins July 8

11. Teaching250: Civics Renewal for America’s 250th and Beyond - from The Center for Civic Education In Partnership with the National Constitution Center, July 9, 7:00-8:30 pm EST

12. August 8, join the League of Women Voters for a nationwide day of action of civic action in honor of the anniversary of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Leagues and partners will lead hundreds of activations across the country centered on civic education, voter engagement, turnout, with an emphasis on young voters and community partnerships. A digital activation is also planned for those who cannot show up in person.

We launched this roundup because there are so many educators supporting civic learning around the country – for all ages, in all kinds of institutions and settings – who may not know how many allies and partners they actually have. Our field, or perhaps our movement, is growing by leaps and bounds thanks to the efforts of these educators. The more we connect with each other, support each other, and learn from each other, the stronger this civic renewal will be.

We want to share more stories and essays about how to do civic learning well, and for that reason, we’re launching Democracy 201, a new feed for paid subscribers within The Renovator. We’ll keep doing our biweekly civic education news roundups and sharing them with the full Renovator audience, but if you also subscribe to Democracy 201, you’ll get more specialized writing about education.

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The American Enterprise Institute held their fifth annual Future of the American University conference: A New Academic-Social Contract? In the video recording, you can check out and her fellow panelists’ answers to the question: “How can the academic social contract actually be rewritten?”

Check out the Youtube playlist of recordings from the Jack Miller Center’s National Summit on Civic Education!

Elizabeth Evans is wrapping up her “Civics in a Year” podcast for Arizona State University’s School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership (SCETL), to coincide with the 250th — it’s an incredible resource as well as a fun listen! I am not at all objective on the subject, as the episodes I recorded with Liz about Athens, Rome, and the birth of the USA are coming out in a couple of weeks…

Civic learning in the spotlight:

• U.S. Department of Education and U.S. Department of Labor Announce Additional Grant Competition Under Elementary and Secondary Education Partnership to Promote Civics with a focus on patriotic education. “In light of America’s upcoming semi-quincentennial, these grants—open to applications from colleges, nonprofits and for-profits—are a timely return to teaching first principles and cultivating the Common Good,” said Assistant Secretary of Labor, Employment and Training, Dr. Henry Mack.

• With Smithsonian under scrutiny, its leader curates a complex history show, by Jonathan Edwards for the Washington Post:

“American Aspirations,” an exhibition opening Tuesday in the newly reopened Smithsonian headquarters, will also acknowledge the darker corners of the country’s history, recognizing that it’s still striving to live up to the ideals on which it was founded 250 years ago.

The exhibit, co-curated by the head of the Smithsonian, Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III, gathers more than 30 objects from across the Smithsonian’s sprawling collections to trace how successive generations of Americans have reached — and fallen short of — the ideals first set down in the Declaration of Independence.

• Civics could bridge divides. Teachers fear crossing the line. Policymakers see the country’s 250th anniversary as a chance to bolster civics education. Educators say they’re facing challenges teaching the subject. By Karissa Waddick for USA Today.

• More Perfect has announced a partnership with the Karsh Institute of Democracy to bolster local journalism and expand civic education nationwide.

The importance of learning civic skills and dispositions:

• The Democratic Tradition We’ve Forgotten, By Trygve Throntveit for Time: civic collaboration.

• Educating as if Democracy Depends on It: Preparing young people to participate and govern means moving beyond entrusting civic learning to a single course in high school or an elective on campus and correcting “education away from democracy.” By Catherine E. Lhamon, former Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights at the US Department of Education, for Stanford Social Innovation Review.

• Schools as Shared Civic Infrastructure: How can we teach students to embrace their civic identity as members of their communities and support them in leading our nation’s democratic renaissance? By Elizabeth Clay Roy for the Stanford Social Innovation Review.

• We Study in Shelters and Still Look at the Stars: A student from Bucha, Ukraine, on resilience, responsibility, and why hardship is this generation’s superpower. From The Aspen Institute’s .

• Memorial Day, Civic Life, and the Lessons We Pass to Our Children by Julie Silverbook.

• Becoming good citizens requires practice – and we all need to do our reps, by Anne Wicks, George W. Bush Institute — reflections on a panel at Wesleyan University’s Democracy 250 celebrations with Melody Barnes, Jonathan Becker, and Katie Montgomery.

• ‘Civics-in-a-Box’ Project from the Center on Representative Government, based at Indiana University in Bloomington, Wins Leonore Annenberg Institute for Civics Award: They will create high-quality, accessible civic education materials that youth group leaders in a variety of community-based settings can use to help students build the skills necessary for effective civic participation in their communities.

Civil dialogue:

• Teaching Civil Discourse: How one college’s initiative is influencing campuses nationwide, By Graham Vyse for the Chronicle of Higher Education on Davidson’s Deliberative Citizenship Initiative (DCI).

• How can colleges teach students to have challenging conversations? As some institutions try to clamp down on classroom discussion, others are providing students with skills to discuss difficult subjects with their classmates. By Danielle McLean for Higher Ed Dive, with a spotlight on Marquette University.

• How Universities Can Counter the Perils of Tribalism and Encourage Civil Disagreement, by Marcos Emilio Pérez for the Scholars Strategy Network.

Learning from history:

• Teaching American History through Film by Dr. Bryan Paul for The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA).

• Constitutional Voices: Phillis Wheatley, by Trey Sullivan for the National Constitution Center.

• The Declaration of Independence’s Influence Around the World, By David Armitage for the National Constitution Center.

• The new faces of Alabama’s voting rights fight, and what they’re learning from their predecessors, by Jonece Starr Dunigan for AL.com.

• Heather Cox Richardson and 250 to 250 are producing daily videos by famous Americans about the history that inspires them, in honor of the semiquincentennial.

• America at 250: History, Innovation, and the Next Chapter from the Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress on June 18 in DC will feature conversations on “Building a Resilient Democracy” (former NH governor Chris Sununu will be on the panel) and “History, Memory and the American Story” (with author John Farrell and Washington Post contributor Michelle Jaconi).

• Were the Constitution’s Authors a Little Too Optimistic?: The nation’s founding document has a blind spot. Trump is making it visible. By Adam Liptak for the New York Times.

Celebrating civic learning from the past year:

• Minnesota Teacher Megan Thompson Wins $10,000 Civic Star Challenge Gold Prize from iCivics and the Bill of Rights Institute

During a period of profound civil unrest in Minneapolis, she helped her students make sense of their constitutional rights to privacy and peaceful protest, and helped them navigate real-world issues by connecting to America’s founding principles. “To support students professionally without inserting myself politically, I offered primary sources and the content to encourage natural connections,” Thompson wrote. Thompson is a James Madison Fellow, a Sphere 100 Fellow, and a member of the National Constitution Center’s Teacher Advisory Board.

• A ‘Civic Star’ educator brightens up his classroom by creating community by Caroline Parker for EdNC, featuring Charles Oliver, a teacher at Roanoke Valley Early College partnering with iCivics.

• What communities in Poland, Brazil, and India Taught Us About Strengthening Civic Culture: Reflections from our year of Global Learning, from Citizen University.

• The Jack Miller Center announces Teaching America250 Awards recipients.

• UW La Crosse Students honor Samuel Scinta as Higher Education Advocate of the Year for his work on community engagement and fostering civil dialogue through the ‘Rebuilding American Civics’ program

• Five UVA Grads Put Lessons in Democracy to Work: After investing hundreds of hours interning with the Karsh Institute, these new UVA graduates are applying what they’ve learned to a wide range of professional and civic pursuits.

• Olin College of Engineering Students Learn to Take Action in New “Local Democracy” Course with Erhardt Graeff.

• Students tackle community issues through civics in Arizona, from the Peoria Times.

• Teaching students to ‘use their voice and actually make a change’: coverage of Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education Civics Project Showcases, by Jill Kaufman for NHPR.

• Clinton School of Public Service at the University of Arkansas student Lauren Sermersheim Serves as Youth250 National Gen Z Advisor for America’s 250th Anniversary.

Civic education in the states:

• Shifts in NAEP and Growth of Civic Seals Are Transformative Opportunities, by Louise Dubé, Emma Humphries, and Shawn Healy of iCivics

• Alaska Legislature approves civics education requirement for all Alaska high schoolers, by Corinne Smith for the Alaska Beacon.

• ‘Founding Voices’ initiative to bring immersive civics education ahead of America’s 250th anniversary: Florida State University’s Institute for Governance and Civics is launching a $1.7 million program to bring live historical interpreters to middle and high schools statewide.

• Refresher Course: Why are civics teachers having a tough time? For Civics 101 by New Hampshire Public Radio, By Michelle Liu, Julia Barnett, and Nick Capodice.

• The University of New Hampshire’s Carsey School of Public Policy is supporting student fellows in “New Hampshire Listens,” supporting civic engagement and responsive government to address low levels of civic knowledge reflected in the 2024 New Hampshire Civic Health Report.

• Michigan students learn about American Government at Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum Civics Camp.

• Trump administration and Philly clash in court over President’s House slavery exhibit as 250th nears: The hearing before the federal appeals court marked the latest step in the legal saga that’s transpired following attempts sanitize history at President George Washington’s Philadelphia home. By Fallon Roth and Abraham Gutman for the Philadelphia Inquirer - also reported by Carmen Russell-Sluchansky for WHYY here.

Civic learning resources

• CERL and the Center for Civic Education Present We the People: National Symposium on Civic Education Research Proceedings and video recordings from a March event at Georgetown University, including a simulated Congressional hearing, research and best practices on civic learning for learners with disabilities and English learners, family engagement, and more.

• Project Look Sharp has a media literacy content hub for The American Revolution at 250, as well as many resources related to Juneteenth.

• How Teaching History Can Help Our Terrible Reading Scores: The narrative appeal of the past has common cause with building literacy, an interview with Rick Hess of EducationNext and Matthew Levey from the Knowledge Matters Campaign

New publications:

• Exploring Equitable Community–Campus Relationships, Edited by Karla Bird, Suchitra V. Gururaj, Sara B. Moore, Andrea Robles, and Cindy Vincent Claar for Campus Compact and AAC&U from Routledge - with an online book series scheduled over the summer

• From CIRCLE: Stronger Civic Access, Support, and Culture Address Engagement Gaps by Rurality and Education: The key assets of our CIRCLE Growing Voters framework are associated with higher self-reported voter turnout and civic action among underserved groups. By Ruby Belle Booth, Seona Maskara, Yanlin Ren.

• A trio of articles featuring new research findings from CIRCLE about the youth vote in 2026:

  • Youth Are Likely to Vote in 2026—But Want to See Big Changes in Democracy

  • 49 Million Young People Will Be Eligible to Vote in the 2026 Midterms

  • Where Young Voters Can Decide Elections in 2026: CIRCLE’s Youth Electoral Significance Index provides data-based rankings of the U.S. Senate and Governor elections where the youth can swing a race.

• America, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries By Eddie S. Glaude Jr. from Penguin Random House.

• Radical Duke: How One Aristocrat-and the American Revolution-Transformed Britain By Danielle Allen from Norton.

Upcoming Events:

1. Crash Course on Facilitating Disagreement from AORTA, Wednesday, June 10, 7 PM - 9 PM EDT

2. K–12 Civic Education on the Eve of America’s 250th Anniversary with Robert Pondiscio for the American Enterprise Institute, Thursday, June 11, 4:00 PM to 5:15 PM ET

3. “What’s Next, America?” is a nationwide initiative of the National Issues Forums Institute designed to help communities come together locally to talk, decide, and act on the issues that matter most to them as the country approaches its 250th anniversary. “What’s Next, America?” asks participants in a community to work through three sets of deliberative discussion questions centering on the overarching questions: where are we now; where do we want to go; and how will we get there. Next Info Session Friday June 12th, 4-4:45pm Eastern.

4. Reimagining the Declaration of Independence for the UVA Lifetime Learning’s Summer Jefferson Symposium, June 17, 3-4:15PM EDT with John Ragosta and Christa Dierksheide

5. An Essential Partners Dialogue Experience: America @ 250, a three-hour facilitated Reflective Structured Dialogue, June 16, 3:00 PM ET

6. Fostering Civic Action in Youth | Cultivating Learning: Celebrating America at 250 from Smithsonian Education, June 17, 45 PM EDT

7. Live from Carpenter’s Hall: The Founding of Pennsylvania and the Legacy of the Pa. Constitution, a WHYY public radio broadcast with guests Professor Christopher Pearl, author of Conceived in Crisis: The Revolutionary Creation of an American State, and Ben Geffen, senior attorney at the Public Interest Law Center, Thursday, June 18, 12:00PM - 1:00PM

8. Democracy and the Economy: Rethinking Civic Participation from the National Civic League, June 18th at 1pm ET (12 pm CT, 11am MT, 10am PT)

9. Young Invincibles is seeking proposals by June 19 for their national summit in Arlington this September. The summit will bring together young adults, policy leaders, advocates, and community partners looking to advance economic opportunity for the next generation, and proposals must feature a young adult perspective (ages 18-34). One pillar of YI’s work is higher education and academic freedom.

10. Joint National Youth Leadership Council (NYLC) National Service-Learning Conference and Points of Light Social Impact Conference, June 22-25, 2026 Washington, D.C.

11. Civil War Round Table: Lincoln & the American Revolution - Founding Forward talk with Dr. Allen Guelzo, Professor of Humanities at the Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida, June 24, 6:00 PM

12. Designing and Conducting Community-Based Research, from the International Association for Service-Learning and Community Engagement (IARSLCE), June 25 at 10am Eastern

13. Our Declaration: “We the People” and the Declaration of Independence, a course for educators from the Civic Learning Institute taught by Danielle Allen, beginning July 8.

14. Teaching Difficult Issues in K-12 Schools-Summer Virtual Workshop Series from Penn State’s Hammel Family Human Rights Initiative, begins July 8.

15. Teaching250: Civics Renewal for America’s 250th and Beyond - from The Center for Civic Education In Partnership with the National Constitution Center, July 9, 7:00-8:30 pm EST.

16. Institute on Experiential Learning and Engaged Dialogue | AAC&U, July 14 – 17, 2026: a four-day, online, team-based institute for colleges and universities committed to strengthening applied learning, dialogue across difference, and civic preparation. Teams leave the institute with a focused action plan to advance this work across the curriculum, cocurriculum, and the institutional structures that support student success and belonging.

17. Smithsonian National Education Summit—Together We Thrive: Towards a More Perfect Union July 14–16, 2026, in person and online.

Be sure to check out the Spring 2026 issue of Civics Magazine from the Jack Miller Center: Teaching the Words that Changed the World: The Declaration of Independence and America at 250, featuring articles by Danielle Allen, Colleen Shogan, Jon Meacham, and many more distinguished historians and civic educators.

Speaking of , in a New York Times piece last weekend, she challenged some recent civic education doomerism:

“Frequently, when people decry the state of our politics, the conversation always lands in the same place: a lament that we just don’t have civic education any more. I want people to know that this is no longer true. The decline of civic education hit bottom about a decade ago and is at last on the rebound. That fact brings me hope.”

Joshua Dunn and Michael B. Poliakoff of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni joined the chorus in the Washington Post. of Expand Democracy agrees and writes about some great examples. In The Dispatch, Joe Pitts writes about Paul Carrese’s optimism on this score, celebrating the publication of Paul’s new book Reflective Patriotism. In Six Gifts for the Republic, highlights six areas of growth and renewal under way for America’s 250th (beginning with civic learning), and organizations leading efforts in each. The Christian Science Monitor’s Editorial Board praises a recentering of civil discourse in higher ed nationwide.

And then there’s hip hop artist Pitbull, who is partnering with a tech company to develop an AI-based Founding Fathers interactive chat.

One more piece from Danielle on education and democracy:

• Education and Its Public Purposes: How schools can support both individual and collective thriving in our democracy. By Danielle Allen for the Stanford Social Innovation Review’s Special Issue on Renewing Public Education’s Purpose, defining democracy education as the preparation of “authentic, equitable citizens,” and one that is best provided by public schools.

Made By Us has put out a summer guide/checklist to help you plan your celebration of this Civic Season:

• A Summer Shaping What’s Next: An Offline Guide to History and Civic Action

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), an important source of data about civic knowledge in K12, is set for some important updates:

• A Year Ago, Experts Worried About NAEP’s Future. Now, the Test is Expanding: The results would drill down on what students know in their senior year, as well as in civics and science. By Linda Jacobson for The74: The National Assessment Governing Board approved a new testing schedule that allows for state-level results in eighth and 12th grade civics as of 2032.

Hopes and anxiety for the Semiquincentennial:

• Renewing the American mind at 250, by Jack Miller and Pete Peterson for American Habits.

• America at 250: Will We Learn from Our Past? By John Bridgeland, Colleen Shogan for The Fulcrum

• America at 250: Battling over national identity by Will Marshall for The Hill, on competing visions in DC for celebrating the semiquincentennial.

• 4 Ways Philanthropy Can Repair Civic Education: As the nation’s 250th anniversary approaches, funders can draw on a proven Illinois model to help schools prepare the next generation of engaged citizens. By Louise Dubé, Geri Mannion and Ambika Kapur, pointing to the Illinois Civic Mission Coalition and Massachusetts’ robust funding for civic learning as strong models.

Learning from history:

• In Pursuit’s series of essays with lessons from American presidents and first ladies have reached Franklin and Jane Pierce (we shared Danielle’s piece about John Adams a few months ago) – and don’t miss the accompanying podcast!

• America at 250: Revisiting Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams recording from a UVA Miller Center event featuring Colleen Shogan, Lindsay Chervinsky, and Andrew Davenport.

• Remembering Washington’s Patriotism, By Mark Dillon, Steve Carney & Hans Zeiger for RealClear Politics.

• Every 50 Years, America Falls Apart. Then Celebrates Anyway: What 1826, 1876, 1926, and 1976 Tell Us About 2026, by .

• Reflections on Our Enduring Ideals: A Conversation with Justice Stephen Breyer (Ret.), an event recording from the National Constitution Center celebrating the new anthology The Promise of America

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Technology in civic learning:

• Data & Society (D&S) announced the launch of AI Civics: “AI Civics will partner with organizations across a range of sectors that are integral to the health of our communities and civic fabric, beginning with libraries; subsequently, the program will seek partnerships with labor organizations, faith groups, educational communities, and others. Through this two-year program, Data & Society will lay vital groundwork for a national civic coalition dedicated to ensuring that people and communities know how to influence local decision-making about how AI is used in and around their daily lives.”

• The Founders’ Case for Human Authorship in the Age of AI, by Laurel Kilgour for Tech Policy Press: “From a republican perspective, human creation is worth promoting not merely for its outputs, but because a society of people who write, create, and invent is better equipped for self-governance.”

Civic education in the states:

• Tennessee Civics Survey: A Report by the Institute of American Civics at the Howard H. Baker, Jr. School of Public Policy and Public Affairs, University of Tennessee, Knoxville: Tennesseans regard civic education as very important but their civic knowledge leaves a lot of room for improvement, and many Tennesseans across the ideological spectrum are afraid their reputations could be damaged if they share political opinions. Responding to the survey, Joshua Dunn and William Lyons argue that a lack of civic knowledge is a major culprit in our toxic political arena.

• A new report from The Civics Center focuses on Pennsylvania and builds the case that in competitive elections, registered youth turn out to vote at very high rates.

