Five Takeaways for Funders from Educating for American Democracy

This piece is published in partnership with Patrick Madden from the National Archives Foundation as a PACE Member and a host of last week’s Educating for American Democracy National Forum.

Last week was a big week for civic education in America, as the Educating for American Democracy (EAD) Roadmap and Report was released. Funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the U.S. Department of Education, the process to create these products was led by iCivics in partnership with Harvard University, Tufts University, CIRCLE, and Arizona State University. Their collaborative and participatory process unfolded over the course of 16 months and involved a network of over 300 people — scholars, classroom educators, practitioners, and students — to ensure a diversity of perspectives and experiences were represented within its recommendations.

This team effort sets forth a new vision for the field of civic learning, building upon the six “Promising Practices” of the 2003 report The Civic Mission of Schools (CIRCLE, Carnegie Corporation of New York) and the ten “Proven Practices” of the 2017 report The Republic is Still at Risk (CivXNow) by offering the first comprehensive guide to content.

EAD’s seven themes map out the disciplinary and conceptual terrain, as well as the skills and dispositional learning needed to support healthy civic participation.

But to be clear, EAD is neither a set of standards nor a curriculum. It’s an advisory document that guides history and civics education via a set of seven themes, six pedagogical principles, and five design challenges — all outlined in the Roadmap. Given the absence of national standards around history and civics education, the Roadmap provides civic educators, policymakers, and curriculum creators a way to shift from “breadth to depth by offering an inquiry framework that weaves history and civics together and inspires students to learn by asking difficult questions, then seeking answers in the classroom through facts and discussion.”

EAD comes at an urgent and important time. As the initiative shares,

“Our constitutional democracy is in peril. After years of polarization, the United States is highly divided, and there is widespread loss of confidence in our very form of government and civic order. For many decades, we have neglected civics and history, and we now have a citizenry and electorate who are poorly prepared to understand, appreciate, and use our form of government and civic life. At the federal level, we spend approximately $50 per student per year on STEM fields and approximately $0.05 per student per year on civics.”

To shift this reality, EAD aims to ensure that 60 million students have access to high-quality civic learning opportunities, 100,000 schools have a Civic Learning Plan and resources to support it in place, and 1 million teachers have excellent pre- and in-service professional development to be EAD-ready — all by 2030.

The report characterizes these as ambitious goals, and given the urgency of the moment, it calls upon all sectors and stakeholders — including philanthropy — to play a role. So what are the major takeaways for philanthropy during last week’s release? What should funders know and what role can they play to support EAD moving forward?

Here are our five major takeaways:

1. There is philanthropic momentum for civic education and learning. An accompanying brief for funders shares that Grantmakers for Education (GFE) heard from its members that civic education was one of their top five priorities. PACE runs a Civic Learning Funder Affinity Group, and interest and engagement has increased over the last year. Some have called the January 6th insurrection a “Sputnik moment for teaching civics,” and the momentum has carried through the funder community.
2. EAD steers away from partisanship. Through our Civic Learning Affinity Group and other funder conversations about civic education, one question we often hear is whether civic learning is political or if certain interpretations or approaches to it may be considered to be advancing partisan goals. This came up during last week’s National Forum as well; questions were asked about the content of the Roadmap and if it was “pushing certain politics” in how it aims to educate young Americans. In a section entitled “One Cause of the Neglect is Dysfunctional Controversy About Content,” the report expands upon how the very premise of questions like these have stalled civic education reform and efforts over the last few decades. EAD, in response, lays out an inquiry-based approach to content that is organized by major themes and questions. From the report: “Because an agreement about fundamentals still leaves room for much diversity, we chose the concept of ‘roadmap’ rather than ‘national standards’ as a frame for our work, and we have structured our EAD Roadmap as a guide to the kinds of questions that should be asked and seriously engaged across the span of a K–12 education, richly informed by advanced scholarship in the relevant disciplines. The question of precisely how to help learners engage with these rich questions is left to state and local educational leaders and educators.”
3. EAD is a Roadmap, and it needs policy and implementation support. The Roadmap is not a curriculum or set of standards, and that was done on purpose to allow each state, county, and local community to adapt it as relevant to them. As such, work will be needed to embrace, adopt, and tailor the framework to existing civic education efforts, and in some places, start those efforts from scratch. For example, one of the goals is that 100,000 schools have a Civic Learning Plan in line with EAD and resources in place to support it. The long-term policy and implementation work needed to see EAD succeed should not be underestimated. PACE member, the Robert R. McCormick Foundation has supported state-level policy implementation efforts through its civic education grantmaking, and their work may offer some inspiration for other funders to consider.
4. There are roles to be played at the national and local levels. EAD shares: “Successful, ground-up implementation requires sustained financial investment and the broad collaboration and the enthusiastic commitment of many stakeholders.” It will take all funders — national funders, state funders, community funders, local funders, education funders, democracy funders — to find a way to support this work for it to succeed. As the accompanying funder brief shares: “Donors that make grants in their local communities can support locally-specific projects and materials; those that work nationally can enable national civil society to improve K–12 civics.” More examples are offered in the briefing.
5. The moment is now, and the goals are through 2030. The team of collaborators started this project 16 months ago, and the case for civic education has only grown stronger since then. The civic education needed to engage with the realities that emerged over the last year — a global health crisis, an economic crisis, protests against racial injustice, a polarizing Presidential election, and an insurrection on the Capitol — is evidence of how high the stakes are and how urgent the need is. The goals of the EAD Roadmap are through 2030, making this the decade to effect serious change in the field of civic education.

PACE wants to make special acknowledgement of its Members involved in this initiative — National Archives Foundation, The Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute, the Robert R. McCormick Foundation, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation — who all contributed in various ways, including as members of steering committees, advisory councils, listening tours, and/or forum hosts. Many of our Members are also interested and invested in civic learning in various ways; as such, PACE has recently articulated our commitment to go deeper into learning and experimentation in this area.