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A Guide to Strengthening Civic Education

This guide is your one-stop shop for crafting strong civic education policies for K–12 schools. We understand you’re busy, so we’ve made it easy to navigate.

Actionable Recommendations: No fluff, just clear policy options tackling various aspects of civic education. Each page outlines the challenge, followed by a plain-language recommendation and multiple policy options.

Resources at Your Fingertips: Need model bill language or examples from other states? Each one-pager has links to those as well. Plus, we’ve included references to supporting research and specific real-life state examples.

One-pagers by Topic: Each section is concise and easy to digest, perfect for you and your staff.

Use the Entire Guide or Focus on Specific Areas: This guide empowers you to take a comprehensive approach to strengthening civic education or focus on specific areas you find most pressing. This menu-style approach allows you to choose the recommendations that best fit your state’s priorities. Want to create new funding for civic educator professional development? We’ve got you covered. Looking to implement better civic assessments or establish a civic seal? We have recommendations for that, too.

Beyond Legislators: Recognizing the many key players in education policy, this guide includes dedicated sections for governors, secretaries of state, and America250 commissions who are uniquely positioned to influence policy.

Get the Status of K–12 Civic Education in Your State

Before delving into specific policy recommendations, we invite you to gain valuable insights from our website’s comprehensive state profiles on K–12 civic education. Each profile details what currently exists and potential areas for improvement. State profiles are updated annually at the end of every summer and maintained throughout the year.

Civics is a Winning Issue

The 51st annual Phi Delta Kappa poll of public attitudes on education (2019) — as well as findings from The Democracy Project report(2018), an iCivics/More Perfect poll conducted by Cygnal (2022), and more — all tell us that an overwhelming majority of Americans want more civics taught. This high level of support remains true across all age, gender, racial, political, socioeconomic, and geographic demographics. To that end, you will find throughout this document examples of policies to advance civic education that have garnered bipartisan support.

Getting Support

For one-to-one support and/or technical assistance, please contact our state policy staff.