• When Students Vote with Their Schedules, by Samuel J. Abrams for the American Enterprise Institute, on UNC Chapel Hill’s School of Civic Life and Leadership (SCiLL), soon to become an independent academic unit - also the subject of a piece by the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, and another WSJ piece by Jack Miller, “Civics Gets a Reboot in American Education”

• Iowa state legislators have proposed a new higher ed general education requirement in American history and government; at the University of Iowa, students would be required to fulfill this requirement by taking courses through the Center for Intellectual Freedom created by the legislature last year.

• The Center for Constitutional Law at the University of Nevada, Reno, in partnership with the Nevada Center for Civic Engagement, will welcome K–12 educators from across Nevada this July for the 2026 Summer Teacher’s Institute at the University’s Lake Tahoe campus. Together, the two organizations will combine scholarly expertise with statewide K–12 outreach to promote constitutional knowledge and civic learning.

• Civic Futures Institute, America 250-Ohio and American Exchange Project Unveil Vision & Investment in Civic Exchange, bringing American students to spend time in communities geographically and demographically different from their own.

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Civic learning resources

• Campus Compact has posted professional learning opportunities for faculty and staff in higher ed, including their Engaged Scholars Initiative and Community Engagement Professional Credential.

• Everyday Democracy’s new OurNext250 Gathering Toolkit—a free resource with practical tools to help you plan and lead your own community conversation.

• GBH has posted footage from April’s Civics in Higher Education National Summit, held at Tufts University, and I thought all the panels were excellent (including the afternoon’s sessions, which I guess GBH did not record):

  • Peter Levine’s opening remarks

  • Civics in the Classroom: Curricula at U.S. 250, featuring Stanford’s Josiah Ober, Yale’s Bryan Garsten, OSU’s Michael Clune, and Tetyana Hoggan-Kloubert from Universität Augsburg

  • Keeping Community at the Core: Three educators describe their transformational civic work, featuring UW’s Amber Wichowsky, UCSD’s Fonna Forman, and Leslie Garvin from North Carolina Campus Engagement

New publications:

• Teaching America: Reflective Patriotism in Schools, College, and Culture by Paul Carrese from Cambridge University Press.

• From CIRCLE: Stronger Civic Access, Support, and Culture Address Engagement Gaps by Rurality and Education: The key assets of our CIRCLE Growing Voters framework are associated with higher self-reported voter turnout and civic action among underserved groups. By Ruby Belle Booth, Seona Maskara, Yanlin Ren.

• America, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries By Eddie S. Glaude Jr. from Penguin Random House.

• Radical Duke: How One Aristocrat-and the American Revolution-Transformed Britain By Danielle Allen from Norton.

• “Fostering Civil Dialogue,” a research brief from the Chronicle of Higher Education: The Chronicle surveyed administrators and faculty across the country and interviewed various experts who study civil discourse and free expression to learn more about how colleges are:

  • Expanding efforts to promote civil dialogue on campus.

  • Developing strategies to encourage this kind of dialogue within the classroom.

  • Overcoming the various challenges to implementing these initiatives.

• Mind the (generation) gap on Democracy Notes: Sophia Winner, Research Program Coordinator at the SNF Agora Institute, unpacks findings from the recent report, “Examining Generational Divides – Political Attitudes and Behavior.”

Upcoming Events:

1. Call-to-Action Symposium: From Planning to Impact, an Express Virtual Symposium on Campus Action Planning for Civic & Community Engagement from Campus Compact, May 27-28

2. Defining Democracy: A ‘1619’ PD Series from the Pulitzer Center, Mon, Jun 1, 2026 4:30 PM EDT

3. American Political Science Association’s Engaging America’s 250th Webinar Series: Making the Founding Documents Relevant in the 21st Century, Tuesday, June 2, 1:30 PM (ET) / 10:30 AM (PT), featuring Paul Carrese, Arizona State University; Roosevelt Montás, Bard College; Jeremy Bailey, University of Florida; Jocelyn Evans, University of West Florida

4. Campus Compact: Showcasing Newman Fellow Mini-Grant Projects June 2, 9, 16, and 23

5. An Essential Partners Dialogue Experience: America @ 250, a three-hour facilitated Reflective Structured Dialogue, June 16, 3:00 PM ET

6. Joint National Youth Leadership Council (NYLC) National Service-Learning Conference and Points of Light Social Impact Conference, June 22-25, 2026 Washington, D.C.

7. Civil War Round Table: Lincoln & the American Revolution - Founding Forward talk with Dr. Allen Guelzo, Professor of Humanities at the Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida, livestreaming on Youtube on June 24, 6:00 PM

8. Teaching250: Civics Renewal for America’s 250th and Beyond - from The Center for Civic Education In Partnership with the National Constitution Center, July 9, 7:00-8:30 pm EST

9. 2026 RESULTS National Conference in Washington DC, July 12-14, 2026: RESULTS is hosting three days of learning, action, and connecting with advocates across the country. We will have a special program followed by a day of advocacy on Capitol Hill, with coordinated, powerful advocacy meetings with members of Congress. (You may remember our guest post by Sam Daley-Harris about RESULTS back in February, about how citizens pushed Congress to grow a backbone and defend foreign aid)

10. Institute on Experiential Learning and Engaged Dialogue | AAC&U, July 14 – 17, 2026: a four-day, online, team-based institute for colleges and universities committed to strengthening applied learning, dialogue across difference, and civic preparation.

11. Smithsonian National Education Summit—Together We Thrive: Towards a More Perfect Union July 14–16, 2026, in person and online.

12. Place-Based Justice Network 2026 Summer Institute, “Summer of Solidarity:” Join a community of higher education and community practitioners committed to values-driven, justice-centered work to reconnect, learn from one another, and strengthen our capacity to act in solidarity with our communities. August 3, 11, and 19.

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You’ll see fewer events in this roundup as we get closer to summer break, but the beginning of what I think will be a surge in celebrations of the Declaration’s 250th…

Civic learning in the spotlight:

• Promoting civic literacy for America’s 250th | by for Gulf Today

• The Promise Of Higher Education And American Democracy | By Jonathan Green, President of Susquehanna University, for Forbes

• Justice Stephen Breyer makes case for civic education: Retired SCOTUS justice says path to less polarization runs through the classroom. | By Liz Mineo for the Harvard Gazette

• Supreme Court Justice Gorsuch highlights staggering decline in civic literacy that prompted him to author new book: The book features hand-painted illustrations and stories of young people who shaped the nation during the Revolutionary War | By Breanne Deppisch for Fox News

• Three Days a Year Is Not a Civic Education | By Samuel Abrams for American Enterprise Institute, responding to the Yale Report of the Committee on Trust in Higher Education and the recommendation of “a civic education initiative that would reach every first-year undergraduate student on a regular basis” in the form of “day-long programs at least three times per year.”

• Civics Is a Cause, Not an Academic Discipline: Before it was trendy on the right, it was trendy on the left — and always incoherent. | By Timothy Messer-Kruse for the Chronicle of Higher Education

Some big news for Citizens & Scholars:

• C&S Secures Eight-Figure Investment, Led by $10M from Einhorn Collaborative, to Advance Campus Civic Culture: The investment will accelerate the reach and impact of C&S’s College Presidents for Civic Preparedness coalition. It will equip university leadership and students with the tools necessary to engage collaboratively through productive conversations, using credible information, and solving community problems.

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A new generation of civic leaders is already here…

Despite the fact that a Harvard Youth Poll Finds a Generation Under Pressure — and Losing Faith in the System.

• Announcing Letters to America: Perspectives from the Generation Shaping America’s Next 250 Years | by for The Fulcrum

• The AI Boom Needs Their Land: How rural and Indigenous youth are defining their own technological future | by for Life with Machines

• Building Community for Mental Health | from : “In fall of 2025, we asked Fellows, our high school students training to become community organizers and leaders, to start the school year with basebuilding events…. One [common theme] was a focus on building community for mental wellness and a focus on mental health.”

• Meet Victoria Vargas: A Young Leader Protecting Nebraska’s Wildlife | By Civic Nebraska

Calls for civil dialogue:

• At 250, America Needs Civic Parenting, Not Just Civics Classes | by Julie Silverbrook for The Fulcrum:

If we want a citizenry capable of self-government, we must rebalance the system. That means continuing to support teachers and schools, while also recognizing that they cannot carry this responsibility alone. It means rebuilding the connections between classrooms, homes, and communities. It means creating accessible entry points that spark curiosity and invite participation. And it means meeting families where they are, with tools and experiences that make civic learning part of everyday life.

• The local communities hoping America’s 250th birthday will help bridge divides | from PBS, coverage of Warm Cookies of the Revolution’s Tax Day Carnival

• Civic Discourse Programs Are Doing the Work. Here’s the Evidence. | Letter to the editor by Michael Murray, President and CEO, Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, for Chronicle of Higher Education

• Let’s Have More Actual Debates | By Justin Eckstein and William Keith for the National Civic Review: not all debates are good, but “Debate at its best functions as democracy’s laboratory, a structured process for sorting out the strongest and weakest arguments for a position before committing public resources or restricting individual freedoms.”

Learning from history:

• A Conversation with Walter Isaacson on “The Greatest Sentence Ever Written” | video from George W. Bush Presidential Center: “We hold these truths to be self-evident…”

• What Can Adam Smith Teach Us Today?: We don’t crave wealth—we crave respect, and Adam Smith warns how that pursuit can quietly erode our lives and our freedom. | video from the Hoover Institution’s Ross Levine

• At 250, Ambiguous Reformer: Woodrow Wilson | By Jeanne Zaino for the Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress

• Inside a Public School Reclaiming an Idea Liberals Left Behind | by James Traub for The New York Times, on civic virtue education in classical schools

• On PBS Firing Line, Constitutional scholars Jeffrey Rosen and Yuval Levin discuss America’s founding documents, why the ideas behind the Declaration of Independence and Constitution matter 250 years later, and the challenges that lie ahead for the American experiment.

• Speaking of America, a one-of-a-kind docuseries from the University of Virginia and Lifetime Learning exploring America’s greatest speeches. Mary Kate Cary, a former White House speechwriter for George H.W. Bush who has taught at UVA, takes us behind the scenes of the most fascinating speeches in American history.

Stories of success in civic learning:

• “The People Doing the Talking Are Doing the Thinking”: Inquiry in Eastern Carver County Schools | InquirED blog on elementary social studies education in Minnesota

• Alexander Hamilton is ‘cocky.’ George Washington ‘owns the room.’ Blind and low-vision visitors decode 1787 using their hands in a new tactile tour. A new Philly Touch tour in Signers’ Hall lets visitors pick up on the founders’ age, status, and demeanor through touch.

• Semiquincentennial Wish Walls are Capturing Hopes for America’s Future | by Jewel Navia for Made by Us

• High Schoolers Connect Science, Journalism, Civic Advocacy in Lesson on Extreme Heat | by Danielle Jo White-Yelito for the Pulitzer Center, about a lesson on “Voices for the Heat: Writing Op-Eds on Climate and Delivery Workers” at Greater Lowell Technical High School

• His AP Government Class Sparked a Passion for Public Service: A high school course was Maxwell Parson’s first step toward his role as a bill drafter in the Montana Legislature. | By Sarah Altshuler for the National Conference of State Legislatures

• Celebrating the Teachers Who Bring Civic Learning to Life | by for the Civic Education Research Lab

Civic education in the states:

• New Hampshire’s Governor Kelly Ayotte signs a new Seal of Civic Excellence and Engagement Program into law, and Idaho’s Governor Brad Little signs a similar State Seal of Excellence in Civics Program into law, which high school students may earn by “Demonstrating mastery, which shall be ninety percent (90%) or higher, on the Idaho civics assessment” as well as completing a civic project and a form of civic engagement and/or community service.

• The Florida Department of Education released the framework for a new U.S. History course designed as an alternative to Advanced Placement. Commissioner of Education Anastasios Kamoutsas said: “The FACT U.S. History framework underscores our commitment to instruction grounded in the full scope of our nation’s history, while ensuring materials are free from ideological bias or indoctrination.” Stephanie Matat for the Tallahassee Democrat calls it an “‘anti-woke’ AP US history alternative.” From Dana Goldstein for the New York Times, Florida Creates a More Conservative Course to Rival A.P. History.

• Tiptoeing through civics lessons | By Peter Rosen for Utah’s America 250 on KSLTV: “Several US government teachers and an instructor who teaches those teachers said many in Utah feel like they’re “walking on eggshells” when they discuss the constitution.”

• Op-Ed: Strengthening civic education in Iowa | By David Randall of The National Association of Scholars

• Alaska lawmakers consider strengthening civics education requirements for high schoolers: Supporters say the current proposal has options for students to meet the requirement, and is essential amid growing public distrust of government. | By Corinne Smith for the Alaska Beacon

• Opinion: Chicago schools’ May Day field trip was wildly inappropriate: Sending students to political rallies undercuts parents’ trust in teachers. | by Nicholas Kryczka, National College of Education at National Louis University professor, for the Washington Post

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Civic learning resources

• Values in Teaching: Resources for Educators in Contentious Times has been launched by Harvard’s Democratic Knowledge Project and Stanford’s EdEthics to support K12 teachers with resources for reflecting, learning, and practice

• National Constitution Center Releases Two New Civics Games & Parenting Podcast to Help Families Explore America’s Story Together During America’s 250th: Civic Quest and Trivial Pursuit: Exploring America’s Story

• The EdRedesign Lab at Harvard Graduate School of Education, in partnership with production company Fire-Works, announced the launch of DREAM ON, a YouTube show dedicated to optimistic explainers about how to improve social and economic mobility in America. With a focus on “place-based” success stories, the show seeks to bring proven and scalable solutions to a national online audience.

• President Lincoln’s Cottage hosts the 2026 Lincoln Ideas Forum on the theme “A Vision for America at 250,” featuring Afghan-American actress Zarmina Hamidi, Weil Legal Innovator Angelina Johnson, prison justice advocate Caddell Kivett, and cultural historian Dr. Izetta Autumn Mobley

• From the National Youth Leadership Council: Youth as Solutions (YaS), a self-paced youth leadership program through which youth councils/teams (young people in grades 6-12 along with an adult mentor from a public school, school district, government entity, or nonprofit) positively impact their communities.

• The Constructive Dialogue Scaling Initiative helps campus leaders take constructive dialogue from a single course or program to an institution-wide commitment.

Summer learning opportunities:

• Civic Education, Democracy, and Lessons from History Summer 2026 Seminar: This virtual professional development seminar features our new Civic Education Curriculum that fosters civil discourse and uses lessons of history to explore civic participation. | Facing History and Ourselves, July 14-16

• To mark the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the Hoover Institution invites high school and college students to reflect on the meaning and the future of the American Experiment through the spoken word.

New publications:

• All We Say: The Battle for American Identity: A History in 15 Speeches By for Penguin Random House.

• Proclaiming Liberty: John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and the Declaration of Independence by Timothy Sandefur for the Cato Institute - check out a recording of a recent event here.

• Jefferson on Race: A Reader, Edited by Annette Gordon-Reed from Princeton University Press.

• Teaching America: Reflective Patriotism in Schools, College, and Culture by Paul Carrese for Cambridge University Press.

• The Community-Centric Path to Rebuilding Trust in Higher Education By Byron P. White for Routledge.

• The Gen Z Election Toolkit: A young person’s guide to protecting and participating in U.S. elections by Alexis Nwatu and Lara Hicks for Protect Democracy.

• Civic Thriving: The Essential Complement to Human Flourishing, A report from History Co:Lab.

“Our young people are growing up in a polycrisis. AI disruption, climate change, global tensions, and the fragility of democracy have everyone on edge. Meanwhile, young people are signaling that they’re not ok: mental health, learning outcomes, and engagement in school are in decline. Many are seeking solutions, but they do so in silos of expertise and age. We wanted to find patterns of what works.

Six months of research, 50 practitioner interviews, and research sessions with 25 young people across 6 states revealed a surprising convergence:

The solution to all of these challenges is the same: shift learning systems so that they nurture relationships, aspiration, and co-creation. This shift will lead not just to better learning, but to civic thriving.

Civic thriving describes a state in which young people feel safe, seen and supported to imagine a better future, feel capable and compelled to build it, and in which communities tap into the insights and creative energy of young people, acknowledging enthusiastically that they matter.”

Upcoming Events:

1. Jack Miller Center 4th National Summit on Civic Education: Join organizations and philanthropists committed to reinvigorating American civic education with our nation’s founding principles. Pennsylvania, May 18-19, 2026

2. National Constitution Center Book Club With Jon Meacham: The Promise of America, Thursday, May 21 at noon ET

3. Webinar: Introducing the Interactivity Foundation’s Discussion Resources (Collaborative Discussion Project (CDP) Toolkit, discussion guides, and a journaling tool) | May 21 @ 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm EDT

4. Project Pericles Civic Story Lab: Bates College Periclean Faculty Leader Yun Garrison and her colleague Fowsia Musse will lead a workshop examining how participants can build and maintain equitable, reciprocal relationships with community collaborators. Citizen Film Founder Sam Ball will share strategies for empowering students and community members to share civic narratives through visual media. Wednesday, May 27, from 2:30 PM - 3:30 PM ET

5. History & Democracy Virtual Summit | American Association for State and Local History with support from the Virginia Museum of History & Culture and National Constitution Center, May 27 – 28

6. Joint National Youth Leadership Council (NYLC) National Service-Learning Conference and Points of Light Social Impact Conference, June 22-25, 2026 Washington, D.C.

7. Civil War Round Table: Lincoln & the American Revolution | Founding Forward talk with Dr. Allen Guelzo, Professor of Humanities at the Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida, livestreaming on Youtube on June 24, 6:00 PM

Shout-out to Nick Longo, Elizabeth Matto, and the Rutgers Democracy Lab team as well as Campus Compact, the Democratic Knowledge Project, and the Allen Lab for Democratic Governance and Innovation for a great event in New Jersey last week! The RDL Think and Do Tank student fellows featured their impressive work at an inspiring project showcase, and a group representing democracy and civic engagement centers in higher ed across the country worked to define the field, or perhaps movement, to which they might all belong.

It’s no easy task. Depending on the institution, a center’s work might be aimed at students, the campus, and/or the neighboring community. A center might prioritize a particular aspect of this work: civil dialogue, voting and civic engagement, or civic knowledge. And political contexts vary widely from state to state and across institutional types. At the core, though, or perhaps on the horizon as a guiding star, are a basic commitment to nonpartisanship joined with American values: pluralism, civic friendship, individual agency, and constitutional government of, by, and for the people. One running theme was the need to build institutional cultures that make these values a daily reality, involving students, faculty, leaders, and staff, not just individual programs.

Some resources shared and cited at the Rutgers gathering:

• Teaching Civic Engagement Across the Disciplines, a 2017 volume from the American Political Science Association, particularly the chapter “Civic Engagement Centers and Institutes” by Elizabeth Matto (one of our hosts) and Mary McHugh. Due for an update, as Elizabeth pointed out. Grad students, take note!

• The New Landscape of “Civics Centers” in Higher Education, a 2025 report from the Heterodox Academy.

• Assessing the Civic Campus: The Link Between Higher Education and Democracy, a report from ITHAKA and AASC&U on how institutions may embrace and evaluate their work for civic engagement from 2024.

