Civics education is essential for developing an informed and politically engaged electorate. Recent declines in civics proficiency across the United States have prompted state legislatures to pass reforms to bolster the subject in schools. This study is an evaluation of recent civics education reform efforts in the United States between 2017-2020. Comparisons are made between trends in national NAEP civics exam data and civics test score trends in Florida and Virginia, which both passed civics reforms during this period, but maintained civic republican and liberal standards in their curricula. Louisiana is used as a control case, as the state has not passed any reforms regarding civics. The data suggests no correlation between civics reform efforts and civics test scores for either Florida or Virginia. Furthermore, an analysis using previous research on the Student Voices program, founded by the Annenberg School of Public Policy at the University of Pennsylvania, is examined as a potential alternative to modern civics teaching, using data from their program sites in Philadelphia and Seattle. This paper advocates for a new form of civics education that addresses the lived experience of students to increase political engagement and to supplement or replace the current methods of teaching civics.
Justin Taylor (Sun,) studied this question.