(Bloomberg Opinion) -- The College Board, which administers college entrance exams to high school students, is trying to use its advanced placement courses and tests for high-achieving students to get American schools to take civics seriously again.
That’s a welcome development after years of neglect by both schools and policymakers. Even better, last year’s redesign of its AP U.S. government and politics course — the first since it was introduced in 1986 — goes well beyond requiring basic knowledge of, say, how a bill becomes law, and seeks to get students engaged with civic life. While the academic part of the AP U.S. government course explores the diverse forces that shape everything from legislation to Supreme Court precedents, students also are required to put their knowledge into action by working on a civics project, even one that takes sides in today’s partisan political battles.
The new U.S. government AP is part of a nationwide push — both inside and outside schools — for high-school students to engage in civic debate and action. Last year, Massachusetts became the first state to require schools to coordinate student-led civics projects, though that state’s high school projects must be nonpartisan.
A civics revival is long overdue. As of 2018, only eight states required students to take a yearlong civics and government class, and only 19 required students to take a civics exam to graduate. Even the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which is considered the nation’s report card, dropped its 4th- and 12th-grade civics and American history exam, in 2014. The ostensible reason was to save money, but the NAEP then adopted a new technology and engineering literacy test a year later.
Indeed, civics fell victim to the narrowing of curricula under both Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, and to the standardized testing regimen that focused on math, science and English. Worried about economic competition from China, neither Democrats nor Republicans anticipated the recent populist and authoritarian threat to Western democracies that civics education is meant to forestall.
The reality is, schools need to do both: prepare students for a global economy and to be engaged citizens in a democracy.
Putting action at the core of civics education may seem counterintuitive at a time when basic knowledge of the three branches of the U.S. government is in short supply and especially considering that college students' activism has often been seen as controversial — think of the sit-ins at segregated lunch counters in the South during the civil rights era and the protests against the Vietnam War.
Yet the benefit of getting high-school students working on civics projects of their own choosing — even partisan ones — goes beyond tapping into the innate desire of teenagers to change the world. Having students work on new legislation or lobby their city council representatives can promote a deep understanding of local, state and federal government and provide the basis for future political engagement.
That’s especially true for immigrants and members of minority groups. Studies conducted nearly 50 years apart — including one by the American Enterprise Institute — show that civics education is especially effective both in teaching poor students and immigrants about government and in increasing their sense of political empowerment.
Students already are demonstrating the power of action civics. In Chicago, high schoolers lobbied Illinois legislators to change harsh disciplinary practices that often pushed minority students out of school and into the criminal justice system, and were instrumental in helping to draft a new school-discipline law in 2016. In New York City, minority student activists are suing the education department for equal access to athletic facilities and school teams. And schools across the country are experimenting with efforts to let students determine school spending priorities on extras such as building a greenhouse or funding a music club.
The Stoneman Douglas High School students in Parkland, Florida, may provide the best argument for a civics approach that encompasses both knowledge and action. Their gun-control advocacy since the 2018 shootings there, which killed 17 students and school staffers, was inspired by research they were already doing for both their AP government class and a district-wide debate program.
Educators also are developing ways to measure the educational value of such projects. In New Hampshire, New York City and Oakland, they have developed assessments that treat the projects like mini dissertations and often require a written report as well as an oral presentation. The AP’s civics projects, however, will count only toward a course grade and not its college-level U.S. government test; that’s in large part because most college government courses do not require projects, according to the College Board.
The biggest challenge may be to scale the efforts at action civics. Only about 281,000 public-school students take the AP U.S. government course — last year, about 30 percent of these students were African-American or Latino and 23 percent were low-income; indeed, the College Board has come under criticism recently for failing to make its tests more accessible to minority students.
States and districts also will need to resist pressures from both the political left and the right that could dilute the push for more robust civics. The movement to require ethnic studies must not be allowed to erode time and attention devoted to civics. And states that require high-school graduates to pass the U.S. citizenship test must resist the lure of a rote multiple-choice approach to civics.
Instead, embracing a meaningful civics project as part of a broader U.S. government and history curriculum may be the best way to help kids make the connection between what they learn about the nation’s political institutions and a future they can affect.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Jonathan Landman at jlandman4@bloomberg.net
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Andrea Gabor, a former editor at Business Week and U.S. News & World Report, is the Bloomberg chair of business journalism at Baruch College of the City University of New York and the author of "After the Education Wars: How Smart Schools Upend the Business of Reform."
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