• Democracy Inventory Guide: Guidance for colleges & universities in inventorying democratic engagement efforts from Campus Compact, 2025.

• The Civic Profile, a new self-assessment tool from Stanford’s Center for Revitalizing American Institutions that anyone can (and should!) take.

Check out these two write-ups of a Harvard event featuring Danielle Allen earlier this month, the first from the Graduate School of Education and the second from the Kennedy School — the conversation was great, despite a power outage that meant the speakers had to wrap it up before sunset.

• Teaching Civics and Strengthening American Democracy: Experts at the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Askwith Education Forum weighed education’s role in meeting the moment as America celebrates its semiquincentennial, featuring Professor Danielle Allen, former Secretary of Education of the Commonwealth of Virginia Aimee Rogstad Guidera (who led an effort to rewrite Virginia’s K-12 social studies curriculum), and 2023 Massachusetts History Teacher of the Year Jessica Lander.

• “We hit bottom in civics a couple of years ago, and we’re actually on the way back up”: Harvard Professor Danielle Allen, former Virginia Secretary of Education Aimee Rogstad Guidera, 2023 Massachusetts History Teacher of the Year Jessica Lander, and HGSE lecturer Eric Soto-Shed on a “renaissance” in American civics education.

  

In other news, Sharon McMahon, billed as “America’s government teacher,” was scheduled to speak at Utah Valley University’s commencement, but McMahon’s since-deleted posts on X about Charlie Kirk’s death provoked a backlash from many students and commenters online as well as several congresspeople and legislators from the state. While UVU’s president initially defended McMahon, it has now been announced that UVU will no longer have a commencement speaker. The Salt Lake Tribune’s editorial board criticized the silencing of McMahon as antithetical to Kirk’s own stance on free speech.

The approaching Semiquincentennial is provoking apprehension as well as optimism:

• America Is Anxious About Its 250th Birthday. So Are Historians. At the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians, scholars wrestled with what people want from national anniversaries — and whether historians can give it to them. | By Jennifer Schuessler for the New York Times.

• Monticello’s Jane Kamensky: Democracy’s “Baton Pass” | the A250 Interviews podcast from iCivics, available on Spotify, Apple, and Youtube.

• America’s 250th Is Repeating a Familiar Mistake | By John Garrison Marks for Time: “Freedom 250, the initiative leading the White House’s 250th anniversary celebrations, fails to adequately address the impact slavery has had on our country.”

• America at 250: Our Lost Opportunity | By Robert Pondiscio for American Enterprise Institute Commentary — “A culture in which every public gesture is interrogated for partisan coding cannot sustain a ritual whose sole purpose is to affirm shared inheritance.”

• Justice Clarence Thomas, “Remarks on the 250th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence” | Civitas Institute, University of Texas at Austin.

Reflecting on civil dialogue:

• A Blueprint for Civil Discourse on Campus | by Shannon Watkins for The Fulcrum.

• We Say We Believe in Free Inquiry — but Our Classrooms Tell a Different Story. If we want to prepare students to participate in American civic life, we need to start teaching differently. By Mella McCormick for Inside Higher Ed, on the need for more continuing education in pedagogy for higher ed faculty.

• Why Civic Discourse Is A Necessary Part of Campus Life | By Clare Antesberger, a student at Rhodes College, for Forbes.

• With DEI Training, Higher Ed Made a Lot of Mistakes. Now We’re Repeating Them. The new civics movement should heed that warning. By Andrew J. Perrin and Christian Lundberg for the Chronicle of Higher Ed: “Getting civic dialogue right this time around means making it an intentionally organized, collectively theorized, systematically integrated effort: one that is academic, serious, and meaningful” and engages the researchers and intellectuals within the institution.

Stories of success in civic learning:

• What Meaningful Character Education Looks Like Around the World: We interviewed global educators about how they teach values, virtues, citizenship, and what it means to be good. By Emily Brower for the Greater Good Science Center.

• Why Civic Knowledge Matters More Than We Think | By Patrick McSweeney for the Civic Education Research Lab, on why civic knowledge is a key adjunct to civic skills.

• The Future of Civic Engagement is Already Here, Featuring Alex Edgar, LaJuan Allen, and Jahnavi Rao | Democracy Lab podcast from Expand Democracy.

• Teaching Skepticism in Kyiv and Nablus: Close attention can foster compassion and spur action | by Peter Levine for Public Seminar.

• Theater for Young Audiences — What Role Can It Play In Saving Our Democracy? | By Joan Lancourt for The Arts Fuse.

• Inspired by the Next Generation at the We the People National Finals | by Diana Owen and the Civic Education Research Lab.

Civic learning resources

• New Online Tools Create On-Ramp to U.S. Democracy for Youngest Voters. Not sure where to start? Click your state to find rules, tools, and motivation. The Civics Center has created state-specific online educational resources aimed at answering students’ most frequently asked questions and increasing youth participation in our democracy. | By for The Civics Center.

• The American Association for State and Local History launches the History & Democracy Initiative (HDI), including innovative programming, strategic collaborations, and original research to help history organizations further their contributions to rebuilding America’s civic culture from the ground up.

• Terms of Engagement podcast from Harvard’s Kennedy School: American Birthright: The Constitution, Citizenship, and Immigration with University of Pennsylvania political science professor emeritus Rogers Smith.

Summer learning opportunities:

• The Kettering Foundation Democracy and Community focus area will be hosting the Summer Institute of Civic Studies at the Kettering Foundation Dayton campus this summer from Sunday, Aug. 2, to Saturday, Aug. 8. This is an opportunity for scholars and practitioners from around the country to learn and connect with each other. Apply by April 30.

• Summer Voting Rights Course and Democracy Training: Student Voting, Civil Rights, and the Practice of Democracy is a three-credit political science course open to any college or dual-enrollment students, designed by historians, political scientists and an election law professor and practitioner. It is taught synchronously and online. The course is led by Jonathan Becker, Professor of Politics; Erin Cannan, Vice President for Civic Engagement at Bard College; and Yael Bromberg, constitutional rights litigator, legal scholar, and election law professor. When: June 22 – July 28. Classes are held online. Cost is $150. Apply by May 27.

• Enrollment is open for the 2026 Digital Inquiry Group Summer Institute for educators in grades 5-12 on July 7, 8, and 9.

New publications:

• For ALL College Students: The CLDE Guide for Generative Curriculum Planning from the Civic Learning and Democracy Engagement (CLDE) Coalition, including the webinar recording from the report launch.

  • The CLDE Guide for Generative Curriculum Planning is a resource for educators who want to make college civic learning empowering for students, feasible for faculty, and renewing for a divided and skeptical democracy. It includes chapters on curriculum design, planning new curricular pathways, planning for leadership teams, and strategizing for long-term investment in faculty and staff learning (including adjuncts and visiting faculty) as the key to success.

• The Promise of America: Reflections on Our Enduring Ideals from the National Constitution Center, featuring an esteemed group of authors led by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer (Ret.), who provides the introduction, and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, who authors the epilogue. It also includes a line-by-line annotated Declaration of Independence prepared by constitutional scholar Akhil Reed Amar. Additional contributors include Jeffrey Rosen, CEO Emeritus of the National Constitution Center; historian and author Walter Isaacson; Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Gordon S. Wood; MacArthur Fellow Danielle Allen; Hon. Jeffrey Sutton, Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, and leading scholars including Robert P. George, Jane Kamensky, Yuval Levin, Mary Sarah Bilder, Lindsay Chervinsky, Rosemarie Zagarri, David Armitage, and Eric Slauter.

• To Counter America’s Civic Illiteracy Crisis, ACTA Urges Universities to Require Foundational Coursework in U.S. History and Government: The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) released A Broadside for the Nation: Preparing College Students for Informed Citizenship.

• Jefferson on Race: A Reader, Edited by Annette Gordon-Reed from Princeton University Press.

• Ray Block, Jr. (2026). “The Classroom as Civic Sanctuary: Teaching, Learning, and the Emotional Labor of Democracy.” Journal of Political Science Education.

• Forthcoming in May: Teaching America: Reflective Patriotism in Schools, College, and Culture by Paul Carrese for Cambridge University Press.

Upcoming Events:

1. Lexington’s First Civic Assembly | New America webinar, April 27, 11 a.m.– 12 p.m. EDT.

2. Advancing Open Inquiry within University Systems | Heterodox Academy members only, April 28, 2 p.m. EDT

3. Standing Up to Bigotry and Hate: Tools for Young People in a Complex World | Facing History and Ourselves, April 29, 7 p.m. to 8 p.m. EDT

4. News Deserts and Universities | Campus Compact and The Center for Community News (CCN) webinar, Thursday, May 7 at 2 p.m. EDT

5. Inside the Vault: The Brotherton Tribe During the Revolutionary Era | Gilder Lehrman Institute, May 7, at 7 p.m. EDT.

6. 2026 Civic Discourse on Campus Virtual Summit | NASPA—Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education, May 8.

7. Jack Miller Center 4th National Summit on Civic Education: Join organizations and philanthropists committed to reinvigorating American civic education with our nation’s founding principles. Pennsylvania, May 18-19.

In 2018, my colleagues and I founded the Center for Free, Fair, and Accountable Democracy (CFFAD). Our small team provides civic education to American adults via materials reviewed by at least one conservative expert and at least one progressive expert. We are among the millions of Americans who have turned their energies toward civic renewal over the course of the past decade. We’re not in it for the book learning. Like so many others, we want to secure government of, by, and for the people.

We power our work with research, and our research has turned up a fascinating puzzle. In theory, a person who supports government of, by, and for the people should not also support autocracy. Yet substantial and rising shares of American adults believe both approaches to governance are equally good. (See Table 1.) How can that be?

Table 1: Some Americans like both autocracy and democracy.

Imagine how things might change if even half of those people could be inspired to reject the temptations of autocratization!

While most of these people are less active politically, many are open to becoming more so. These ambivalent Americans are a consequential audience worthy of attention. They represent a large pool of potential new support for democracy.

Inspired by that idea, we began researching this puzzle with the ultimate goal of developing a theory of change for converting ambivalent Americans from the temptations of autocracy to active support for American democracy.

Our initial findings are fascinating and point to a path forward. In a nutshell, we find that a combination of knowledge, mindset, and partisanship goes a long way towards explaining whether a person might support representative democracy over autocracy or why they might instead be ambivalent between the two options or even reject both. People with a strong base of specific knowledge of what is essential to democracy tend to favor democracy, while those with weak specific knowledge tend to favor autocracy. Yet, people with what we call an expedient mindset, and who have only a moderate store of specific knowledge, tend to be ambivalent. People also tend to be ambivalent about democracy when the President is from their party. (See Figure 1.) We explain more below.

1. Support for democracy is more associated with specific knowledge of what is essential to democracy than with having a university education.

We compared the level of general educational attainment (low, medium, and high) with an index of specific knowledge about what is necessary for democracy. The index is a simple count of how many of five questions a respondent answered correctly. The five questions are part of the World Values Survey:

• Religious authorities interpret the laws (Not essential)

• The people elect their leaders through free elections (Essential)

• The army takes over when the government is incompetent (Not essential)

• Civil rights protect people’s liberty against oppression (Essential)

• Women have the same rights as men (Essential)

Both level of educational attainment and specific knowledge measures are positively correlated with whether a person values democracy as a good or bad way for the country to be governed, but specific knowledge is more potent. For example, as shown in Table 2, there is a 68 percentage-point gap in support for democracy between those who answer all five questions correctly and those who answer all incorrectly. By comparison, the gap between those with high and low educational attainment is only 18 percentage points. The correlation between support for democracy and knowledge of what is essential for democracy, 0.41, is much stronger than the correlation with educational attainment, 0.17.

Table 2. Share of Respondents Who Support Democracy

2. Unhappily, we also find that the pool of specific knowledge of what is essential to democracy has been draining, even though educational attainment has improved.

It remains true that people with more education tend to have more accurate knowledge about what is essential to democracy. The problem is that this tendency has been weakening with each new birth-year cohort. On the one hand, younger cohorts have enjoyed a higher level of educational attainment than the older cohorts. On the other hand, on average, they know less about what is essential to democracy than their elders. (See Figure 2.)

Figure 2. Education versus Knowledge of What is Essential to Democracy

This decline is evident within each of the three educational attainment groups. (See Table 3.)

Table 3. Specific Knowledge Holding Education Constant, by Birth-Year Cohorts

Education still matters, though: the decline is slower for those with more education. Yet, in an ideal world, there would be gains rather than declines. Civic education needs to be made more effective and more widely available, and it also needs to target what is essential to democracy and why. (For example, it is more important to know why the framers required a separation and sharing of powers than to name all three branches of government.) Higher education also needs to up its game, ensuring that civics knowledge from K-12 is both retained and deepened.

3. An expedient mindset combined with middling knowledge of what is essential to democracy correlates with ambivalence between democracy and autocracy.

One of the more prominent explorations of this mindset was conducted by two political scientists, John Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse. They found a large share of Americans who (1) don’t care about politics, (2) believe the political process is often unfair and ugly, (3) prefer to delegate the process to unelected experts or successful business leaders who they believe will be more likely to make wise and selfless decisions than politicians would, but (4) want to retain a democratic option to remove corrupt or harmful decision makers. Hibbing & Theiss-Morse (2002) refer to this mindset as a desire for “stealth democracy” after the military aircraft that are designed to be difficult to detect on radar. They find that most people who feel this way would happily place their trust in an imaginary form of government led by unelected experts who know and respect our common needs. In this light, we follow Bloeser et al. (2024) who characterize this mindset as expedient.

The third criterion, unelected experts or business leaders, surely overlaps with autocratic governance, while the fourth overlaps with democratic governance – nicely illustrating the ambivalent attitude. However, to avoid having a tautological measure of ambivalence, we constructed an index of the expedient mindset using eight questions in the WVS:

1. How interested are you in politics? (Not very)

2. When you get together with your friends, [how often] would you say you discuss political matters? (Occasionally or never)

3. How often in elections [are] opposition candidates prevented from running? (Often)

4. How often in elections [are] are voters bribed? (Often)

5. How often in elections [do] rich people buy elections? (Often)

6. How much confidence do you have in universities? (A lot)

7. How much confidence do you have in major companies? (A lot)

8. How much confidence do you have in elections (A lot)

We found that this measure of the expedient mindset was prevalent among those who favored autocracy (60%), followed by those who were ambivalent (46%). (See Table 4.) Only 16% of those who favored autocracy could correctly answer at least four questions about what is essential to democracy, compared to 39% of the ambivalent group. By contrast, only 30% of the people who favored only democracy harbored an expedient attitude, and 87% answered at least four of five key questions correctly about democracy.

Table 4: Summary of Three Influences on Ambivalence

The index for the expedient mindset is only available for 2017 but between 1995 and 2017, among ambivalent Americans, the percentage of people who believed having unelected experts is a good way to be governed rose from 66% to 75%; it also grew among those who support democracy (from 23% to 38%). At the same time, it stayed steady among those who support autocracy.

Table 4. Agreement That Rule by Unelected Experts is a Good Way to Be Governed

4. The problem of ambivalence is not confined to one party.

People in both major parties are susceptible to autocracy’s temptations. The contest between autocracy and democracy is timeless and non-ideological. It will continue so long as people who disagree seek advantage over one another by altering how we are governed.

In 2011, when Barack Obama was President, the share of Democrats who equally favored democracy and a strong leader, unrestrained by Congress or elections, was 32%. In 2017, when Donald Trump was President, the Republican share reached that same level.

The changes over time shown above are consistent with findings by other researchers. People in one party will be open to weakening democracy when the President represents their party, hoping to advance their agenda more easily. They will want stronger institutions of democracy when the President is not from their party, hoping to slow down the other side. This expedient attitude, especially when widely held, allows ambitious politicians to try to weaken democracy to their advantage.

These findings must be acknowledged to be preliminary. We had only a few apples-to-apples surveys to support comparison across time. And while we can rule out potential drivers of ambivalence related to rural residency, the highest educational degree, income, and ideological polarization, the data did not permit exploration of affective polarization.

Nonetheless, the findings are suggestive enough to justify further research into the dissemination of essential knowledge about democracy and into the expedient mindset and how to change it. We have shared these findings in the hopes that other democracy practitioners might find them valuable and invite those who are interested to join in our research process and pursuit of a theory of change. Come join us in this work! Your ideas and feedback in this regard are most welcome. Write to us at team@cffad.org.

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For a jolt of much-needed inspiration and hope as well as humor, I highly recommend watching this panel from Campus Compact’s recent conference in Chicago:

• Hope, Institution Building & Possibilities for Civic Love: How might hope and love guide our civic lives? In this plenary session, Adam Bush, President of College Unbound, explores the Civic Love framework designed by the National Public Housing Museum with Stanley Howard and Renaldo Hudson. Both Stanley and Renaldo survived death row in Illinois and are now on the cusp of graduating from college.

This was also a great panel, featuring two very impressive students:

• Advancing Higher Education’s Democratic Promise: Lumina Foundation President and CEO Jamie Merisotis makes the case for higher education’s role as an engine of economic mobility and a cornerstone of democratic life. Following the keynote, Jamie is joined by students Kaylei Voorhies and Morgan Bennett for a panel discussion moderated by Byron White.

Another look back at Civic Learning Week from and Louise Dubé:

• Civic Learning Week 2026: Believe in Bottom-Up Civic Renewal | by Louise Dubé, iCivics, and Danielle Allen, Democratic Knowledge Project

And for my fellow history nerds, a really interesting new look at democratic societies through urban planning (?):

• Democracy Was Not Just a Greco-Roman Affair in the Ancient World: Researchers use archaeological-textual tool to uncover global spread of democracies—and autocracies—in early societies, led by Gary Feinman, the MacArthur Curator of Mesoamerican and Central American Anthropology at the Field Museum’s Negaunee Integrative Research Center.

A new look at the state of American democracy affirms the need for more civic education:

• The Charles F. Kettering Foundation and Gallup have launched the Democracy for All Project, a landmark national survey and research initiative exploring how Americans perceive and experience democracy. Their new report “The People’s Role in American Democracy” draws from the views of more than 20,000 adults nationwide, examining citizen involvement, barriers to participation, the role of social media and information, and the impact of civic education.

  • New Report Shows Division in Americans’ Views of Democracy: One-third of Americans believe regular people don’t have power to make change in the country. | By Davi Schulman for US News and World Report

  • Americans Paying Attention But Struggling to Act, Major Democracy Study Finds | by Stacey Brown for the Washington Informer, April 7, on a study by Gallup and Charles F. Kettering Foundation

  • The Myth of Youth Apathy | by Jason Vadnos for the Kettering Foundation: “According to Is Democracy Working? the first report from the Kettering-Gallup Democracy for All Project, young adults today are more skeptical of democracy than older generations. But we must not mistake skepticism for apathy. My lived experiences and a wealth of research show that the idea of Gen Z being apathetic about democracy is nothing more than a myth.”

• As public comments come in on the NAEP Civic Assessment Framework, Fox News reports that “American students’ lack of basic civics knowledge alarms education advocates: ‘The very republic that we have is at stake if we continue to produce citizens that don’t think critically about these very, very important issues,’ says Terry Stoops.”

