| The Thomas B. Fordham Institute

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Accountability & Testing

Standards & Accountability

Jessica Poiner

9.22.2025

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It’s been a little over two years since Ohio policymakers established a statewide initiative championing the science of reading, an evidence-based instructional approach that focuses on phonics and knowledge-building. Under this policy, public schools are required to use state-approved high-quality instructional materials (HQIM) and teachers and administrators must complete professional development. The state budget passed just a few months ago built on these efforts by continuing to fund literacy coaches and requiring the Department of Education and Workforce (DEW) to maintain and expand its professional development offerings.

Here at Fordham, we’ve been keeping a close eye on a variety of success indicators to track the progress of this sweeping effort. Recently released state report cards for the 2024–25 school year offer our first in-depth look at student achievement under these policies. But before we dig into the data, here are some important reminders about why it’s far too early to make any sweeping judgments.

First, this initiative is a huge undertaking. And as the saying goes, Rome wasn’t built in a day. Progress (or lack thereof) during the first official year of implementation shouldn’t be used to judge the success or failure of such a complex policy. The science of reading is a long-term investment in our schools and students’ futures, and patience—combined with a strong sense of urgency—is required. Remember also that a one-year change in proficiency rates doesn’t make for a trend. We won’t be able to understand the true impacts of this effort until we have a few more years of data.

Second, the science of reading largely focuses on Ohio’s youngest learners. The students who will benefit from these changes are currently in preschool, kindergarten, and first grade—but state testing doesn’t begin until third. Ohio’s “improving K–3 literacy” measure sheds some light on growth among early elementary students (more on that below), but for the most part, report card data won’t include impacted students for another few years.

Third, the 2024–25 school year was one of transition, during which plenty of districts were still working out science of reading implementation kinks. For example, according to a report given by DEW officials at a public meeting this summer, 82 percent of districts reported that they were fully aligned to the state’s HQIM expectations by June 15. That means one in every five weren’t fully aligned. (To its credit, DEW plans to audit districts and schools this year to verify their alignment.) Professional development is similar. State lawmakers required all current educators to complete a professional development course in the science of reading, but the deadline wasn’t until June 30, 2025. In other words, although science of reading implementation officially began last year, in reality, it was more of a transition period.

Even with these caveats, it’s crucial to closely examine report card data. To begin, let’s take a look at statewide results. Chart 1 shows the number of students who scored proficient or above on the state’s English language arts exams. In the final column, which identifies the difference between 2024 and 2025 results, green shading indicates improvement and red indicates a decline. Only two grades—seventh and eighth—saw an increase in the percentage of students who scored at least proficient. Every other grade saw a decrease, with the steepest drop coming for third graders.

Chart 1. Percentage of students scoring at least proficient on English language arts state tests

Tracking proficiency numbers will help state leaders measure progress. But identifying how many students score in the lowest achievement level, or “limited,” is also crucial, as declining numbers there would indicate progress as well. Chart 2 identifies the number of students in grades 3–8 and high school who scored limited during the last three school years. The final column identifies the difference between 2024 and 2025 results, with green shading indicating improvement (fewer students scoring limited) and red shading indicating a regression (more students scoring limited). Unfortunately, only three grade levels—fourth, eighth, and the high school English II exam—registered fewer limited scorers than the prior year. Every other grade saw an increase. The highest jump in limited scorers was in third grade, with an increase of more than 4 percentage points. Together, the data in charts 1 and 2 paint a worrisome picture for the make-or-break year of third grade, as fewer students scored proficient and more scored limited.

Chart 2. Percentage of students scoring limited on English language arts state tests

Given that Ohio’s science of reading effort is a statewide initiative, it’s important to track statewide results. But state numbers can mask improvement (or lack thereof) in individual districts. The report card’s early literacy component allows us to dig deeper. For the sake of narrowed focus, let’s consider results from the Ohio Eight, a group of eight urban districts with a long history of poor performance. We’ll also add Lorain and East Cleveland to the mix, since they spent several years under the oversight of now-defanged Academic Distress Commissions. (So did Youngstown, which is one of the Ohio Eight.) Together, these ten districts serve nearly 187,000 students—more than a tenth of the state’s public-school population—and are among those most in need of early literacy improvement.

