Civics teachers are afraid of political land mines, and students get watered-down lessons

New research finds civics teachers across this country say, in large part, that they are uncomfortable teaching civics and are unprepared to do so.

The survey from the Sandra Day O’Connor Institute finds more than three-quarters of respondents said they had avoided certain topics or self-censored because they were afraid of backlash.

But there are other reasons they cited as primary challenges to teaching civics, including a lack of time in the curriculum, insufficient training and lack of support from school administration.

Liam Julian is vice president for Programs and Public Policy at the Sandra Day O’Connor Institute. He joined The Show to talk more about this study.

Marion Rhodes

Full conversation

MARK BRODIE: Liam, first off, what stands out to you about these findings?

LIAM JULIAN: Well, I think what stands out to us the most is probably the sort of broad finding that teachers who teach civics are not particularly comfortable doing it. And there’s a variety of reasons why they’re uncomfortable. But that in and of itself — that finding that civics teachers are uncomfortable teaching civics — is somewhat startling.

If we polled math teachers or science teachers and found that huge majorities of them were not comfortable teaching geometry or chemistry, I think we would all, be astounded by that finding. But that’s unfortunately the case with civics today.

BRODIE: Yeah. Well, so let’s talk about some of those reasons. And I think some of them maybe are perhaps a little more obvious than others. And I’d like to start with the fact that, you know, some of these topics can be somewhat controversial. They can be debatable. Maybe they don’t have a lot of guidance from their district or their school or in some cases, as you found, the state itself, about what they can and can’t say.

How prevalent is that that teachers, they kind of just don’t want to wade into some of these hot-button topics?

JULIAN: Well, it’s quite prevalent. And all the reasons you described are correct. It starts at the state level, where you have state standards that are sometimes clear, but more often than not are vague.

When we surveyed teachers, not even 15% of them said that they had received clear guidance from their district about what they could or could not teach. So just think about that: not even 15%.

And then you compound all that with the fact that in today’s environment, teachers are hyper-aware that one misstep can really lead to some pretty serious professional and personal consequences. And so when you add all that up, it becomes sort of a chilling environment for teaching civics.

BRODIE: Did you find that, or did teachers talk about maybe trying to structure their lessons to keep it away from sort of current events and maybe some of those topics that can be controversial?

I’m wondering, if you’re just talking about the makeup of the U.S. Supreme Court or the three branches of government or what the Bill of Rights says, I would think it would be kind of hard to find a lot of controversy, a lot of sort of potential landmines in those areas.

JULIAN: Yeah, that’s correct. And when we talk to civics teachers, a lot of them did say that they sort of focused more on teaching that kind of content, the sort of how the government is structured. That’s incredibly important. And students need to know that.

But the issue is that in a civics class, you really want to be going beyond that, to sort of have those discussions about how that works in practice. You want to be having discussions where students are learning about the tensions in our government, the tensions that come with having a country where we need to find compromise to get things done and how hard that can be.

Those are the kind of conversations that are happening less and less in these classrooms. So we’re getting civics, but we’re getting in many cases, a watered down version of it that does a disservice to students.

BRODIE: Is there a way to teach those kinds of tensions without potentially getting teachers in trouble or bringing up issues that some students or their parents might find super objectionable?

JULIAN: Yeah, I think there are. We surveyed experienced civics teachers, and though huge majorities of even those experienced teachers told us that it was difficult to teach civics today, they also shared with us some of the strategies that they use in their classrooms.

One that seemed to be common among experienced teachers and also effective, was grounding those discussions in founding documents, in primary sources. And this accomplishes a number of things, but one thing is that it just sort of lowers the temperature.

If you’re talking about current issues and you just dive right in, those discussions can quickly get sort of personal and heated. But when you frame those sort of current issues in terms of, quite frankly, topics that we’ve been discussing in this country for hundreds of years and that the founders themselves were wrestling with, then you have a different atmosphere for having a conversation.

You also teach students the importance of grounding their opinions in evidence.

BRODIE: One of the other reasons that you found that teachers feel uncomfortable teaching civics is that it seems like they don’t necessarily — some of them — know civics all that well. And I guess going back to what you said about math teachers and science teachers, if there were some percentage of math teachers who said they weren’t prepared to teach geometry or algebra, that would be a big deal.

It seems like it’s maybe equally a big deal of civics. Teachers aren’t feeling particularly prepared to teach civics.

JULIAN: Yeah, and this is so important, and I’m glad that you’re bringing it up. You have to keep in mind, too, that these teachers — most of them are you would say millennials or Gen X — they did not themselves have a robust civics education in their own K-12 careers.

So you could have a situation where a teacher never had a civics class. And then in their sort of training to become teachers, what we heard from teachers in the surveys that we conducted is they didn’t get a lot of civics content there either. And so you have a social studies teacher who is tasked with teaching a class on government, and they themselves may never have had a class on government. So, that’s a problem.

BRODIE: Well, so it seems like sort of the overarching message here is that teachers need more. They need more guidance from either the state government or from their school leaders or school district officials about what they can and can’t do and can and can’t say. And they need more content knowledge from whoever is doing the training about getting them up to speed so they feel comfortable teaching the subjects.

Is that a fair assessment?

JULIAN: Yeah, you got it. So it’s I think it’s three things. It’s preparation, guidance and support. And so the preparation element is what you mentioned about content knowledge. They need to be trained in civics content. And they also need to be trained in how to lead conversations around controversial issues.

Guidance needs to come in the form of clear state standards, clear guidance from district and school leaders about what can and cannot be taught, the ways in which it can and cannot be taught.

And then support needs to come from those leaders as well. And what that looks like is if a teacher is teaching civics in a responsible way, that that’s going to be supported, that teacher is going to be backed and that that type of teaching is expected.