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Political wrangling over civic learning continues:

• Protests and Cancellations Mar Trump Administration’s America 250 Tour: Education Secretary Linda McMahon’s tour marking the nation’s 250th anniversary has been criticized as partisan and divisive. | By Laura Meckler (Washington Post)

• Protesters block Education Dept’s ‘History Rocks!’ tour in several states | Fox News video

• The Department of Education’s Accreditation, Innovation, and Modernization Committee meets this week to review higher education accreditation standards, following Trump’s executive order from last year. They’ll be looking at allegedly discriminatory practices and faculty viewpoint diversity, among other things. Inside Higher Ed covers the proposed changes here, and concerns here, and the Chronicle of Higher Ed reviews potential legal challenges here.

  

• How a Civics School With a Conservative Bent Divided Its Supporters: A University of North Carolina program was intended to promote civil discourse and ideological diversity. Some of its early conservative supporters say it is doing the opposite. | By Stephanie Saul for the New York Times

• WRAL and local media outlets sue UNC for access to $1.2M secret report: The University of North Carolina declined to make public its report into the School of Civic Life and Leadership. Local media outlets argue that the document is a public record. | WRAL News

• This university’s ‘intellectual freedom’ center creates the problem it claims to solve | By Victor Ray for MS Now

But so do efforts to overcome divisions:

• A Tale of Two Cities | by Rabbi Charles Savenor for The Fulcrum:

  “At the very same moment in two different cities, two visions of society were unfolding, one seeking to build the civic bonds that hold us together, the other seeking to tear them apart. Watching students who did not know each other at 9 am exchanging their contact information just six hours later emphasized all of the positives Dickens mentions: hope, belief, and possibilities. However, the tsunami of hatred and violence flooding our country makes any advancement of societal cohesion feel illusory.”

• Can Ideological Diversity Improve Campus Culture? Professor Eitan Hersh, the inaugural director for Tufts University’s new Center for Expanding Viewpoints in Higher Education, wants create a new campus atmosphere of “robust intellectual life, where norms of curiosity and goodwill reign.” | Terms of Engagement podcast from Harvard’s Ash Center

• The Real Crisis on Campus Isn’t Civility, It’s Meaning | By Jed Atkins, Dean of the School of Civic Life and Leadership at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, for RealClear Education

Stories of success in civic learning:

• Functioning Democracies Requires Participation—Not Just At The Ballot Box, But In The Day-to-day Work Of Community Building | By Paul Adler, Chief Strategy Officer, Rand Commercial, for the Rockland County Business Journal

• Children and young people’s assemblies: The next generation of democracy. What happens when young people are given the space, trust, and respect to rise to the occasion of democratic decision making? By for DemocracyNext

• “Can You Tell Me How to Get to Democracy?”: Sesame Street as Civic Education | by the and Nadya Hayasi

• Online democracy education can work, new evidence shows | by Anja Neundorf for Democracy Without Borders

• A class project that took years -- and ended up on the President’s desk | By Steve Fennessy: “students in both classrooms rallied around a bold idea – to propose congressional legislation that would expedite the release of records from civil rights cold cases.”

Civic education in the states:

• At Rutgers, Students Are Learning About Democracy in a Lab: One of the lab’s flagship initiatives is the Think and Do Tank, a yearlong program that brings together about 25 students from a range of majors and backgrounds to identify issues they care about and develop real-world solutions to address them. The paid program offers academic credit and emphasizes hands-on, applied work. The Lab also supports summer fellowships, projects for graduate students and faculty, dialogue work, a student showcase, and Solving Grand Challenges Month

• We must take our civic literacy into our own hands | by philosophy student Tanya Narwekar for the Daily Texan, April 7

• Philadelphia School District voter summit gives students hands-on civics lesson ahead of Pa. election: Young Philadelphians showed off their civics projects, participated in workshops about local elections and got hands-on experience with a voting machine. | By Ben Bennett for WHYY

• How to Overcome Climate Anxiety: Maine’s youth co-authored legislation and got it passed! | by Kaelin Ferland for about the Maine Youth for Climate Justice (MYCJ) coalition

• Students step up for bill that would promote media literacy among the TikTok generation. The initiative is part of a broader voluntary program designed to recognize Minnesota high school students for excellence in civics courses and activities. | By Anais Froberg-Martinez and Justin Parnjan for MinnPost

Civic learning resources and opportunities:

• Civic Values: Learning About Them, Living Them. Using Civic Profile, an interactive tool, Americans can better understand themselves and their communities—and perhaps build bridges. An interview with Chester Finn, Jr. from Stanford’s Hoover Institution.

• With the support of More Perfect, The Civics Center is expanding its High School Voter Registration Data Portal—transforming it into a tool not just of information, but of action. For the first time, it will offer a clear picture of registration rates among 18-year-olds across all 50 states, with deeper county-level insights in 20 states, alongside demographic and policy context. | by on Civic Moonshots

• Documents of Democracy: Lessons in Liberty for We the People from the Center for Civic Education and the University of Florida’s Hamilton School of Classical and Civic Education:

Through intensive seminars, educators will engage in primary source analysis, dialogue-based inquiry, and model lessons to strengthen students’ understanding of the principles of liberty, limited government, and equality. The project will produce enduring resources—including a Primary Document Toolkit for America’s 250 and new Civics Snapshots video series—to reach teachers and students nationwide. Together, we are preparing the next generation to carry forward the ideals of American democracy.

• The Jack Miller Center is hosting online summer reading groups in June as a part of their Founding Civics program: one on Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, one on American founders’ views on education, and one on Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois, and a Post-Slavery America. JMC is also co-sponsoring lots of teacher institutes over the summer, for which applications are now open.

• Is Your School a Fit for SLICE (Service-Learning in Civic Education)? The National Youth Leadership Council (NYLC) is partnering with public high schools across the U.S. to implement high-quality service-learning in at least three core classes over two school years — with full training and ongoing support provided throughout. A research team from the University of Minnesota will also conduct interviews and focus groups to capture your experience in depth. Sites are now being selected for the 2026–27 school year. Dates and Times: April 16, 9:30 AM or May 6, 12:30 PM

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New publications:

• What Does Effective Civic Education Look Like? New Evidence from the James Madison Legacy Project Expansion Research, by the

• Forthcoming in May: Teaching America: Reflective Patriotism in Schools, College, and Culture by Paul Carrese for Cambridge University Press.

Upcoming Events:

1. The Civic Learning and Democracy Engagement (CLDE) Coalition will host a virtual forum on April 13, 2026, 3:30-5:15 PM Eastern to celebrate the release of For ALL College Students: The CLDE Guide for Generative Curriculum Planning.

2. What It Means to Be an American — and What It Requires of Us at This Moment | ASU+GSV Summit 2026 (San Diego) panel featuring Eboo Patel (Interfaith America), Ellen Dollarhide McCoy (Ronald Reagan Institute), Eric Liu (Citizen University), and Louise Dubé (iCivics), Monday, April 13, 2026, 2:10 pm-2:45 pm

3. Exploring Civil Rights History teacher workshop: Explore new primary source sets illuminating 19th-century Black civil rights. | Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Tuesdays, April 14 & 28, 7:00 PM EST / 4:00 PM PST hosted on Zoom

4. Political Control of General Education on College Campuses | Alliance for Higher Education, April 14, 1pm ET

5. Deepening Civic Learning through Community Connections | Civic Learning Institute Workshop, Wednesday, April 15, 7:30-9pm

6. Surveillance on the Quad: Privacy, Safety, and Protest | PEN America, April 16, 3pm ET

7. Purpose in Practice: Community-Engaged Teaching Across the Curriculum | California State University online conference, Fri, Apr 17, 2026 2:30 PM - 3:50 PM EDT

8. Historical Thinking and Democratic Citizenship | Alliance for Civics in the Academy webinar with Suzanne Marchand, Jeffrey Collins, Jonathan Gienapp, and Mary Clark on April 22, 2026, 9:00–10:00 am PT

9. National Youth Leadership Council (NYLC) Service-Learning Symposium: Uniting for Good: A Virtual Gathering, April 22, 10 AM – 4 PM CDT

10. Standing Up to Bigotry and Hate: Tools for Young People in a Complex World | Facing History and Ourselves, April 29, 7:00 pm to 8:00 pm EDT

11. News Deserts and Universities | Campus Compact and The Center for Community News (CCN) webinar, Thursday, May 7th @ 2:00 PM ET

12. 2026 Civic Discourse on Campus Virtual Summit | NASPA—Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education, May 8

13. Jack Miller Center 4th National Summit on Civic Education: Join organizations and philanthropists committed to reinvigorating American civic education with our nation’s founding principles. Pennsylvania, May 18-19

• Nina Rees, an undersecretary in George W. Bush’s Department of Education, wrote about it from the perspective of an Iranian-American for EdWeek.

• In The74, David Noah argues for connecting Iran’s ancient and modern histories,

• Faculty at institutions like Seattle University and Princeton are holding teach-ins,

• Bryan Alexander moderated a conversation about how the war impacts higher ed on Future Trends Forum, and

• Penn State’s Boaz Dvir reflects on how to approach conversations about Iran in the classroom for The Conversation.

  

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Last week, I wrote about how to give students opportunities to practice civic skills in their own schools, including a great example: ’s work with Listening Schools:

And great minds think alike, I guess, because also posted a piece about student agency in schools!

Why civic learning in schools matters

• A Generation Ready To Lead | By Rajiv Vinnakota for Forbes: “A generation ready to lead is already here. The choice is simple: keep them on the sidelines, or invite them in as full partners in building what comes next—and be willing to learn and lead alongside them.”

• Higher Education Was Built For Moments Like This | by Kathleen Cole and Robert Glover for the EDU Ledger: “we help prepare a generation not just to navigate a divided democracy, but deepen students’ capacity to participate in it. We help to strengthen democratic life where it still exists and expand it where it doesn’t.”

• Educating for Democratic Resilience | by Peter Levine, “on the theory that democracy is more resilient when many people belong to self-governing, autonomous associations.”

• Debate hosted by Pepperdine: Are Schools Failing at Civic Education – And is That Driving Today’s Political Divide? ‘Ignorance does not produce neutrality, it produces distortion’ | By Katy Grimes for the California Globe

• America’s Civics Gap Isn’t Just What Students Know. It’s How They Engage. What does it take to prepare Americans to participate meaningfully in their democracy? Experts examine how civic education can help cultivate knowledge, judgment, and civic virtue—starting at a young age. | By Natalie Ermann Russell for UVA’s Karsh Institute on the relationship between civic thought and experiential learning

• A write-up of The Fund for American Studies’ (TFAS) annual conference, Developing Courageous Citizens: Revitalizing Civic Education and America’s Founding Principles, by Frank Filocomo for the RealClear Foundation: Civic Education, Civil Society, and Americanism

• What Is Civic Hope? And Why Should Schools Care About It? | By Rick Hess in conversation with Ashley Berner, the director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy for EdWeek, March 17: “A realistic, future-focused disposition supports democratic behaviors like voting, writing elected officials, and supporting a peaceful transfer of power. Cynicism and despair don’t. Neither does ideological outrage.”

• Higher Ed’s Role In Protecting Youth Voting Rights And Democracy | By Yael Bromberg, Jonathan Becker, and Civic Nation for Forbes

• Strengthening our Democracy Starts in the Classroom: Facing History & Ourselves President & CEO Desmond K. Blackburn, PhD reflects on what school and district leaders can do to prioritize civic education.

Thoughts on America at 250:

• The real revolution is not giving up on democracy — or on each other: As we approach the Semiquincentennial, there are lessons from the founders we can heed going forward right now. | by Kerry Sautner for The Philadelphia Inquirer

• America at 250: Patriotic Lament From Her Darker Sons | Rev. Dr. F. Willis Johnson for The Fulcrum

• Q&A with Madison Center for Civic Engagement’s Kara Dillard: Through a series of events, discussions and community partnerships, JMU’s VA250 programming connects the state’s founding history to conversations about civic participation today.

• What Does the Declaration of Independence Declare? | Lecture by Dr. Roosevelt Montás, John and Margaret Bard Professor in Liberal Education and Civic Life at Bard College, for the the Moynihan Center at CCNY in partnership with the Jack Miller Center

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Civic education in the states:

• Why civics education matters for CT students | by State Rep. Kevin Brown and Kristina Pires for the Connecticut Mirror

  • “As our nation approaches its 250th anniversary in 2026, the America 250 CT Commission has called for a renewal of civic engagement and democracy. The State Seal of Civics Education and Engagement, which Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont signed this week, provides a tangible, lasting legacy for this milestone year.”

• California’s civic seal is growing. Now we must expand access. | By Robert Medrano and Jenifer Crawford for The Fulcrum

• How to deepen California’s commitment to K-12 civic learning | by Erica Hodgin for EdSource

• In Florida schools, a debate unfolds: What does ‘civics’ mean in 2026? Gov. Ron DeSantis and some districts see civic education one way. Students think they’re missing core American principles. | by Jeffrey S. Solochek for the Tampa Bay Times

• In Page School, WA teens get an up-close education in policymaking | by Sophia Sostrin for the Seattle Times

• Minnesota students advocate for Civic Seal to boost media literacy: A proposal before the Legislature would create a graduation credential for teens who receive civics instruction in five areas, including media literacy. | Minnesota Star Tribune

• When Kansas City families learn civics together, democracy gets a boost | Opinion By Joanna Geller and Julie Holland for the Kansas City Star about CLTI, the Children’s Leadership Training Institute (for children ages 3-12 years old), and PLTI, the Parent Leadership Training Institute

• State Conference at Rutgers Highlights Civic Participation Ahead of Nation’s 250th Anniversary: this year’s CivicsNJ symposium featured speakers from Monticello, iCivics, and New Jersey’s state government as well as student leaders.

Civic learning resources and opportunities:

• Civic Values: Learning About Them, Living Them. Using Civic Profile, an interactive tool, Americans can better understand themselves and their communities—and perhaps build bridges. An interview with Chester Finn, Jr. from Stanford’s Hoover Institution.

• The Revolutionary Lives of Catharine Macaulay and Mercy Otis Warren | We the People podcast episode from the National Constitution Center featuring Mary Sarah Bilder of Boston College Law School and Sara Georgini of the Massachusetts Historical Society

• Wesleyan University is offering a new course to high school students through its partnership with National Education Opportunity Network (NEON), a nonprofit that facilitates the teaching of college-level courses to low-income high school students nationwide. The course, called “Civics, Citizenship, and the American Imagination,” is taught by Khalilah Brown-Dean, the Rob Rosenthal Distinguished Professor of Civic Engagement, with the support of 15 Wesleyan student teaching fellows.

• Student Leaders Turning Advocacy into Action | from the Children’s Defense Fund, March 5, about the Black Student Leadership Network

• Democracy House is accepting applications until April 19: The Young Leaders Summer Institute (YLSI) is a civic education program for young people ages 18-23, designed to prepare rising generations to defend, strengthen and improve democracy. Over the course of the program, for about 3-5 hours per week, YLSI Fellows learn about threats to democracy, discuss global and historic democratic contexts, and develop their civic leadership skills.

• Shake The Future Up hopes to shake up the polls with increased youth voter registrations | By Lizeth Tello for Solving Sacramento

New publications:

• Edward Brooks and Michael Lamb. “Ten Reasons Why Colleges and Universities Should Educate Character.” Journal of Moral Education.

• Ask Every Student Impact Report:

  • “While specific strategies can vary in effectiveness based on the size and type of campus, capacity building strategies such as Hiring Student Leaders, Building Inclusive Coalitions, and Building Institutional Partnerships consistently produced higher voter registration numbers when compared to campuses with similar enrollment numbers. When it comes to direct AES voter registration strategies, Academic Integration strategies such as Class Visits and Faculty Champions consistently produced higher voter registration rates.”

• The Power of Youth Service: How Service Empowers Young People from Gallup

  • “A nationally representative survey of more than 3,000 U.S. youth ages 12-25, conducted by The Allstate Foundation and Gallup, finds that youth service is linked to positive outcomes in the areas of career readiness, connection and resilience.

    “Eighty-two percent of youth say they have participated in at least some form of service. Youth who serve report feeling prepared for a future career, connected to their community and able to handle whatever comes their way, with the greatest benefits seen among those who engage deeply or take on leadership roles.”

• Webinar recording: Measuring What Matters: Using Data and Storytelling to Demonstrate Civic Impact | Partners for Campus-Community Engagement (PCCE)

• Forthcoming in May: Teaching America: Reflective Patriotism in Schools, College, and Culture by Paul Carrese for Cambridge University Press.

Upcoming Events:

1. We Hold These Truths with Monticello’s Dr. Jane Kamensky | webinar from UNUM and the Village Square, Tuesday, March 31, 2026 @ 7:00 pm

2. The Roadmap to Educating for American Democracy: Making K-12 History and Civic Learning Meaningful | Civic Learning Institute course, April 7-May 5

3. Webinar organised by the Global Cooperation for the Democratic Mission of Higher Education: Global Solidarity, Learning, and Action to Renew Higher Education’s Democratic and Civic Mission | 9 April 2026, (9:00-10:30 AM EST / 3:00-4:30 PM CET)

4. Civics in Higher Education: A National Summit hosted by The Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts University and the Alliance for Civics in the Academy (ACA) on Friday, April 10, 2026 from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. on Tufts University’s Medford/Somerville campus.

5. The Civic Learning and Democracy Engagement (CLDE) Coalition will host a virtual forum on April 13, 2026, 3:30-5:15 PM Eastern to celebrate the release of For ALL College Students: The CLDE Guide for Generative Curriculum Planning.

6. What It Means to Be an American — and What It Requires of Us at This Moment | ASU+GSV Summit 2026 (San Diego) panel featuring Eboo Patel (Interfaith America), Ellen Dollarhide McCoy (Ronald Reagan Institute), Eric Liu (Citizen University), and Louise Dubé (iCivics), Monday, April 13, 2026, 2:10 pm-2:45 pm

7. Deepening Civic Learning through Community Connections | Civic Learning Institute Workshop, Wednesday, April 15, 7:30-9pm

8. Purpose in Practice: Community-Engaged Teaching Across the Curriculum | California State University online conference, Fri, Apr 17, 2026 2:30 PM - 3:50 PM EDT

9. National Youth Leadership Council (NYLC) Service-Learning Symposium: Uniting for Good: A Virtual Gathering, April 22, 10 AM – 4 PM CDT

10. Standing Up to Bigotry and Hate: Tools for Young People in a Complex World | Facing History and Ourselves, April 29, 7:00 pm to 8:00 pm EDT

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    We’re making these roundups to support coordination and connection for civic educators — consider helping us out with a paid subscription!

You may be familiar already with the Educating for American Democracy (EAD) Roadmap, a set of guidelines created by more than 300 educators and scholars across the ideological spectrum and geographical span of the United States, and published in 2021. (If you’re not, check it out! Or read about the Civic Learning Week workshop about it, or sign up for a course about it in April!)

That Roadmap also comes with a Pedagogy Companion full of advice for teachers who want to better help students develop the skills, knowledge, and agency they need to participate in a constitutional democracy. Because it’s not just a matter of what we teach – it’s how we teach.

Among the six core pedagogical principles in the companion is Principle 5, “Practice of Constitutional Democracy and Student Agency.” In EAD classrooms, students should “learn how to exercise and understand civil rights and responsibilities to address issues that are pertinent to their communities,” connecting what they’re learning to the real world.