First, let’s look at how they performed overall on the early literacy component. Chart 3 displays two data points—districts’ star ratings on the component and the weighted percentage that determined those ratings. This percentage is based on three measures: third-grade reading proficiency rates, third-to-fourth grade promotional rates, and the percentage of off-track readers who move to on-track status in the following year. Districts with a weighted component percent of less than 58 earned one out of five stars while those with a weighted component percent from 58 to less than 68 earned two stars. In the columns dedicated to the most recent school year, green shading indicates improvement from the prior year, yellow indicates results that remained flat, and red indicates a decline.

Chart 3. Overall early literacy results on state report cards in selected districts

Cincinnati was the highest performer of these districts and the only one to earn two stars. Its weighted percentage did decline between 2024 and 2025, but the drop was small enough that it did not impact its rating. The lowest performers were Cleveland, which earned a weighted percentage of 48, and Lorain, with a 48.8. Just two districts earned a higher weighted percentage than they did the prior year: East Cleveland and Youngstown. East Cleveland improved by 5.3 percentage points, while Youngstown eked out a gain of less than half a percentage point.

Next, let’s take a closer look at one of the early literacy component’s three measures: third grade reading proficiency. Chart 4 displays the percentage of students who scored proficient on the reading segment of the ELA exam, as well as the statewide third grade proficiency average.[1] The final column identifies improvement between 2024 and 2025 with green shading and a decline with red.

Chart 4. Percentage of third graders scoring proficient on the reading segment of state ELA exam in selected districts

The only district that improved was East Cleveland, with a sizable jump of more than 10 percentage points. Considering East Cleveland had the worst proficiency rate of these districts in 2024—an abysmal 25 percent—that’s good news. Meanwhile, in the nine districts that regressed, the decline ranged from 1.3 percentage points in Canton to a whopping 8.2 percentage points in Lorain. That puts Lorain’s third grade proficiency rate at just under 28 percent, making it the only district in the group where fewer than a third of third graders were proficient (although Cleveland, the next lowest performer, only meets that threshold via rounding). It’s also worth noting that almost all of these districts are considerably behind the state average, with the difference ranging from 15.2 to 33.6 percentage points. Cincinnati had the smallest gap and is just 5.5 percentage points behind the state average.

Lastly, let’s take a look at progress. DEW tracks district progress via the “improving K–3 literacy” measure, which uses the results of fall diagnostic assessments to determine the percentage of students who move from “not on track” to “on track” in reading from one year to the next. These results indicate how well schools are improving K–3 literacy throughout all the early grades, not just third. By doing so, the measure identifies schools and districts that are making critical progress with struggling readers. Chart 5 displays the overall percentage of students that each district moved to on track in reading during the three most recent school years, as well as the difference between 2024 and 2025 results, with green shading indicating improvement and red a decline. Canton, which is shaded in yellow, is a unique case, as its kindergarten data for the 2023–24 school year were misstated on its report card.

Chart 5. Results for the improving K–3 literacy measure on state report cards in selected districts

Early literacy RCs blog chart 5 — *The improving K–3 literacy measure is “NC,” or not calculated, if more than 90 percent of kindergarten students are on-track.

Unfortunately, there’s very little progress to celebrate. Only one district—East Cleveland—showed improvement. But it did so with a sizable jump of nearly 7 percentage points that catapulted it from the worst of these districts in 2024 to second among them in 2025. There’s still a lot of work to be done, but improved results in both progress and proficiency should be welcome news in East Cleveland.

The other nine districts didn’t fare as well. The percentage of students who were moved to on track in reading declined across the board, with drops ranging from half a percentage point in Cincinnati to 5.3 percentage points in Lorain. The decline in Lorain means the district managed to move just 10 percent of its students to on track in reading. That’s not just the lowest percentage among these districts, it’s the lowest in the entire state. Lorain’s third grade proficiency rate, meanwhile, was the second lowest in the state. Such abysmal numbers should prompt some pointed questions for lawmakers, who voted to give the district a free pass by dissolving its Academic Distress Commission and its state-mandated academic improvement plan. Clearly, Lorain hasn’t improved much in terms of early literacy. In fact, the district is moving backwards.

