Let’s Mark America 250 With A Civic Education Revival

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As the United States marks its 250th birthday and Americans reflect on the nation’s Founding, we should also ask whether we’ve prepared the next generation to understand it.

The truth is, we haven’t.

On the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), U.S. history is the worst-performing subject tested. Just 13% of 8th graders were proficient, and four in 10 couldn’t reach even a basic level in 2022. Scores have been declining since 2014. On the Civics NAEP assessment, about one in five students was proficient, and nearly a third scored below even a basic level.

The country has already written down what a citizen should know — it just doesn’t require citizens to know it.

Immigrants who want to become Americans must pass a naturalization test that requires them to name a branch of government, explain what the Constitution does, and say why the colonists broke from Britain.

Yet survey native born Americans with the same questions, and most fail. A 2018 study found that only 36% of American adults could pass a basic citizenship test — compared with a 95% pass rate among immigrants actually required to take it.

We hold the people joining this country to a standard we don’t hold the people born into it. Much of that gap starts in the classroom, where history and civics have gradually been pushed to the margins.

Under No Child Left Behind, schools were held accountable for reading and math. Students were tested in those subjects, and schools had to answer for those results. That worked, and it coincided with the largest gains across the nation.

But history and civics were largely left out of that framework. Schools were not held accountable for them, and over time, they received less attention. Today, the average elementary classroom spends roughly 16 minutes a day on social studies — a fraction of the time devoted to reading and math.

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In a federal survey, only 49% of 8th graders reported taking a class focused primarily on civics or government, and 8% had taken no such course at all.

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After No Child Left Behind, the country moved to Common Core State Standards, which never set a single standard for what history students should learn. The Common Core governed reading and math, and its approach to reading taught students to stay inside “” answering only what the page itself revealed.

History is different. Students cannot fully understand the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution without understanding the grievances against King George III, the debates over independence, and the political philosophy that shaped the American Founding. Common Core may have addressed how students should read those documents, but it never addressed what they should know before they did so.

The result is a generation that may recognize the Founding documents without understanding why they were revolutionary. They may know the Constitution exists without understanding federalism or the separation of powers it created. They may hear arguments about socialism and capitalism without ever having studied the history from which those arguments come.

What a student actually learns increasingly depends on the state, and often the district, where he happens to go to school.

A 2025 survey found that 62% of Americans under 30 now hold a favorable view of socialism, and a third say the same of communism. These opinions were formed, for most of them, without ever having studied what this truly means in practice. A student who never studied the Soviet famines or the Cold War doesn’t know what it looks like when a government controls what people can grow, buy, or sell.

And these gaps certainly don’t remain in the classroom. They shape how young Americans understand the political, economic, and civic debates they inherit.

America 250 should be a national recommitment to teaching the story of the United States with defined content and accountability. Every graduate should leave school understanding the nation’s Founding, the Constitution, the structure of American government, and the events that have shaped the country since.

The real gift of America’s 250th would be a generation of graduates who finally understand the country they’re being asked to celebrate. Committing to truly teach it is the least this birthday should ask of us.

Read more Let’s Mark America 250 With A Civic Education Revival

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Jennifer Weber is a fellow for K-12 Education Policy at the Manhattan Institute.