Schools and districts can provide important opportunities for democratic practice. Some students may participate in student government. Student newspapers can be a venue for students to make their voices heard and cultivate research and communication skills. Schools can bring in community leaders and elected officials to speak with students, to humanize the people so often distorted in traditional and social media and to shine a spotlight on local levels of government.

But the Roadmap also proposes ways to take democratic practice in schools to a higher level, by using democratic governance as a means of decision-making within a classroom or school. Imagine: school leadership of the students, by the students, for the students. Students can work together to create class compacts or community agreements, setting ground rules for how they engage with each other. Some schools have student voice committees, student advisory councils, student seats on the school board, or participatory budgeting processes. When students practice making decisions together on behalf of their community, they’re building the civic skills and dispositions they’ll need as adults.

Listening Schools: An Apprenticeship in Citizenship

Last month, I met an educator who’s facilitating this kind of work. She’s working to train students to reflect on and communicate about the kind of learning community they want. And more important, she’s ensuring that teachers and administrators will actually listen when students make their voices heard.

is an assistant director at the Center for Education Policy, Applied Research, and Evaluation at the University of Southern Maine, where she also earned her doctorate in public policy, with a background as a Waldorf school administrator. In 2020, she heard from teachers who were alarmed at the isolation their students (and they themselves) were experiencing as a result of pandemic lockdowns. That’s when she and three of her colleagues founded The Source School, a nonprofit that works with schools to reimagine and transform school climate using systems change frameworks from Theory U.

In 2021, Jennifer was working with a superintendent on school policy changes who said the students in her district didn’t trust school leaders enough to participate in a dialogue at all. Jennifer suggested training the students themselves to collect data and facilitate focus groups, and to present their findings to teachers and administrators. The superintendent promised to listen to what the students had to say. The result became Jennifer’s dissertation study and the “We Listen” program, which expanded into the Listening Schools Network as more schools and districts asked to participate.

Jennifer facilitated group discussions with students as a neutral observer. At the first meeting at another school, the students held the floor, sometimes reluctantly.

I asked if they were interested in doing a project similar to the one we’d been working on at Mrs. Harris’s school. Silence. Then, eventually, “Why would we try? Nothing will ever change around here. Nothing we say matters.”

Over a series of sessions, the students reflected on their feelings of agency (and, mostly, the lack thereof), their values, their goals for improving school climate, and the activities that could help them do it. They did this collaboratively through a structured, deliberative process, and practiced presenting their concerns and plans to adults.

Listening Schools have made use of a tool called Cortico, designed by a team at the MIT Center for Constructive Communication. Cortico generates transcripts from dialogue circles and assists students in exploring important themes and turning their conversations into impactful shared stories. Then, when students speak to decision makers about school policies, they can ground their presentations in data, and listen with an open mind to how adults’ perspectives add to this broader picture.

This is a powerful process, but it’s not one-and-done. Listening School administrators work to build sustainable infrastructure for the students to keep talking, and for leaders to take in their contributions and make changes. They change school procedures and policies to incorporate more student input. And as the process unfolds, bonds of trust and empathy start to get stronger among students, teachers, and administrators, as each group begins to believe that the others really are listening and appreciate what they have to say.

Cortico is also built into the University of Southern Maine’s Maine Education 2050 project, inviting students, parents, educators, and community members to imagine the future of education in the state. This year, working with Partners in Democracy, they’ll be facilitating a Citizens’ Assembly on Educational Priorities.

Mainers, Jennifer points out, are proud inheritors of New England’s tradition of town hall meetings and local civic participation. “They’re used to just relying on that one same guy who’s been running the coastal waters commission for 15 years, but at the same time, they know very well that their leaders are aging. When I tell them that they need to prepare young people to succeed them, they get it. I talk about ‘community sustainability’ instead of ‘democracy,’ but they want to be a part of it.” Community members can and should get in touch with school staff to learn about what they’re doing (without pre-judging or hostility!) and to find out how they can support it, Jennifer advises. “Schools aren’t just a thing we fund for people who have kids – the school is a part of the community, serving the future of the whole community,” she maintains.

Since Maine’s schools have a lot of local control over their curriculum, Jennifer adds, “One of my goals is to work with policymakers and the Superintendents’ Association to have a process for engaging students in school decision-making processes as a component of civics curriculum. We’re not going to teach them civics and never ask them what they think in the first institution they enter!”

Jennifer likes to think of the Listening Schools framework as helping to turn high school into “an apprenticeship in citizenship.” Students are seeking out others’ perspectives, collaborating to solve shared problems, working with institutional leaders, and accepting that change takes time and patient strategy. “They’re building the civic muscle of imagining a future, and imagining themselves as creating that future.”

What is your state or school district doing to support civic learning, including the skills of deliberation and consensus-building? How do you see schools serving the future of your community?

What would you change, or what would you have tried to change, in your school?

Leave a comment

But that was just one of many CLW events around the country. And there were plenty of opinion pieces about the importance of civic learning to mark the occasion too.

Advocating for civic education during Civic Learning Week

• Why parents should read articles (like this one) with their teenage children: As our nation celebrates Civic Learning Week, it is important to recognize that news literacy is a key aspect of civic education. | R. Lance Holbert and Huma Rasheed, For The Philadelphia Inquirer, March 12

• Ohio can’t have a healthy democracy without civics: We celebrate civic education and engagement in the Buckeye State and build momentum for stronger K-12 civic education policies as we round the turn to America 250. | by Paul LaRue and Joe Miller for the Columbus Dispatch

• Civic Education in California: A Foundation for a Healthy Democracy. What steps are being taken to ensure students not only understand their Constitutional rights, but are prepared to use them? | by UC’s Alison Yoshimoto-Towery for The74

• We Must Invest in Civics for America’s 250th | By Hans Zeiger for RealClear Education

• If we want a stronger democracy after 250 years, it starts in N.J. classrooms. | By Nicholas A. Chiaravalloti for the New Jersey Star Ledger

• Educators Are the Heroes of America’s 250th | by David Bobb and Louise Dubé

• Why civic education in schools is more important than ever | Opinion By Tani Cantil-Sakauye for The Sacramento Bee, March 9 - in California’s upcoming elections, “We should be asking every one of these candidates ‘If elected, what will you do to make civic education a priority for California’s young people?’”

• Another event from the previous week: Reflections from the We the People: National Symposium on Civic Education Research | by the Civic Education Research Lab and Patrick McSweeney, March 12, 2026

The Philadelphia forum was only the beginning of the semiquincentennial events, and a year of celebrating democracy:

• Drone shows, field trips and a birthday party: Schools prepare to celebrate America’s 250th | by Lexi Lonas Cochran for The Hill

• This Summer, Students From Hundreds of Colleges Will Heed One Urgent Call | in the New York Times, Wesleyan president Michael Roth announces Democracy Summer (a throwback to Freedom Summer), an initiative of more than 400 colleges and universities to promote and protect democracy

Legislation for civics:

• During Civic Learning Week, Senator Andy Kim (D - NJ) Introduces Legislative Package to Better Equip Next Generations through Civics

  • The American Civics Renewal Act establishes a bipartisan, bicameral congressional commission to conduct a comprehensive review of civics education across K–12, higher education, and adult learning.

  • The Every Student is a Citizen Act strengthens and expands federal support for American history and civics education.

  • The American Stories Act expands the authority of the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities to support films, radio, video, and other media projects that broaden public understanding of civics and the United States Constitution.

  • A resolution that directs the Senate Rules and Administration Committee to establish an annual, nationwide academic competition for secondary school students.

• Cwodzinski bill would create civic seal for Minnesota students | Eden Prairie Local News: “Under the proposal, students could earn the seal by completing civics coursework, participating in project-based assessments and engaging in civic activities outside the classroom.”

• How to deepen California’s commitment to K-12 civic learning | by Erica Hodgin for EdSource, March 9, building on the state’s State Seal of Civic Engagement

• In Pennsylvania, Advocates push to upgrade civics education standards: As the semiquincentennial commences, legislators, educators and nonprofit organizations are trying to seize the momentum to spotlight the subject. | By Justin Sweitzer and Hilary Danailova for City & State Pennsylvania, about the PA Civics Coalition’s state campaign for updated social studies standards and a State Seal of Civic Literacy, featuring EAD teacher Shannon Salter.

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New opportunities to advance civic learning:

• Assessment of Learning Outcomes in Nonpartisan Voter Engagement Programming: The University of Northern Iowa, Weber State University, and the Students Learn Students Vote Coalition are leading a research project to assess student learning outcomes in nonpartisan voter engagement programming. They are currently looking for campus vote coordinators who are willing to incorporate four learning assessments into their nonpartisan student voter engagement programming this fall. Campus coordinators who participate will receive $500 upon completion of the requirements of the study. To register your interest in participating, please fill out this short form. To learn more about the project or to ask questions, please email Clarissa Unger at clarissa@slsvcoalition.org.

• Public Comment Sought for NAEP Civics Assessment Framework: To prepare for a potential update of the National Assessment of Educational Progress Civics Assessment Framework, the Board is seeking public comment through March 27.

• The Institute for Citizens & Scholars (C&S) Unveils Bold Three-Year Plan to Spark 20 Million Young Civic Problem-Solvers by 2029

  • Over the next three years, C&S will continue strengthening its work on college campuses, in communities, and in workplaces to help young people build and demonstrate three essential civic skills:

    • Having Productive Conversations — Anchored in curiosity, respect, and active listening.

    • Using Credible Information — Distinguishing and applying reliable sources of information.

    • Collaborating to Create Solutions — Working together to define, explore, and address shared challenges.

  • On college campuses, C&S will partner with hundreds of college presidents and school leaders to build strong civic cultures where every student can practice essential civic skills. In communities, C&S will fund and coach thousands of young leaders in all 50 states, giving them the tools and pathways to create fresh civic solutions. In workplaces, C&S will pilot partnerships with 25 private sector companies to strengthen civic understanding and engagement at work; helping build more inclusive, collaborative workplaces that benefit both business and the country.

  • Looking ahead, C&S is creating and launching a new national participation platform in summer 2026—an open invitation for mission-aligned partners to join us in building and growing this effort together. Designed to make civic participation more accessible, meaningful, and achievable, the platform aims to engage 15 million young people by 2029.

New civic learning resources:

• Bill of Rights Institute Launches Civics Innovation Lab:

  • The Civics Innovation Lab will develop, test, and deploy new instructional strategies, interactive and participatory design processes, and advanced technologies, such as AI-enhanced tools, to increase teacher support, improve student achievement, and equip the next generation with the knowledge and skills to practice civics in their daily lives. The first set of tools will be released in time for America’s 250th birthday on July 4, 2026.
    The Institute will host events that bring together civic leaders, educators, technologists, and investors to build a community of civic practice around the Lab. The first events are at SXSW EDU in Austin, TX and at the Museum of History and Industry in Seattle, WA, on April 30.

• Smithsonian Launches Regional Collaboratives, a National Initiative To Strengthen Community Partnerships Across the Country: “By connecting museums, K–12 and higher education systems, educators, libraries, tribal nations, community organizations and local leaders, the initiative strengthens existing networks while creating new pathways for collaboration and opportunity.”

• For Civic Learning Week, Vermont Secretary of State highlights new comic-art State House guides for kids and New Hampshire’s Secretary of State David Scanlan and Civic and Voter Education Coordinator Lily Woo are pleased to usher in Civic Learning Week (March 9–13) with a new “Civic and Voter Education” section on the Secretary of State’s website.

New publications:

• “Inquiry-based and culturally responsive learning opportunities in social studies: A panel study of their relationships to civic development.” Benjamin Bowyer & Joseph Kahne for Theory & Research in Social Education. Published online: 27 Feb 2026

• Building Political Homes for Youth: Five key elements for organizations that want to support young people’s democratic belonging and civic engagement. | Report & Toolkit by Sara Suzuki, Seona Maskara, Ruby Belle Booth, and Alberto Medina for CIRCLE, February 26, 2026

• Testing Democracy: How Large-Scale Assessment Systems Can Support Civic Learning | By Laura Hamilton & Chris Brandt, National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessment, March 2026

• America’s 250th anniversary edition of Believe in People: Bottom-Up Solutions for a Top-Down World by Charles Koch and Brian Hooks of Stand Together, invoking the Declaration of Independence and America’s founding ideals to unite the country and solve our shared problems.

• Forthcoming in May: Teaching America: Reflective Patriotism in Schools, College, and Culture by Paul Carrese for Cambridge University Press.

Upcoming Events:

1. Teaching Elementary Students to Have Effective Discussions | Civic Learning Institute Workshop, Thursday, March 19, 7:30-9pm

2. Meaningful Civic Assessment: Bring Data Together to Tell Our Stories | Voter Friendly Campus webinar, March 23, 1:00 PM - 02:00 PM ET

3. Civics Beyond Borders: Fostering Civic Skills for Democracy in a Global Age | online forum from Retro Report and CFR Education for secondary and postsecondary educators, Wednesday, March 25, 3:00-4:00 P.M. (EDT)

4. Teach the Declaration’s Global Impact Using Media and Artifacts | PBS LearningMedia and the Museum of the American Revolution webinar, March 25 from 7-8 p.m.

5. Strategies for Building a Community of Care & Belonging | Facing History and Ourselves, March 26, 7:00 pm to 8:30 pm EDT

6. Forecast Public Art 2026 Series: Creative Power, Civic Purpose: How Artists Strengthen Democracy. The second webinar in this series, Knowledge Is Power: Demystifying Civic Systems Through Creative Practice, is scheduled for Thursday, March 26 · 12–1:30 PM CT: How artists restore civic understanding, expand public access to complex systems like budgeting and voting, and increase community engagement in democratic processes.

7. Engage Students Through Simulation: A Practical Guide with CFR Education | Council on Foreign Relations, Monday, March 30, 2026, 11:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. (EDT)

8. The Roadmap to Educating for American Democracy: Making K-12 History and Civic Learning Meaningful | Civic Learning Institute course, April 7-May 5

9. Civics in Higher Education: A National Summit hosted by The Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts University and the Alliance for Civics in the Academy (ACA) on Friday, April 10, 2026 from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. on Tufts University’s Medford/Somerville campus.

10. The Civic Learning and Democracy Engagement (CLDE) Coalition will host a virtual forum on April 13, 2026, 3:30-5:15 PM Eastern to celebrate the release of For ALL College Students: The CLDE Guide for Generative Curriculum Planning.

11. What It Means to Be an American — and What It Requires of Us at This Moment | ASU+GSV Summit 2026 (San Diego) panel featuring Eboo Patel (Interfaith America), Ellen Dollarhide McCoy (Ronald Reagan Institute), Eric Liu (Citizen University), and Louise Dubé (iCivics), Monday, April 13, 2026, 2:10 pm-2:45 pm

12. Deepening Civic Learning through Community Connections | Civic Learning Institute Workshop, Wednesday, April 15, 7:30-9pm

13. Jack Miller Center 4th National Summit on Civic Education: Join organizations and philanthropists committed to reinvigorating American civic education with our nation’s founding principles. Pennsylvania, May 18-19, 2026

14. Joint National Youth Leadership Council (NYLC) National Service-Learning Conference and Points of Light Social Impact Conference, June 22-25, 2026 Washington, D.C.

often talks about celebrating the green shoots of democracy renovation as one of our core missions here at The Renovator, and educators are as close to those green shoots as anyone.

Educators plant the seeds of knowledge, skills, values, dispositions, and informed action that we hope will grow into lifelong habits of civic participation and yield a healthier, fairer democracy. They nurture civic agency and a capacity for problem-solving that are strong enough to withstand the blight of disinformation, the invasive weeds of cynicism and extremism, and economic dry spells.

I can’t hope to recap everything that happened at the Forum – for one thing, I didn’t make it to every breakout session, and this post would go on much too long if I tried to summarize everything I did see! But I do want to report some of what I saw as the highlights, and I’ll leave it to you to add your highlights in the comments.

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Stories from Educating for American Democracy teachers

The Forum began with a session on the Roadmap to Educating for American Democracy (EAD), now five years past its launch and enmeshed in curricula across the country.

Educators from Pennsylvania and Missouri spoke about anchoring their lesson planning in the EAD concept of reflective patriotism – clear-eyed civic honesty about America’s past, both the good and the bad, balanced with pride and faith in our founding principles that don’t stray into uncritical adulation. No matter how polarized their communities are, educators have found that reflective patriotism is a concept that brings people together and inspires curiosity rather than suspicion.

EAD teachers talked about their renewed sense of hope and joy, rediscovering American history alongside their students with an inquiry-based approach. In Arkansas, students are partnering with the Chamber of Commerce to plant trees and create informational brochures about local history for the town visitor center. A civics teacher in Montana was surprised when an outspoken libertarian student presented a research project on socialist Eugene Debs and enthusiastically praised Debs’ advocacy for working people, while remaining critical of his ideology. An AP U.S. history teacher’s students began the year by writing a dialogic debate between any two characters (from SpongeBob to Ayn Rand and even the moon?!) about writing a federal U.S. Constitution. Much to their teacher’s surprise and delight, they have regularly referred back to that project to help them understand later eras of U.S. history. The word is spreading: In Missouri, two more districts reached out to an EAD pilot school to work on their own implementation plan.

Across the country and across disciplines, students are tuning in to civic learning as a toolkit to translate their passion and frustration into action that helps their communities thrive. A science teacher studied solutions to the space junk cluttering our solar system with his students. A librarian guided students through research about the palm oil industry to help them understand how their spending affects global markets and communities, and a year later, students still meet her in the hall and sigh: “Palm oil!”

Preparation to participate

In her keynote address, historian Jill Lepore gave us all a powerful reminder of the possibilities these classroom experiences help create. America has – or at least had – a proud tradition of regular constitutional conventions held at the state or regional level to rewrite state constitutions as new technologies, demographic shifts, and conditions drove a need to adapt. Advocacy groups held these conventions too, to push legislators to acknowledge their concerns and serve the citizenry in a broader sense. There were Colored Conventions, conventions for women’s suffrage and Prohibition, conventions of indigenous nations, and of labor unions. Colleges and universities held town halls and open public debates. In the 20th century, that tradition waned. Maybe it’s time to bring it back.

When you picture a debate on a public issue – immigration, say, or a wealth tax, or military spending – hosted at a university, do you imagine civil discourse and respectful disagreement, or do you imagine shouting? Or worse? There was broad agreement at the Forum that if educators focus solely on transmitting civic knowledge, they aren’t doing enough.

If we expect students to be prepared to advocate respectfully for new policies or to participate in deliberation alongside people with diverging perspectives and positions in a pluralistic democracy, then we also need to build civic values, dispositions, and habits into our frameworks of civic learning.

This idea came through clearly in the Forum’s closing plenary session. Celina Stewart, the CEO of the League of Women Voters, recalled her own childhood in a raucous household with six children. “It’s never easy to decide anything! But at least we listen to each other, and when we disagree, the world doesn’t end, and we’re still a family,” she reflected. “I worry that we think about pluralism as politeness, or as frictionless. That’s not what pluralism and democracy actually look like.” The mission of civic education in the 21st century must be to prepare students to disagree, to endure friction, to make their voices heard even in the face of pressure to be silent – without breaking the bonds of community or disrespecting their fellow citizens.

Student voices

I want to take a moment to appreciate the panel moderated by PBS’ “Civics Made Easy” host Ben Sheehan on Student Perspectives. Four extraordinary students (who all insisted that they weren’t actually all that extraordinary) spoke on the panel about their experience with civic leadership, and shared their perspective on what makes their generation tick.