***

This latest round of state report cards clearly demonstrate that Ohio districts and schools have their work cut out for them when it comes to boosting reading outcomes. But with the state’s science of reading initiative, they have evidence-based tools that should help over the long haul. Now that last year’s transition period is in the rearview, it’s time to look ahead—and put the pedal to the metal!

[1] The statewide results are for the entire third grade English language arts exam, which includes writing, and not just the reading segment.

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Jeff Murray

9.22.2025

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Let’s start today’s clips on the low end of the scale re: newly-released state report cards. TV news in Cleveland is focusing on the I Promise School in Akron, which earned a low Performance Index score, very low test scores, and some of the worst proficiency rates in the state for its students in both English and math. Fordham’s Jessica Poiner, a northeast Ohio native who has written extensively about I Promise’s genesis and evolution, is quoted and linked throughout this piece, but the key for me is the statement from Akron City Schools that has a whole lot of ~~information~~ deflection about why things have not improved given all the money, personnel, and supports poured into the school. (Fox 8 News, Cleveland, 9/18/25)
Jessica has also been keeping close tabs on East Cleveland City Schools, once one of the worst-performing districts in the state and one of just two still subject to an Academic Distress Commission…nominally. Her past work is not quoted in here, but I’m sure she’ll be digging into the data again soon enough. Because things appear to be looking up for the district, and its leader has lots of information (compare to the above “information” provided by Akron City Schools) on how he believes he and his team were able to move up from 2 stars to 3 stars overall. (Cleveland.com, 9/21/25)
Back on the low end again, Fordham’s Aaron Churchill is among the voices discussing the disappointing data on reading achievement statewide in this piece. Math achievement is a little better, but I’m not sure we should be cheering about this information just yet. (Dayton Daily News, 9/21/25)
Let’s end today’s clips on the higher end of the report card scale. The folks at Parma City Schools are celebrating a rise from 3.5 stars to 4 stars this year and while early literacy remains a low-scoring sore spot for them, they too have a lot of information about how they achieved their boost and how they plan to continue their rise. (Cleveland.com, 9/22/25)

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Policy Priority:

School Funding

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Jeff Murray

9.19.2025

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Stories featured in Ohio Charter News Weekly may require a paid subscription to read in full.

News to Newsweek

Newsweek has, it seems, just discovered the existence of charter schools and spent a couple thousand words introducing them to readers this week. They call the growth of the sector a “slow rise”, which is probably fair, but they also lean warily into the fact that charters are expanding nationwide and student enrollment has been on a faster clip in recent years. Not a bad introduction, overall, and far preferable to the misinformation we have been used to receiving via national sources.

Marching for charters

No lack of charter knowledge in New York City, where thousands of parents, students, and educators (representing more than 200 schools) marched across the Brooklyn Bridge yesterday to promote charter excellence and to demand more equitable funding for their schools. The timing of the event is not coincidental, as mayoral candidates in the Big Apple have been staking out their positions recently—both for and against charter schools—ahead of the November election.

Emulate Indiana

Speaking of equitable funding for charters, Fordham’s Aaron Churchill this week looked at changes in school funding in Indiana designed to bring district and charter resources into near-parity. He calls it “path-breaking”, especially because it attempts to send both state and local funding to the schools students actually attend, and he urges Ohio to move toward such a system using Hoosier State efforts as a template.

Still arguing in Kentucky

Meanwhile, charter opponents in Kentucky pled their case this week before the state Supreme Court, arguing that a state law allowing funding for charter schools is unconstitutional on the grounds that it “redirect[s] public school money, public funds, to schools operating outside the common school system without the approval of Kentucky’s voters.” There is no timeline for a ruling, thus prolonging the nearly decade-long stalemate that has persisted since the Bluegrass State’s charter statute was signed into law in 2017. No schools have yet opened as a result of ongoing legal action around the funding question, but this court hearing is a tiny lurch toward a resolution.

One more

While charter school supporters in Missouri are pleased that recent legislation finally allowed charters to operate in the city of Columbia—bringing the total of cities to three—the Director of Education Policy at The Show-Me Institute recently opined that at least one other large city also needs to be granted that permission. Families in Springfield also deserve more and better options, says Cory Koedel, and research shows that charter schools help their students succeed.