Ava June Tackett entered the Chamber of Commerce Civics Bee essay contest in middle school and reflected on her experience of civic education in rural Kentucky. Even in middle school, she wrote, she could tell she wasn’t getting the same learning opportunities as other students in other parts of the state or country – and she learned this was partly due to changes to the ACT and state standards. She could also tell that her teachers were afraid to talk about politics in class.

So could Shreya Raman, hailing from Arizona, who insisted: “Having a copy of the Constitution on your classroom wall isn’t political, it’s American. There’s a difference between brainwashing kids and telling them to support a specific ideology and making sure that they’re informed citizens.”

Ben Kurian, a documentary filmmaker and co-founder of Students for Patient Advocacy Nationwide from Ohio, recommended advocacy on specific issues, which often requires coalition-building with strange bedfellows and across party lines. But Shreya and Ava also pointed out that civic learning is not limited to politics or debating current events. If you’re improving the life of a community or working to understand other people better, you’re becoming a better citizen of a democracy, and that’s what civic learning is about.

Panelist Charles Rinker, a peer mediator trained in restorative justice, took aim at critics of Gen Z who see them as nihilistic or disengaged. “I think we’re the most patriotic generation, in the sense that being patriotic means critiquing where we are, realizing how much work we have to do, and being ready and willing to advocate for that.” The other panelists nodded vigorously as Charles called for civic learning opportunities in the humanities, because “humanities fuel our soul” (I felt a room full of teachers’ hearts leap in unison). Shreya jumped in to suggest that young people particularly want opportunities for creative, artistic expression of what they care about.

And in general, the panelists said, whether students want to invent new technologies or make art or write laws or plant trees, whatever their skills and interests are, and whatever their GPA might be, just encourage them: “What you’re good at matters – use that to make a difference.”

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America at 250

It was a pleasure to spend time with hundreds of people dedicated to the mission of civic learning, a refreshing break from our day-to-day work that helped re-ground us. It also felt galvanizing in the moment of the semiquincentennial.

Danielle marked the occasion as a birthday party of sorts for the Declaration of Independence, one of many semiquincentennial celebrations set for Philadelphia and America’s 250^th. 250 civics teachers and students attended the Forum to mark the occasion, along with hundreds more representing a network of organizations involved in curriculum, educational resources, professional development, and policy advocacy for civic learning.

Victoria Hughes, Co-Chair of the History, Civics, and America’s Future Advisory Council at America250, reminded us of anniversaries past: During the bicentennial in 1976, she recalled, we were a deeply divided country traumatized by political violence and assassinations, political corruption, a divisive fight for the Equal Rights Amendment, and economic decline. The bicentennial opened up an opportunity to recommit ourselves to our founding principles and to a more perfect union. The semiquincentennial offers the same opportunity, especially to educators, who can help to ensure that the reflections and recommitments actually stick for the rising generation of leaders.

Raising a Glass

In 1774, delegates to the First Continental Congress marked the end of their session in Philadelphia with a banquet at City Tavern, and raised 35 toasts to celebrate the occasion and their hard work. At the National Forum, we, too, raised a glass to celebrate in the historic Memorial Hall, built for Philadelphia’s Centennial Exhibition in 1876, and now home to the Please Touch Museum. I’ll leave you with those toasts, composed by participants.

1. To those whose words started a revolution, founded a country, and inspired the world.

2. To the Founders of our Republic: People of imperfect goals and an imperfect vision, yet possessed of the leadership to unite and the bravery to begin. We honor the drive that pushed them to look to the future and the humility to know their work was only a start. To the Architects!

3. To the unsung Americans who keep moving equality, liberty, and the American dream forward for the betterment of all.

4. To a future shaped by informed citizens, courageous learners, and a democracy that grows stronger when everyone belongs and participates.

5. To carrying the blessings and burdens of the past with the optimism that ‘we the people’ can shape our future

6. To those once excluded—may their descendants help perfect the promise.

7. To not letting independence stand in the way of interdependence

8. To our military children, who were born into service—not service by their choice—yet sacrifice greatly for our nation’s safety

9. To the educators, students, and community partners who bring civic learning to life—thank you for creating spaces where inquiry leads to understanding, where young people discover the power of their voices, and where collaboration strengthens our communities.

10. To our Teachers: Who plant the seeds of history and the power of the People. May the knowledge they sow today grow into a generation of citizens who are engaged, enthusiastic, and active in the arena. To the Planters!

11. To civic teachers—guardians of the “why” behind the “how.”

12. To our Students: The rising forest of our Republic. May the knowledge they’ve gathered grow a fire in their bellies—turning them into the loudest, proudest, and most active citizens this nation has ever seen. To the Future!

13. As we gather to celebrate our nation’s 250th, let us raise a glass to constitutional democracy not as a finished story, but as a shared responsibility we renew each day.

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An investigation into student voting data

The U.S. Department of Education sent a Dear Colleagues Letter to presidents of institutions of higher education on February 5 about data on student voting rates from the National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement (NSLVE). DOE advises that:

“Institutions intending to utilize any NSLVE report or data this year are advised to wait to do so until the Department has completed its investigations into Tufts University and the National Student Clearinghouse. Any IHE that utilizes NSLVE data released in 2026 could be at risk of being found in violation of FERPA.”

The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that the National Student Clearinghouse cut ties with NSLVE as a result.

Ryan Quinn covered the letter for Inside Higher Ed, the Tufts Daily covered the university’s response, and the Alliance for Higher Education published guidance and talking points in response. Amanda Fuchs Miller, who served in President Biden’s DoE, criticizes the move in Inside Higher Ed.

New civic learning resources:

• More Perfect has launched , a landmark initiative celebrating America’s 250th anniversary. This Substack will serve as a digital home for a year-long exploration of leadership, character, and the American Experiment. Each week throughout 2026, they will publish original essays from some of the nation’s most prominent voices—including former Presidents, First Ladies, and leading historians—as they reflect on the enduring lessons and complex legacies of those who have occupied the White House. Check out ’s post on John Adams from last week! CEO Colleen Shogan also spoke to CSPAN about the project.

• The Urban Libraries Council launches the The Civic Makers Lab, a grant and peer-learning program that equips librarians to serve as civic learning facilitators, and empowers young adults ages 18-24 to be active contributors to their communities. Through experiential civic learning (the process of acquiring civic knowledge and skills through action), libraries will build new pathways for young adults into civic life, rooted in curiosity, connection, and community problem-solving, rather than partisanship. Application due today!

• Eric Liu and Citizen University publish Power Walk: A Field Guide. Want to make change happen in your neighborhood? Start by taking a walk. Citizen University’s Power Walk Field Guide is an activity designed to help you look closer, notice more, and ask some new questions about the place you live.

• Bad Bunny and the All-American Culture of Halftime | A Project Look Sharp media literacy activity.

• The National Constitution Center offers a new free course on civic virtues: What the Founders Meant by Happiness: A Journey Through Virtue and Character. Online and self-paced, open to anyone! And you can check out the video of their recent town hall: Thomas Paine and the 250th Anniversary of Common Sense, featuring Gary Berton, the president of The Thomas Paine Historical Association, and Scott Cleary, co-editor of New Directions in Thomas Paine Studies and author of The Field of Imagination: Thomas Paine and Eighteenth-Century Poetry.

• Cato’s Sphere Education Initiatives: Igniting Curiosity and Civil Discourse in the Classroom. Teachers from Massachusetts, North Carolina, and Colorado, all in the Sphere network, spoke to Free Society about the challenges of teaching in 2026 and how they are promoting civic culture. | By Josh Hardman for the Cato Institute.

• On PBS NewsHour, Norah O’Donnell spotlights overlooked women who shaped U.S. history in We the Women.

And some great talks to check out:

• From the Harvard Kennedy School Ash Center podcast Terms of Engagement, co-hosts Archon Fung and Stephen Richer invite democracy and civil rights advocate Cornell William Brooks to assess the evolution of America’s historical narrative and what implications history has on our contemporary political context: How Does Our Civil Rights History Shape the Future of American Democracy? And Amanda Litman joins the podcast to talk about why she believes democracy needs a generational makeover and to discuss her recent book, When We’re in Charge: The Next Generation’s Guide for Leadership: What If Millennials and Gen Z Leaders Replaced the Gerontocracy?

• Annmarie Caño, author of the new book Leading Toward Liberation: How to Build Cultures of Thriving in Higher Education (Johns Hopkins University Press), spoke to Bryan Alexander on the Future Trends Forum about how higher education can help faculty, staff, and students thrive

• Peter Levine recaps a recent talk at Tufts on his blog: The USA at 250: constitutional crisis.

Students, tech, and democracy

• From Civics of Technology, ideas for how to conduct a classroom Technology Audit to help students reflect on the efficacy, ethics, and biases of the tech tools they use every day.

• From the Knowledge Matters Campaign, the new History Matters Review Tool: A Vision for Creating High-Quality K-5 History Curriculum. “The History Matters Review Tool describes the core features of a comprehensive elementary social studies curriculum: sequenced knowledge building, inquiry-based learning, text-grounded discussion, and writing that develops both historical understanding and literacy. It is modeled on the highly regarded Knowledge Matters Review Tool for ELA curricula.”

• Media Literacy That Moves the Needle: Findings from Project Community | by and , February 26, 2026, with a link to the full report on the pilot of the Project Community curriculum.

• From The74, Social Media Is Toxic When It Comes to Tough Issues. Schools Can Help Kids Cope. Katz & Levine: 3 ways teachers can encourage students to talk through uncomfortable differences, think, listen and connect with ideas and one another.

Three articles about the Gen-Z changemakers around the globe who are leading powerful democratic movements:

• Gen Z, Guardians of Democracy: Protests have led to possibility in at least three spots around the globe. | by for , February 19, 2026

• Young People Are Fed Up, But They’re the Best Hope for Reviving Democracy | by for , February 19, 2026

• Small, approachable actions are the key to a nonprofit push for greater civic engagement among Gen Z | An article for AP News featuring the newly rebranded C&S, formerly the Institute for Citizens & Scholars - you can also check out an interview with President Rajiv Vinnakota on the Future Hindsight podcast

And a recap of Youth250: Our Declaration, an event hosted by MadeByUs:

• What Gen Z Is Declaring at America’s 250th: Insights from young adults from across the U.S. at Youth250: Our Declaration. | by for , Feb 26, 2026 - you can also check out the video recap of the event on Youtube.

The Wall Street Journal explores the politics of civil dialogue initiatives in higher ed:

• These Schools Want Civil Discourse on Campus. Even That Is Up for Dispute. New programs aimed at reforming campus culture have drawn scrutiny from skeptical professors, administrators and students who see them as a conservative takeover. | By Pamela Paul for the Wall Street Journal, Feb. 20, 2026.

New publications:

• Viewpoint Diversity: What It Is, Why We Need It, and How to Get It, co-edited by John Tomasi & Bernard Schweizer for Heresy Press, with a chapter by on “How to Be a Confident Pluralist”

• From Conflict to Conversation: Restoring Civic Trust in Divided School Communities | by Melinda Burrell, D.G. Mawn, and Becca Kearl for the National Civic Review, Winter 2026: As school districts across the country continue to navigate divisive issues, a new model for facilitating productive conversations starts with being vulnerable, admitting we do not have all the answers, and being willing to listen and change.

• Exploring Equitable Community–Campus Relationships | Edited by Karla Bird, Suchitra V. Gururaj, Sara B. Moore, Andrea Robles, and Cindy Vincent Claar, co-published by AAC&U and Routledge.

• From the Brookings Institute, A new direction for students in an AI world: Prosper, Prepare, Protect. “A yearlong study by the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution finds that, given the current trajectory of generative artificial intelligence (AI) and its implementation and use, the potential risks to students overshadow the benefits. But it’s not too late to bend the arc of AI use to enrich, rather than diminish, student learning and development”, including social and civic development.

• Campus Speech and Academic Freedom: A Guide for Difficult Times by Erwin Chemerinsky and Howard Gillman for Yale University Press.

• We the People: Pluralism in Real Life (Toolkit) | By Chris Walsh (Director, Freedom and Democracy) and William McKenzie (Senior Editorial Advisor), George W. Bush Institute, February 25, 2026 - 9 principles of American pluralism for organizations, businesses, and communities.

• The College Reality Check: What Students Experience vs. What America Believes report from Lumina Foundation and Gallup: 70% of college students agree they can express their opinions freely on campus.

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Upcoming Events:

1. How Can Universities Strengthen Civic Education in K–12 Schools? From the Alliance For Civics in the Academy webinar series, featuring Jennifer McNabb, Joshua Dunn, Meira Levinson, and Jenna Storey on March 4, 2026, 1pm Eastern

2. Teaching Through Dialogue: Perspectives on Curiosity, Connection, and Critical Thinking | Constructive Dialogue Institute, Mar 4, 2026 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM EST

3. ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge Action Planning Virtual Workshop, Wednesday, March 11 at 2 PM ET

4. America 250: Engaging Students with History, Media & Civic Voice - Discover classroom-ready civics resources to support teaching the America 250th anniversary in this fast-paced virtual resource sharing session. | Facing History and Ourselves, March 11, 7:00 pm to 8:00 pm EDT

5. “I Had to Stand Up for My Rights”: the Fourth Amendment and Mapp v. Ohio: Explore the 1961 Supreme Court case that redefined the rights of the accused and was based on the search and seizure provisions of the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment. | Annenberg Classroom & New York Historical webinar, Wednesday, March 11, 6 – 7 pm ET

6. Teaching Elementary Students to Have Effective Discussions | Civic Learning Institute Workshop, Thursday, March 19, 7:30-9pm

7. Meaningful Civic Assessment: Bring Data Together to Tell Our Stories | Voter Friendly Campus webinar, March 23, 1:00 PM - 02:00 PM ET

8. Civics Beyond Borders: Fostering Civic Skills for Democracy in a Global Age | online forum from Retro Report and CFR Education for secondary and postsecondary educators, Wednesday, March 25, 3:00-4:00 P.M. (EDT)

9. Teach the Declaration’s Global Impact Using Media and Artifacts | PBS LearningMedia and the Museum of the American Revolution, March 25 from 7-8 p.m.

10. Strategies for Building a Community of Care & Belonging | Facing History and Ourselves, March 26, 7:00 pm to 8:30 pm EDT

11. Forecast Public Art 2026 Series: Creative Power, Civic Purpose: How Artists Strengthen Democracy. The second webinar in this series, Knowledge Is Power: Demystifying Civic Systems Through Creative Practice, is scheduled for Thursday, March 26 · 12–1:30 PM CT: How artists restore civic understanding, expand public access to complex systems like budgeting and voting, and increase community engagement in democratic processes.

12. Engage Students Through Simulation: A Practical Guide with CFR Education | Council on Foreign Relations, Monday, March 30, 2026, 11:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. (EDT)

13. The Roadmap to Educating for American Democracy: Making K-12 History and Civic Learning Meaningful | Civic Learning Institute course, April 7-May 5

14. Civics in Higher Education: A National Summit hosted by The Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts University and the Alliance for Civics in the Academy (ACA) on Friday, April 10, 2026 from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. on Tufts University’s Medford/Somerville campus.

Check out this great new report and practical guide from the American Academy of Arts & Sciences:

• Preparing Students for Civic Life: A Guide for Higher Education Leaders

  • The publication was developed by a working group of university presidents, faculty, and civic experts, led by David E. Campbell (University of Notre Dame) and Ben Vinson III (Case Western Reserve University; Harvard University; National Humanities Center). The publication outlines eight institution-wide strategies to embed democratic learning across curricula, culture, and community. The publication complements the strategies with six case studies of institutions already putting these approaches into practice.

And this is a great read for anyone who works with young people in this moment:

• From the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, Community Work in Times of Crisis: Reflections from Carnegie Young Leaders on what they’re seeing in their work, February 5, 2026.

In Semiquincentennial news:

• From the Federation of State Humanities Councils: 51 Humanities Councils Join National Initiative to Explore the 250th through Community-Driven Cultural Programs

  • By the People: Conversations Beyond 250 is a series of community-driven programs created by 51 humanities councils across the United States, its territories, and the District of Columbia in collaboration with local partners. Together, these programs explore 250 years of the nation’s cultural life and imagine its shared future. Programs and events from each state, territory, and DC will be added to the Federation’s By the People homepage as they are announced.

• A webinar recording from Stories Change Power and Cristin Brawner of the National Issues Forum Institute: America’s Next 250: A Toolkit To Be Part of What’s Next. America’s Next 250 is a nationwide initiative designed to help Americans turn conversation into action where they live, work, and learn, with resources including deliberative discussion guides and talk-to-action trainings to use in your community.

• The Free Society Coalition has put together a pamphlet to guide discussion and debate about the Declaration of Independence and the semiquincentennial: Happy Birthday, Freedom!

• Monticello’s Declaration Book Club is going strong with groups in all 50 states!

Students, tech, and democracy

• The New York Times Learning Network and the Pulitzer Center are hosting a live webinar for middle and high school students, How A.I. Is Reshaping Our World, March 4 at 1 p.m. Eastern. Submit questions from students by February 18.

• Helping My Community Learn Why Local Elections Matter | By Manuela Bulgaro, President of the Criminal Justice Club and Voter Engagement Ambassador at Raritan Valley Community College, for Forbes.

• TikTok And Democracy: The Importance Of Fact-Checking Information | By Haylee Seiwell and Civic Nation for Forbes.

• VR’ing Democracy: High School Innovators Use Virtual Reality to Empower First-Time Voters | by Civics Unplugged for The Fulcrum.

Civic humanities

• Public Humanities Aren’t Extra. They’re How We Practice Democracy. | By Bowie State University student Kevin Lopez Cruz for The Sentinel of Maryland, February 5, 2026.

• Can Literature Help Save Democracy? A recent book argues that reading fiction and non-fiction can promote relational, cognitive, and emotional qualities that would improve democratic dialogue. | By Ravi Chandra for Greater Good Magazine January 23, 2026 - with shout-outs to Danielle’s work.

• Learning to Govern Ourselves | Interview: Ben and Jenna Storey on The Remnant with Jonah Goldberg (podcast), February 2, 2026.

The politics of civic education

• From Facing History and Ourselves: Reflecting on Democracy through a New Lesson and Film: The Officials. This new elections documentary and related curriculum can help students explore how civil servants maintain fair voting processes and civic trust.

• Civic Education for Civic Capacities | By Andrew J. Perrin for the American Enterprise Institute’s The Future of the American University, February 10, 2026, calling for “a disagreement-centered curriculum that teaches and models good argument across disciplinary and content areas”

• Civil Society Is Withering. How to Help Schools Restore Engagement | From EducationWeek, a conversation between Rick Hess, the director of Education Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, and Ashley Berner, the director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy, about the relationship between civil society and schools as parts of civic infrastructure.

• The K–12 Social Curriculum as Common Ground—or Proxy Battlefield? Beyond Zero-Sum Politics in Public Education | , January 29, 2026

  • “One logic treats curriculum as zero-sum territory: my history displaces yours; recognition is scarce; standards become symbolic victories in cultural warfare. Civic pluralism operates differently. It begins from the premise that we inherit a world shaped by many civilizations and traditions, and that education should enlarge students’ historical horizons rather than narrow them. The purpose of the curriculum is not to adjudicate whose narrative wins, but to cultivate the analytic capacities needed for democratic citizenship.”

• Michigan social studies teacher Keith Kindred reflects “on teaching civics when the presidency stops looking civic” on Michigan Public.

• New Hampshire educator Tyler Paré writes for the New Hampshire Bulletin, drawing on his grandfather’s stint with the Civilian Conservation Corps: Social media broke political discourse. Civil service could repair it.

• The University of Utah’s asks of “Civics Centers as Ivory Towers”: “Is the point of these centers to reform universities or to educate citizens for the practice of self-government?” And what place should they have, if any, commenting on current events and public questions?

James Traub’s recent book, The Cradle of Citizenship: How Schools Can Help Save Our Democracy, has generated a range of responses:

• Can American Children Point to America on a Map? In “The Cradle of Citizenship,” the journalist James Traub finds that the biggest crisis in education is not what kids are learning, but whether they’re learning anything at all. | by Mark Lilla for the New York Times Book Review.

• James Traub Misreads the Classroom | by Stanley Kurtz for The National Review, February 2, 2026 in response to Traub’s book and continuing earlier conservative critiques of Educating for American Democracy.

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Civil dialogue in the news

• What George Washington Can Teach Us About Grace in the Wake of Violence: After the death of Charlie Kirk, a Utah Valley University scholar takes solace in the Founding Father’s model of civil discourse and offers it as a way forward for educators and students. | By Matthew Brogdon for EdSurge, 11, 2026.

• Shaping Delaware’s future leaders through civic dialogue: High school students tackle political challenges and practice civil discourse at second annual Delaware Dialogues for Future Leaders on the topic of regulating toxic speech online | by Jackie Diehl for UDaily, February 6, 2026.

• App State’s Civic Literacy Initiative empowers students for active citizenship and dialogue across differences in partnership with the Constructive Dialogue Institute | By J. Todd Coates and Tracy Tilley for Appalachian Today, Jan. 30, 2026.

• Unite awarded $3.9M grant to launch civic institute at HBCUs: LaFayette nonprofit Unite won a $3.9M federal grant to launch a national HBCU Civil Discourse & Freedom Institute, expanding civic education and training across campuses. | by Hannah Barron for The Valley Times-News.

New publications:

• Leadership Learning for Systems Thinking and Practice. New Directions for Student Leadership: Volume 2025, Issue 188. (partially open access)

• The challenge of misinformation in the civics classroom | By Diana Owen in the Journal of Applied Communication Research, discussing tools from the .

• ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge Student Voting Handbook - 2026 edition: Through Students Vote 2026, the ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge provides institutions of higher education and their students with guidance and resources to promote nonpartisan voter registration and voting in 2026 elections.

• Coming of Age in Polarized Times: Teaching Civil Discourse in a Digital Era from the Or Initiative, using student and educator interviews about the conflict in Gaza since October 7 to learn about how students perceive the social media environments where they get information.

Upcoming Events:

1. In Pursuit of a More Perfect Union featuring: David W. Blight, Lonnie G. Bunch III, Drew Gilpin Faust, Karin Wulf, Colleen Shogan (moderator) | panel presented by More Perfect at The New York Historical and livestreaming, February 16, 6:30 – 7:30 pm ET

2. Defining Democracy: A 1619 Project PD workshop series helping educators to acknowledge Black Americans’ contributions to American history, and understand the lasting legacies of slavery in our democracy today. February 16, 2:00 PM - 4:00 PM EST

3. The Alliance for Civics in the Academy hosts “What Counts as Success? Assessing the Impact of Civics in Higher Ed” with Trygve Throntveit, Rachel Wahl, Joseph Kahne, and Peter Levine on February 18, 2026, from 9:00-10:00 a.m. PT.

4. ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge Spring Virtual Townhall on Wednesday, February 18 at 1 PM ET

5. Inside the Civic Classroom: Lessons from Award-Winning Civic Educators | An American Civic Education Teacher Awards Webinar from the Center for Civic Education, February 18, 7:00-8:30 pm EST

6. Askwith Education Forum from the Harvard Graduate School of Education: An Evening with Michael Sandel discussing The Tyranny of Merit and Democracy’s Discontent, Wednesday, February 18, 5–6:30 p.m. ET in person or virtual

7. The Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities at Bard College’s Philip Lindsay is hosting a free monthly drop-in webinar series on the topic of citizens’ assemblies, beginning on February 18. You can also check out their Democracy Innovation video series here.

8. Civic Learning Through Projects: Getting Started | Civic Learning Institute Workshop, Tuesday, February 24, 7:30-9pm

9. Panel on the new book Youth Voting Rights: Civil Rights, the Twenty-Sixth Amendment, and the Fight for American Democracy on College Campuses Edited by: Jonathan Becker and Yael Bromberg, hosted by Civic Nation, February 25, 2:00 PM Eastern

10. National History Day is introducing a new webinar series for teachers, Revolutionary Ideals: Understanding 250 Years of American Principles. This series, developed in partnership with the American Historical Association, will run from April 2026 to March 2027. Participants can earn 90 professional development hours or college credit at no cost and will work in cohorts. Apply by February 27.

11. Stories of Civil Disobedience | An American Civic Education Teacher Awards Webinar from the Center for Civic Education in Partnership with Colonial Williamsburg, March 3, 7:00 p.m. ET / 4:00 p.m. PT

12. How Can Universities Strengthen Civic Education in K–12 Schools? From the Alliance For Civics in the Academy webinar series, featuring Jennifer McNabb, Joshua Dunn, Meira Levinson, and Jenna Storey on March 4, 2026, 1pm Eastern

13. Teaching Through Dialogue: Perspectives on Curiosity, Connection, and Critical Thinking | Constructive Dialogue Institute, Mar 4, 2026 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM EST

14. ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge Action Planning Virtual Workshop, Wednesday, March 11 at 2 PM ET

15. Teaching Elementary Students to Have Effective Discussions | Civic Learning Institute Workshop, Thursday, March 19, 7:30-9pm

16. The Roadmap to Educating for American Democracy: Making K-12 History and Civic Learning Meaningful | Civic Learning Institute course, April 7-May 5

Some big in-person convenings coming up:

20. We the People: National Symposium on Civic Education Research hosted by The Center for Civic Education and the Civic Education Research Lab (CERL), Washington, D.C., March 6–7, 2026

21. America250: National Convention for Christian Education: A national convention on cultivating Christian, civic virtue in our students, March 8-10, Philadelphia

22. Civic Learning Week National Forum Liberty and Learning: Civic Education at 250, hosted by iCivics and the Democratic Knowledge Project in Philadelphia, March 9-10, 2026 (registration is free)

23. The Fund for American Studies’ 2026 Annual Conference, Developing Courageous Citizens: Revitalizing Civic Education and America’s Founding Principles, March 11-12 in Washington, D.C.

24. Campus Compact 2026 Annual Conference in Chicago, March 16-18, 2026 - the American Association of State Colleges And Universities (AASCU) has scheduled their American Democracy Project conference for March 15-16 on the same site, so you can attend the two conferences back to back (at a discount)

25. Jack Miller Center 4th National Summit on Civic Education: Join organizations and philanthropists committed to reinvigorating American civic education with our nation’s founding principles. Pennsylvania, May 18-19, 2026

In case you missed it, Tay Moore posted a beautiful essay in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day for from the Aspen Institute:

• Martin Luther King Jr., Benjamin E. Mays, and the Power of Rural Education

We published a piece by Penn’s about bringing more veterans into higher ed, at a greater variety of institutions:

And a follow-up by to her first post for us about the best ways to engage Gen Z (hint: by involving them in program planning and design), with a post about the semiquincentennial:

The 250th also gets a feature from EdSurge:

• Civics Takes Center Stage in 2026: With the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, social studies is the subject to watch this year.

More news from the NEH, the subject of pieces in the New York Times and Forbes:

• NEH Announces $75.1 Million for 84 Humanities Projects: Grant awards in honor of the nation’s 250th anniversary will support research, education, and public programs on the Declaration of Independence and America’s founding. The Ohio State University, the University of North Carolina, and the University of South Carolina won substantial grants for their Schools or Centers for civic thought, and a $10 million award went to the Foundation for Excellence in Higher Education (FEHE) which will include programs for civic education (full list of awards by state here).

And in related news, the U.S. Department of Education Announces Release of $169 Million Under the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE), including over $50 million for civil discourse projects at 17 institutions and organizations nationwide, according to Inside Higher Ed.

Local Government and Civic Education

Last week, the posted “Five Reasons We Need Civic Education in 2026 - And What CERL’s Research Suggests We Do Next.” One of the five reasons was that students (and adults) overlook local government as a place where they can effect change. I couldn’t agree more – in fact, that was the subject of my first piece at The Renovator!

Robert Glover up in Maine has been sharing the story of his efforts to engage students in local government through experiential learning, in a webinar and now in an article for The Fulcrum:

• Student Civic Engagement in Action: Q&A with the Authors of ENACTing Change | Scholar Strategy Network (SSN) webinar

• The Problem Isn’t Apathy. It’s about Teaching Students Where Power Lives. | by Robert Glover for The Fulcrum - about ENACT: The Abraham Feinberg Educational Network for Active Civic Transformation

Judithanne Scourfield McLauchlan at University of South Florida has written about her efforts for Political Science Educator (full disclosure: I helped her get started when I was at The Citizens Campaign!):

• Using the Citizens Campaign “10 Steps of No Blame Problem Solving Method” to Teach Students How to Work with Policy Makers to Solve Community Problems

  

What kind of civic education do we need?

• Equipping Students With Core Civic Skills in the Rule of Law: Seventy-two percent of American adults believe leaders who respect the Constitution and rule of law are extremely important for having a strong and healthy democracy | by on Civic Moonshots, Jan 15, 2026

• Being True to America: Towards a Healthy Civic Education | by Andrew Doty for States Forum

• Colleges Have Forgotten How to Argue: Civil discourse was once the point of higher education. We need to make it mainstream again. | by Eboo Patel for the Chronicle of Higher Education

• Harvard’s EdEthics launches the Values in Teaching hub, including student-facing resources to support civil discourse and productive civic conversations and to support students in developing values-based reasoning.

• Watch Beyond The Ivory Tower: What Elite And Non-Selective Colleges Can Teach Each Other About Civics, a webinar from the Alliance for Civics in the Academy, and read J. Cherie Strachan’s commentary, In Search of Good Citizens and Civic Leaders? Don’t Overlook Students Enrolled at Non-Selective Institutions.

• On Michael Lee’s podcast When We Disagree, Rutgers political scientist Elizabeth Matto explores Gen Z attitudes to voting and discusses productive methods of engagement: Gen Z, Democracy, and a Crisis of Faith.

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A survey for museums

YOUR HELP NEEDED WITH SURVEY RESEARCH! Are you doing civics in your museum? We need to hear your story! On behalf of the Educating for American Democracy Community Learning Partners task force, Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello is partnering with Wilkening Consulting to survey the public history, museum, and related fields to better understand how they have been inspired by and made use of the Educating for American Democracy roadmap to integrate history and civics into their program, exhibitions, and resource development.

We hope that you will tell us how you integrate civic engagement and learning at your own site, especially if you use the EAD roadmap in any way, but even if you are integrating civics using different frameworks and resources.

Thorough answers may make you eligible for an invitation to a two-day civic learning summit at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello in November 2026.

Complete the ten-minute survey! (https://lnkd.in/edb4sSVk)

A new publication:

• Promoting K-12 Civic Learning and Engagement Through Assessment, Edited By Laura S. Hamilton, Samuel H. Rikoon, David Kidd. Routledge, 2026

Upcoming Events:

1. The Civic Learning Institute’s next online course, Difficult Conversations in the Classroom, begins January 29th. Learn more and register for Difficult Conversations here. You can also contact CLI to learn about custom workshops!

2. The Project-Based Learning Institute is hosting webinars about incorporating PBL in elementary (January 29) and secondary education (February 5), both at 4pm Eastern

3. The Declaration of Independence and the Push for Racial Equality | National Constitution Center webinar, Monday, February 2, 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm Eastern

4. Generation Citizen in Action: How to Build a Sustainable Civics Program, with Peter Brown, Secondary Social Studies Curriculum Coordinator @ Oklahoma City Public Schools | February 4 at 2pm Eastern

5. 60-Minute Civics: Majority Rule vs. Minority Rights: Madison’s Warning Revisited | An America 250 Webinar from the Center for Civic Education, February 5, 2026 • 7:00-8:00 pm EST

6. Civic Assembly Exploration Event for Community Colleges | Campus Compact in partnership with New America, Thursday, February 5, 2026, 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM ET

7. The Alliance for Civics in the Academy hosts What Counts as Success? Assessing the Impact of Civics in Higher Ed with Trygve Throntveit, Rachel Wahl, Joseph Kahne, and Peter Levine on February 18, 2026, from 9:00-10:00 a.m. PT.

8. Inside the Civic Classroom: Lessons from Award-Winning Civic Educators | An American Civic Education Teacher Awards Webinar from the Center for Civic Education, February 18, 7:00-8:30 pm EST.

Some big in-person convenings coming up:

9. We the People: National Symposium on Civic Education Research hosted by The Center for Civic Education and the Civic Education Research Lab (CERL), Washington, D.C., March 6–7, 2026

10. America250: National Convention for Christian Education: A national convention on cultivating Christian, civic virtue in our students, March 8-10, Philadelphia

11. Civic Learning Week National Forum Liberty and Learning: Civic Education at 250, hosted by iCivics and the Democratic Knowledge Project in Philadelphia, March 9-10, 2026 (registration is free)

12. The Fund for American Studies’ 2026 Annual Conference, Developing Courageous Citizens: Revitalizing Civic Education and America’s Founding Principles, March 11-12 in Washington, D.C.

13. Campus Compact 2026 Annual Conference in Chicago, March 16-18, 2026 - the American Association of State Colleges And Universities (AASCU) has scheduled their American Democracy Project conference for March 15-16 on the same site, so you can attend the two conferences back to back (at a discount)

14. Jack Miller Center 4th National Summit on Civic Education: Join organizations and philanthropists committed to reinvigorating American civic education with our nation’s founding principles. Pennsylvania, May 18-19, 2026

Of course, the 250th presents an opportunity to cultivate an informed, prepared citizenry – valuable in its own right. But here are three more big reasons to brainstorm ways to engage young people now.

Riding the Youth Wave

First, there’s an incredible collision taking place: The nation turns 250 just as the biggest American generation ever crosses the threshold to adulthood.

The largest birth year in U.S. history was 2007, with a new baby boom of 4.3 million children born. Those 2007 babies are now the high school class of 2026. The sheer size of this cohort is already shaping politics, culture, the workplace and consumer trends.

Today’s young people are in fact part of a global youth wave. More than 40 percent of the world’s population is under 25. Youth political movements have taken hold in Nepal, New Zealand, Madagascar and Morocco. Institutional leaders can’t ignore this impact – and if they’re smart, they’ll embrace it, recognizing that we can either change with this generation or be changed by them.

Beginning the “commemorative decade” on the right foot

Second, all those young people are pouring into our systems every year — voter rolls, the workforce, the stock market — and driving a wave of change that will span America’s “commemorative decade.” The 250th is just the start of that decade. All our founding documents will cross the quarter-millennium milestone between 2026 and 2040, as all of Gen Z and Gen Alpha step into adulthood. If we want these founding documents, and the ideas and inspiration they contain, to inspire a new generation to understand, sustain and improve our democracy, we’ll need to build the institutional muscle to connect with youth – not just for the 250th, but for the next 15 years.

Closing the trust gap

The decade ahead presents an opportunity to close the gap between young people and our institutions, and rebuild some level of trust, currently threadbare. On the other hand, a commemoration that’s disorganized, out of touch, or simply a snoozefest only furthers disinterest and disengagement, diminishing trust in institutions. It opens the door for alternate celebrations with partisan or exclusionary motives to take root.

The disparity between the demographic shape of the country and of power-holders is palpably felt among Gen Z. They are quite aware that institutional leadership in America is far away — demographically, culturally, socially, economically — from young people’s everyday world. The laws that get passed, issues that get attention, and systems that seem intractable drive this home.

Twenty-four members of Congress are over 80, and half of those are running for re-election this year. Meanwhile, more than half of Gen Z identifies as politically independent, and only 16 percent thinks democracy is working well. Many civics events trot out current and former Supreme Court justices as speakers meant to inspire youth, but only 17 percent of Gen Z thinks the Supreme Court can be trusted. The median age of cable TV news viewers is 70. The old guard has come and gone, but they’re still on TV. This is the ecosystem young people are experiencing during this commemoration.

Of course, Gen Z is not the first to encounter an “out of touch” ruling class. That’s practically a rite of passage. But young people today are using a myriad of new tech tools and media to express ourselves and to connect with each other in everyday life, a constantly evolving landscape that is disconnected from our institutions. Actually, I’ve come to see Gen Z as a “canary in the coal mine” for how many Americans of all ages are feeling: unheard, unconvinced and unsure who to trust.

So how do we get young people’s help to write the next chapter for our institutions?

Design thinking rests on this liberating principle: You can’t get people to do anything. You can only design for their underlying need.

Four key questions

Across our work with museums and cultural and civic organizations trying to reach youth audiences, we’ve found that young people – actually people of all ages – are asking four key questions before participating in civic life:

• Is this for me?

• Who else will be there?

• Do I know enough?

• Why should I care?

We’ve seen the most success from initiatives that address these questions up front, and lead with information that’s important to the user, not the institution.

When it comes to the U.S. 250th commemoration, have we addressed these four questions? Some recent views from our youth community at Made by Us reveal a blunt reality; young people do not think the celebration is for anyone other than institutional power-holders, and they certainly don’t think it’s for them, as our December 2025 polls showed:

These data points suggest we’re headed toward a missed opportunity to seize upon a generation’s emerging and keen — if unsteady and uncertain — interest in contributing to American life and a better future.

Gen Z wants to participate. They want to be heard and improve things and volunteer and make their own meaning out of this complicated and changing nation. They would rather not be on their phones all the time, pay a gazillion dollars for a college degree, or have to make new friends in the most polarized, sensitive and always-recording social climate to date. They are voting with their wallets, their time and their votes (or non-votes). They are wondering how they can make it any clearer to the rest of us that the future is not abstract, but in fact arriving daily.

The 250th is an incredible, once-in-a-generation moment to usher in a better future. Commemoration is one of the few avenues average Americans have to shape our national story, from monuments to street names. This moment will be defined by both the past that we honor and the future that we imagine and build toward. If done well, it’s a great test kitchen for how we might reconfigure other aspects of civic life to better appeal to and engage young people — and people of all ages. So how can we turn the youth-excluding dynamics around?

Building Better On-Ramps

When we take the time to measure civic opportunities, we learn there is a glut of supply for civics resources and ways to take part in civic life. We also know Gen Z has an immense demand for credible information and ways to be heard. But currently there is no connective tissue between supply and demand. Institutional leaders and Gen Z are often operating in different universes.

It’s been eight years since New Power was published, arguing that networked participation is replacing top-down authority in politics, culture, and business. Yet most institutions still define themselves by boards, VIPs, prestige brands, and credentials – sources of legitimacy that increasingly fail to translate externally. Young people do not recognize most board names. They are unmoved by logo soup. They also know you can call yourself anything you want online.