*****

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School Choice

Topics:

Charter Schools

Jeff Murray

9.19.2025

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More report card coverage means more Aaron Churchill quotes. So let’s bring ‘em on! Here he’s parsing both reading (down) and math (up) achievement results. “Reading generally did not fall as much [last year as] during the pandemic,” he said, suggesting that teachers and schools are still getting used to new science-of-reading curriculum and pacing and needing a bit more time to get it all down pat. “We have seen more robust recovery in math. But that’s against a larger dip that we had in the pandemic,” adding that “One year doesn’t make a long-term trend.” Pragmatic and wise. “We need to preach some patience.” (Cleveland.com, 9/17/25)
Blog posts from both Aaron Churchill and Jessica Poiner are quoted and linked in this great piece on what is termed the “chaos” of industry-recognized credentials in Ohio’s schools. Sadly, the correct term is probably “fraudulosity” or “trickuliciousness” (if we're trying to be nice about it) because it seems pretty clear from my colleagues (and many others interviewed here) as well as the hard data that schools and districts across the state are spending a lot of time and effort to get students to earn credentials as a path to high school graduation without regard to whether the skills they represent—and they do represent skills achieved, don’t get me wrong—are of any practical value in the job market into which those graduates are emerging. I feel it’s pretty clear that a majority of them are valueless, and that adults pushing kids into them know this to be true. If so, it’s not “chaos” that’s happening, but something much worse than that, whatever you want to call it. (The 74, 9/18/25)
The former superintendent of Cincinnati City Schools opined doomily this week that “America’s schools are in historic turbulence” and must be fixed ASAP. This is not just her opinion; she shares it with the 200 current school district leaders she surveyed over the summer. “Their message was clear,” she says: “They are exhausted, anxious, and deeply concerned for our students’ futures. They identified five urgent challenges − and paths forward.” You will likely not be surprised to find out that poor academic achievement of students is barely clinging on at number 5 on the list (and characterized as “The Silent Emergency”, as if no one has been screaming it from the rooftops for years). You will be even less surprised to find out that the number one solution to all of these problems is Send More Money. I don’t know how much she was paid to come up with those findings, or indeed who footed the bill. Probably a lot. Personally, I could have gotten the same results for them for the price of 18 holes at General Custer’s. (Cincinnati Enquirer, 9/16/25)
The data used here are pretty old, but lawyer and podcaster Jack D’Aurora insists in this op-ed that student academic success clearly isn’t about the amount of money being spent—using Upper Arlington, Columbus, and Steubenville school districts as evidence—but about how (and how well) the dollars are used. I’ll leave you to read it and see if he’s truly making the points he thinks he is, but I will say I feel bad for the folks who run Steubenville City Schools for always being “the exemplar” in education discourse today…no matter what the point is or who’s trying to make it. That intense wattage of limelight cannot be a positive experience. (Columbus Dispatch, 9/18/25)

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School Funding

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Teresa Eliopoulos

9.18.2025

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From my experiences supporting districts to choose and use high-quality instructional materials (HQIM), I’ve seen that curriculum selection often breaks down where it matters the most: in classrooms. So I was fascinated to read educator Brian Wong’s firsthand account of his school’s math adoption. One section in particular stood out:

When my co-teacher and I first started teaching the curriculum, we received a two-hour Zoom training, and then we were sent on our way. The training is supplemented with coaches, but they are stretched thin among New York City’s many math teachers.

The good news is that Wong and his colleagues persisted with the curriculum, collaborating to figure out how to leverage it for the benefit of their students. The bad news is twofold. First, Wong recalls, “we made all kinds of preventable mistakes in those early days,” and it took a full school year before the curriculum “started to click.” While some growing pains are inevitable with new materials, better planning and stronger educator supports could have spared a whole student cohort from full exposure to a process of instructional trial and error.

Second, Wong’s limited access to professional learning is all too common, and may even be better than average. In a 2024 survey, only 48 percent of teachers reported receiving professional learning on using instructional materials.

The latest NAEP scores highlight the urgency of improving student outcomes, and quality materials are a key ingredient in this work. But curriculum alone is not enough. Districts must have a comprehensive, strategic adoption process to ensure every student benefits from excellent teaching and learning.