I’m not suggesting that to connect with youth audiences, institutions must switch power grids entirely. It’s hard to satisfy both an institutional funder and a 19-year-old gamer. Perhaps gravitas doesn’t easily coexist with coolness. The goal is to supplement institutional power, not abandon it. Institutions that are seeing traction with youth audiences are those willing to operate, at least some of the time, on a parallel axis measured by resonance, usefulness, and reach. When organizations look closely at what’s happening in group chats, feeds, cultural moments, and peer networks and then tap into those conversations, their work becomes more effective and legible. For example: If your organization is talking about the midterm elections while college students are talking about their midterm exams, start with the reality that their pressing concern is tomorrow’s chemistry test, and find ways to help with that – mental health breaks, study tips, stories of life beyond college. Trust moves at the speed of connection.

This doesn’t mean dumbing anything down; in fact, when it comes to sharing history, Gen Z wants the raw data, the thoughtful critique. But cultural institutions that want to reach young people must include on-ramps that answer those four core questions:

• Is this for me?

• Who else will be there?

• Do I know enough?

• Why should I care?

Modeling is one powerful on-ramp. The Civic Alliance, a network of more than 1,200 companies activated to support civic engagement, worked with ViacomCBS to integrate voting into the fabric of popular streaming shows, complete with a how-to toolkit for Hollywood. A character might have “Election Day” circled on their calendar — subtle, participatory and effective.

Influencers provide on-ramps for individuals to connect with brands, news, music and more. Quizzes, polls, prompts and other interactive questions can do this too. We have a whole list of tactics you can try in the Gen Z Engagement Scorecard.

The fastest track to delivering programs, content and curriculum that appeal to youth is to ask a young person to design them. After hearing from many cultural institutions that they lacked a way to simply ask a young person their opinion — “we don’t know any!” — we took a big bet and launched the Youth250 Bureau, a first-of-its-kind national youth advisory board, our “Gen Z Hotline.” We had so much interest that we had to create subsequent programs for more waves of young people that wanted to contribute to the 250th, which validated our assumption that the appetite for civic participation is there – but not always the opportunities.

On the institutional side, we need to make it standard to include youth in the design process. There are bright spots: Edelman launched an internal Gen Z Lab of 250 young people, and in Sydney, Australia, it’s now required to have a youth member on every cultural institution board. It’s smart business strategy to design with, not for people, but there’s a longstanding attachment to “how we’ve always done it” that slows down progress.

For the 250th, this requires a mindset shift toward asking what kinds of moments, tools, and invitations might naturally intersect with people’s lives in 2026 and beyond. The anniversary is competing with everything else vying for our attention, energy, and optimism, from the World Cup to the daily headlines to summer vacations. Happily, this is an opportunity — and the best possible moment — to build up this relevance muscle for all that’s to come.

We know we can do it. Back in 2020, Gen Z’s skepticism and lack of connection to July 4th led to the development of Civic Season, three weeks of learning and action from Juneteenth to July 4th. We worked with a group of young leaders from Civics Unplugged who brought up the idea that Independence Day could be so much more than hot dogs and fireworks, or just a day off — if re-imagined, it could drive real patriotic participation in community and country. Civic Season has served as a proving ground for collective experimentation around how we could coordinate and deliver a meaningful 250th

Since its launch, Civic Season has grown to a beloved tradition, reaching 85 million people annually. Civic Season is a coordinated campaign, but adapts to local environments, like Utah adding in Pioneer Day, or the historic farm Conner Prairie hosting outdoor events while the e-book app Libby shares reading lists. The pluralism is the point; it has a resonant, sticky through-line but is elastic enough to hold all of our stories and evolve over time. Crucially, Civic Season created a space where institutions could innovate and experiment within the safety of a large, collective campaign.

A practice decade

It is harder than ever to deliver all that institutions are expected to deliver, for a changing American people, in changing times. We aren’t going to get it right all the time, and incremental change is far more feasible than any kind of overhaul of our systems.

This is why the 250th should be viewed as the kickoff to an incredible practice decade for institutions to transform into the places we will need for tomorrow. We must make time and permission to test, adapt, and learn in public — to pilot small changes, assess what resonates, and build confidence over time rather than striving for instant transformation.

And we ought to show our work. Gen Z is an audience that’s okay with you trying new things, changing your mind, evolving your approach and showing that you’re learning, too. This is the generation of hybrid school and work, blurred race and gender lines, and multiple identifiers (artist/Doordasher/paralegal/health girlie). They resist an either/or, binary simplification, and this fluidity extends across their lives. They want major institutions to bring the expected seriousness and credibility to the work, but if you dabble in a rogue meme, they won’t be mad. If you share an amateur video of yourself rather than a highly produced one, well, that’s the realness they’re looking for.

With this serious, fluid generation at the helm, a richly pluralist view appeals. The 250th anniversary can embrace a both/and approach — we can retain some of the pomp and circumstance from tradition, while giving equal weight to the joy, the fun, the promise, and the plurality. When it comes to teaching civics, engaging people with our institutions, or how our democracy is operating, we need the strengths of both institutions and youth.

Let’s enter the next 250 years together, with generations connected, starting with this decade of incredible milestones and youth power at scale. Ask the young people in your life or your organization:

• What do you want the United States to be like in 50 years, at our 300th anniversary? What needs to change to get there? Who do you think will determine that?

• Where is your time and attention going right now? What do you talk about with your friends?

• What do you think older generations aren’t understanding about this moment?

You may be surprised at how these questions can cast our world in a new light. Let us know what they say!

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In front of that Arizona State University class, he moved as if looking through a gun sight. “Wait, wait, wait. Never fire until fired upon. You know your friends have been shot, have been maimed, have been killed, but you wait, wait, wait. And that” — he looked at his student peers — “is what we did.”

Experience representing the operational difficulty and ethical complexity of military service is uncommon on elite college campuses.

Nationwide, about 5% of undergraduates have military connections. In the most selective institutions, that number drops below 2%, often far lower. Some of these differences come down to elite colleges and universities’ propensity to work with 18–23-year-olds. Yet the military has also been excluded.

In Arms and the University: Military Presence and the Civic Education of Non-military Students, Professors Donald Alexander Downs and Ilia Murtazashvili trace the expulsion of Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) units from Columbia, Harvard, Stanford, and Yale Universities for four decades following the Vietnam War. While those campuses have ROTC programs today, the largest programs are at public universities and military-affiliated institutes that cluster in the South and West. Their research demonstrated a distancing of hard power from the halls of elite higher education, where significant military history and realist approaches were absent from several leading security studies programs.

Even at elite institutions with ROTC programming, students are less likely to hear about the sort of frontline experiences we heard in the human rights seminar. That would require broader inclusion of non-traditional-age students.

Learning through the wisdom of others’ experiences

This is not merely about a sense of belonging. It’s about education: understanding the world, its politics, and their consequences.

Career Foreign Service Officer Carol Kalin picked up this theme in a dissertation on veterans in the Ivy League. She interviewed a Marine Corps Veteran attending Columbia, who remembered challenging a classroom consensus on the ease of implementing a no-fly zone. He detailed the operational commitments and possibility of deaths involved — certainties and likelihoods that his classmates hadn’t understood.

Whether civilian, military, or veteran, we owe one another educational pathways that reflect authentic equality of opportunity and create inclusive environments for deepening understanding through one another’s experiential insights.

The Vice President of the United States’ biography suggests how some institutions may fail to do that.

In Hillbilly Elegy, JD Vance shares the sting of cumulative biases. As a law student at Yale, he feels his veteran identity and patriotism aren’t matched by many in the Acela corridor. If patterns of military enlistment are any indication, he’s right. Soldiers are more likely to come from The South and West. His working class experience cleaning up after others made him dissimilar from all but one of his classmates out one evening in New Haven, he writes. Here too, the data agrees. From selective R1s through liberal arts colleges, elite higher education institutions largely reproduce elite status. Place plays an important role too. Rural kids are more likely to live in what researchers call education deserts, far from any higher education institution.

Though the term is unpopular on the right, a concept that screams through Vance’s book is intersectionality. It’s not only that he was poor or grew up far from economically prosperous communities. It’s also that his people come from a historically excluded, rural Appalachian culture. And by the time he makes it into elite circles, he is also a veteran. Each of those aspects of Vance’s identity gave him a perspective that could have informed unique contributions to campus conversations — and each made him an outlier among his peers, as many other veterans also experience.

Part of the point of broad inclusion is that no single individual should ever represent any single category. Vance is a member of the Republican Party. His former Senate colleague Ruben Gallego is also a Marine Corps Veteran and first-generation Ivy League alumnus, yet his experiences lead him to serve as a Democrat. What’s troubling from the perspective of education for democracy is limited representation of and cross-pollination among experiences, categories, networks, and ideas on college campuses, a theme woven through veteran and Dartmouth alumnus Phil Klay’s Citizen Soldier: Moral Risk and the Modern Military.

Would more broadly distributed military-affiliated inclusion yield different kinds of truths and analytical insights in higher ed classrooms? Downs and Murtazashvili (cited above) think so. Arms and the University is rife with examples of contributions growing from dissimilarity. The authors refer to this as “productive friction” between civilian and military worlds.

What does higher education owe the country and the individuals who serve in its military?

Considering inclusion from the vantage point of veterans is important, not only because they pledged their lives to support the political institutions that ultimately make excellence in higher education possible. It also reveals the ways in which structures of exclusion operate across our society and are accelerated through an educational system that struggles to serve middle, working class, and poor families in a broad and accessible manner. From a strategic perspective, for a sector seeking to rebuild public trust, it’s important to wrestle with the ways in which patterns of exclusion may undermine our capacity to have conversations on campus, while also fomenting resentment off campus.

At Ivy League schools, 17% of students come from families in the top 1% of income earners; more than 60% come from the top quintile. By contrast, the upper class is not well represented in the military. Middle- and working-class people who do attend college face disproportionate risk of going into debt yet failing to earn a degree. Yet whether veterans or not, those who attend elite institutions are far likelier to land one of the most influential positions across science, business, media, and politics.

For families from communities where the data suggests elite higher education is just “not for them,” it is easy to see how they might conclude that economic opportunity and mobility is not really for them either. Part of the mistrust of higher education may be rooted in this juxtaposition between rhetorically promoting democratic equality (a non-zero-sum ideal) and contemporary elite admissions pressures (a zero-sum game).

Additionally, students and scholars engaging in conversations isolated from hard power may too easily overlook at least one uncomfortable lesson of history: military strength supporting national security is a foundational component in any civilian-led government that ensures the fundamental conditions for open inquiry.

America, like many powers preceding it, has amassed stability, books, and laboratories enabling scholarly investigation. Over the last century, the US has benefited from the global flight of scientists, artists, activists, and innovators from totalitarian and oppressive regimes. We have had a deserved reputation for offering stability, investing in science, and supporting open intellectual exchange. That reputation is very much at risk. But let’s also be clear: it has never existed absent civilian-led and democratically restrained military power.

It’s past time for new innovation to ensure the individuals who take an oath to support and defend the Constitution receive access to a broad set of educational opportunities.

The challenges here, however, point to patterns beyond veterans alone.

Higher education can’t address these issues through its default response: fundraising and program innovation at single institutions competing with one another. We need better systems-thinking and coordination if there is to be anything like a renewed social contract between America and its universities. That will necessarily include educational opportunities supporting career development from among all economic classes and backgrounds, along with opportunities for renewal throughout one’s life journey. System innovation requires deeper thinking about K-16 pipelines, as well as partnerships among community colleges, regional 4-years, and elite institutions. It also indicates the importance of thoughtful state and national policies, positive government relationships, and good-faith governance.

A high-quality, empowering education should be affordable and accessible for all Americans — especially those who ensure our collective defense. Our classrooms, our educational institutions, and our democracy will be better for it.

Eric Hartman is a senior fellow and director of the executive doctorate in higher education management at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education.

Didn’t catch my live conversation with of Bridging Differences, about their higher ed playbook and neuroscience-backed approach to dialogue and disagreement? Check out the recording here, and two clips that I thought were especially insightful!

• Bridging Differences with Juliana Tafur

More stories about civil dialogue:

• Everyone’s Starting ‘Civil Dialogue’ Programs. Will they work? By Eric Kelderman and Francie Diep for the Chronicle of Higher Education

• In Northwestern’s Trump Agreement, International Students Singled Out For ‘Open Debate’ Training | By Sonel Cutler for the Chronicle of Higher Education

• The Professor of Pluralism: Kwame Anthony Appiah on free speech, thick skin, and the mistakes of DEI offices. | By Evan Goldstein and Len Gutkin for the Chronicle of Higher Education - on the importance of dialogue across difference and equality in higher ed

A call for contributions from the Institute for Democracy and Higher Education: Help Build an Open Repository of Pro-Democracy Teaching and Learning Resources

Please contribute to a new, open-source collection of educational materials designed to strengthen learning for a democracy in question. We seek materials across disciplines, including the humanities, social sciences, physical sciences, and professional studies.

We are seeking resources in three categories:

• Teach-Ins: Interactive activities, worksheets, digital tools, and other downloadable materials that reduce prep time and can be used immediately.

• Curricular Inserts: Ready-to-use readings, discussion guides, prompts, and multimedia resources for embedding democratic learning into existing courses.

• Cross-Disciplinary Programs: Materials that support pro-democracy learning across all fields—bridging STEM, social sciences, the humanities, and professional programs.

News from the National Endowment for the Humanities

• A new call for proposals:

  • At the February 2026 deadline, NEH invites proposals for endowments to build the applicant organization’s capacity in research and teaching of Western civilization, American history and government, and civics.

• And two summer institutes that might entice K-12 civic educators - apply by March 6:

  • Making the Good Reader and Citizen: The History of Literature Instruction in American Schools

  • America’s Forgotten Founders: The Revolutionary City of Philadelphia

History and Civic Learning, from 1776 to 2026

• A podcast from the American Enterprise Institute: WTH: America 250 Begins! With Professor Gordon Wood. By Danielle Pletka + Marc A. Thiessen, January 1, 2026.

• Peter Levine appears on the Story Preservation Initiative podcast to talk about The Foundations of American Democracy and the history of “civic turning points” in the U.S.

• NY lawmakers want to require public schools to teach history of Jan. 6 Capitol riot, from WWNY TV News

• Civics Lesson: Educators prepare future journalists and do what they can to shore up democracy | By Tara McKelvey for Liberal Education

New publications:

Check out this great list of books, articles, and publications from 2025, from the Hoover Institution:

• Notable Developments in the Citizenship Sphere: June–December 2025 | Compiled and reviewed by Eva Margaret Lacy, Jed Ngalande, and Sophia Craiutu, for the Hoover Institution’s Working Group on Civics and American Citizenship

• Assessing What Matters in Civics: A Practical and Credible Tool for Student-Led Civics Projects | by Chaebong Nam, David C. Kidd & Liz Block for The Social Studies

  • This paper introduces the Civic Thinking Summary, a novel performance assessment tool embedded in a curriculum developed to support student-led civics projects, which are now mandated for Grade 8 and high school students in Massachusetts.

• Affective Polarization Convening Summary Report from the and the Institute for Citizens & Scholars, with “insights from 14 research studies and conversations among scholars, practitioners, and students focused on young people ages 14-24. The report traces how affective polarization emerges in K-12 classrooms, college campuses, families, the media landscape, and election contexts, and also points out promising opportunities for interruption and intervention.”

• The Pursuit of Liberty: How Hamilton vs. Jefferson Ignited the Lasting Battle Over Power in America by Jeffrey Rosen for Simon & Schuster

• Teacher Educators as Scholar Citizens: Activism and Resistance in Uncertain Times | by Sarah Kaka, Matthew S. Hollstein, Elizabeth Kenyon, Nancy Patterson for Bloomsbury

• Coming out on January 20: University: A Reckoning by Lee C. Bollinger (president of Columbia University from 2002-2023) for Norton.

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Upcoming Events:

1. Revolutionary Voices: Student Media-Making and THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION | Organized by KQED Education Events, Tue, Jan 13, 2026 7:00 PM EST

2. The Alliance for Civics in the Academy hosts “Beyond the Ivory Tower: What Elite and Non-Selective Colleges Can Teach Each Other About Civics” with Thomas Schnaubelt, J. Cherie Strachan, Scott Arcenas, and Josiah Ober on January 14, 2026, from 9:00-10:00 a.m. PT.

3. We Can Teach Hard Things: iCivics webinar on civil dialogue around contentious topics in the classroom, January 14, 6pm PT/9pm ET or February 11 and April 29 at 7pm ET

4. 60-Minute Civics from the Center for Civic Education - America 250: Reimagining 1776 for Today’s Classrooms | January 15, 2026, 7:00 p.m. ET / 4:00 p.m. PT

5. Applying the Themes of Democracy & Freedom Throughout a US History Course | Facing History and Ourselves, January 21, 2026, 6:00 pm to 7:30 pm EST

6. APPLY BY January 23: The Sandra Day O’Connor Institute’s U.S. Constitution Social Studies Educator Workshop 2026, June 7-12, 2026 at the National Constitution Center, Philadelphia

7. 2026 is Here: Seizing the Moment of America’s 250th in the Classroom | Join Natacha Scott from iCivics and Rachel D. Humphries from the Bill of Rights Institute, for this free webinar as they discuss ways to harness the energy of this historic year using the Civic Star Challenge. January 27, 2026 07:00 PM ET

8. The Civic Learning Institute’s next online course, Difficult Conversations in the Classroom, begins January 29th. Learn more and register for Difficult Conversations here. You can also contact CLI to learn about custom workshops!

9. The Declaration of Independence and the Push for Racial Equality | National Constitution Center webinar, Monday, February 2, 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm Eastern

10. Civic Assembly Exploration Event for Community Colleges | Campus Compact in partnership with New America, Thursday, February 5, 2026, 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM ET

11. The Alliance for Civics in the Academy hosts “What Counts as Success? Assessing the Impact of Civics in Higher Ed” with Trygve Throntveit, Rachel Wahl, Joseph Kahne, and Peter Levine on February 18, 2026, from 9:00-10:00 a.m. PT.

Some big in-person convenings coming up:

1. We the People: National Symposium on Civic Education Research hosted by The Center for Civic Education and the Civic Education Research Lab (CERL), Washington, D.C., March 6–7, 2026

2. America250: National Convention for Christian Education: A national convention on cultivating Christian, civic virtue in our students, March 8-10, Philadelphia

3. Civic Learning Week National Forum Liberty and Learning: Civic Education at 250, hosted by iCivics and the Democratic Knowledge Project in Philadelphia, March 9-10, 2026 (registration is free)

4. The Fund for American Studies’ 2026 Annual Conference, Developing Courageous Citizens: Revitalizing Civic Education and America’s Founding Principles, March 11-12 in Washington, D.C.

5. Campus Compact 2026 Annual Conference in Chicago, March 16-18, 2026 - the American Association of State Colleges And Universities (AASCU) has scheduled their American Democracy Project conference for March 15-16 on the same site, so you can attend the two conferences back to back (at a discount)

6. Jack Miller Center 4th National Summit on Civic Education: Join organizations and philanthropists committed to reinvigorating American civic education with our nation’s founding principles. Pennsylvania, May 18-19, 2026