To better understand this challenge, EdReports partnered with The Decision Lab to conduct a nationally representative survey of over 250 district leaders and educators. Our new report, Beyond Selection: Rethinking How Districts Adopt Curriculum, uncovers why district intentions around HQIM often fail to translate into classroom impact—and what can be done about it.

Late-stage challenges often begin early

Our survey shows that districts face their greatest hurdles in the late stages of curriculum adoption. Nearly half of respondents reported challenges with consensus-building (49 percent) and implementation (48 percent), far higher than those who pointed to early-stage tasks like determining needs (13 percent) or narrowing options (14 percent).

This pattern reflects a broader confidence-implementation gap. While 72 percent of district leaders say they feel confident in selecting high-quality instructional materials, only 59 percent have systems to evaluate implementation effectiveness, and just 60 percent pilot curricula before adoption. Strong intentions too often falter without early investments in planning and process design, leading to fractured decision-making, limited buy-in, and stalled implementation later on.

Regulatory and technological pressures add to the strain. Districts identify incompatibility of existing infrastructure with new technology systems as their single greatest challenge, with regulatory compliance a close second. This reflects the ever-increasing complexity of the policy landscape, with 40 states passing “science of reading” laws since 2013.

Finally, we found that leaders are open to targeted support from external partners but prefer to maintain ownership of final adoption decisions. While only 14 percent welcome outside help in making curriculum choices, many seek assistance with data interpretation (55 percent), curriculum evaluation (41 percent), and implementation logistics (40 percent). Districts also value help with communication and process management—highlighting the importance of support that extends beyond curriculum expertise.

Moving toward a stronger adoption process

These findings should prompt state and district leaders to reassess their approach, ensuring coherence from start to finish in curriculum adoption and implementation. Our survey reveals clear opportunities to strengthen districts processes by addressing foundational barriers, designing comprehensive approaches, and strategically leveraging both internal expertise and external support.

1. Establish strong foundations. Given their reported challenges with technology compatibility and regulatory compliance, districts should prioritize mapping requirements, aligning timelines, and ensuring systems are ready before reviews even begin. Rhode Island’s approach—defining HQIM and providing statewide guidance and resources—shows how early clarity can lead to more consistent, successful decisions.

2. Design comprehensive processes. Adoption must be understood as a long-term process, not a single event. Confidence in choosing materials is meaningless if districts fail to plan for piloting, evaluation, and teacher support. Building a clear instructional vision, detailed roadmaps, and professional learning plans from the outset helps connect early choices to classroom impact.

3. Prioritize educator voice and stakeholder consensus. Teachers bring expertise no one else can, and their early involvement is critical for building ownership. At the same time, families and communities need structured opportunities to contribute and understand decisions. Louisiana’s experience illustrates the power of deep engagement: teacher enthusiasm has sustained HQIM use for over a decade.

4. Leverage external expertise strategically. In a resource-constrained environment, selective partnerships can free up district capacity, strengthen communication and stakeholder engagement, and support smoother implementation. Using free, trusted resources such as EdReports’ independent curriculum reviews and adoption resources can free up internal capacity. Further, the most effective external support helps to build local expertise over time, as Rhode Island’s district learning cohorts demonstrate.

When these four elements come together—strong foundations, comprehensive planning, authentic engagement, and strategic support—districts can move toward a curriculum adoption process that delivers on the promise of HQIM: better teaching and stronger outcomes for all students.

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Evidence-Based Learning

Teachers & School Leaders

Michael J. Petrilli

9.18.2025

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There’s been a lot of smart analysis of the dismal results released last week from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)—much of which I’ve highlighted in the last two issues of SCHOOLED, my new Substack newsletter.

But here’s an alarming fact that you probably haven’t seen before: The cohort of students who scored at record-low levels in 12th grade reading were part of the same generation of kids who scored at record-high levels in fourth grade. Let’s see how this looks when we glimpse scores by cohort.

Table 1. Average NAEP scale scores in reading, by cohort

* As Andrew Ho pointed out on LinkedIn, Covid knocked NAEP off its normal schedule, so 12th graders were tested in 2024 instead of 2023. It’s the high school graduating class of 2023 that was tested as eighth graders in 2019 and fourth graders in 2015. So I can’t claim that this was the exact same cohort. But for our purposes, it’s close enough.

Sure enough, when the Class of 2023 was in fourth grade, in 2015, they posted the highest average score ever on the reading NAEP (223)—a full ten points ahead of fourth graders in 2000. That equates to about a grade level of progress over the course of just one generation of students. Pretty darn impressive.

Let’s pause on that good news for a moment. What it means is that elementary schools back in the early 2010s were doing a good job teaching reading, or that students in that generation (people who today are about 20 years old) came into school relatively well prepared, or both.

Of course, we know what happened when these folks were about 15 years old, in 2020. The Covid pandemic struck and sent many of them to Zoom School for a year or longer. No wonder their scores fell off a cliff by 12th grade.

But as others, such as Eric Hanushek, have pointed out, it wasn’t just the pandemic. By 2019, this cohort’s eighth grade literacy scores were already showing signs of trouble. Whereas the class of 2023 had the best reading scores ever as fourth graders—two points ahead of second place, the class of 2019—their eighth grade scores were two points lower than those for the class of 2019, for a four-point swing. Given that scores were down just (!) three points in 12th grade, that indicates that much of the damage might have been done by the end of middle school.

(The general patterns look much the same for math, though the class of 2024 can’t boast the best fourth-grade math scores ever; those came in 2013, for the class of 2022.)

The same story emerges if we re-run this analysis for the lowest-performing 10 percent of students, whose recent declines have been particularly dramatic.

Table 2. NAEP scale scores in reading, 10th percentile, by cohort

So what happened?

We know that Covid (and school closures) hurt achievement significantly between the time that our recent high school graduates were in eighth grade (2019) and in 12th grade (2023–24).

But we also know that reading achievement for this cohort sputtered between the fourth and eighth grades between 2015 and 2019. What explains that?

The obvious culprit is the rise of smartphones and social media during this period and its impact on motivation, sleep, and the time spent reading for fun. While others, including Harvard’s (and NAGB’s) Marty West, have come to the same conclusion, none of us can prove it.

But let’s assume that, someday, a smart economist publishes a study demonstrating convincingly that phones and social media are to blame. It’s still not obvious what we should do about it. Phone bans can help between 9:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m., Monday through Friday. But as Mike Goldstein and Sean Geraghty point out, that ignores the real issue—what kids are doing with their devices after school, on the weekends, and especially into the wee hours of the night. Schools can be part of the battle against screens and scrolling, but we’re going to need to engage parents and communities, as well, if we want to get back to the best reading (and math) scores ever.

Author's note: A big thanks to my colleague Jill Hoppe for her help with data collection for this piece.

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Accountability & Testing

Evidence-Based Learning

Teachers & School Leaders

Editor's note: This was first published in the “Civic-Ready” issue of NASBE’s State Education Standard.

As the nation’s 250th birthday nears, civics education is once again a hot topic, and deservedly so. It hurts to see how little American young people know about the country’s past, its core principles, and how its governments are designed to work. It hurts more to confront evidence that many appear to be losing faith in democracy itself—a worsening problem as domestic discord and conflicts deepen over the role of government itself.

Education leaders face a heavy lift: The National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the “Nation’s Report Card,” last tested eighth graders in civics and US history in 2022. The grim results showed just 22 percent reaching “proficient” in civics and a dismal 14 percent attaining that level in history. At the same time, a 2023 survey reflects generational differences in confidence in democracy in general: Just 37 percent of those ages 26–41 strongly agreed that democracy is the best system of government, compared with 62 percent of those ages 58–64 and 75 percent of those older than 77.[1]

Nobody should expect schools to do it all, but they have a clear role when it comes to knowledge and skills and a substantial role when it comes to the formation of attitudes and values. And state education leaders—especially state boards—have a role, too. They must sort through some fervent disputes and make good decisions: on standards, assessment and accountability, as well as incentives for districts’ selection of quality curricula and professional development.

Lively disputes surround what schools should teach and children should learn about how governments work, their own rights and responsibilities, and the attributes of good citizenship in 21st century America. Such disputes typically involve both civics and US history, sometimes the entirety of social studies. They usually center on one or both of these sets of questions:

Is America’s saga a tale of success—the creation of sound principles followed by ever-improving implementation—or a sorely flawed story of failures, exclusions, and inequality? Closely related, should lessons in civics (and history) aim to foster patriotism or skepticism regarding one’s own attitude toward the land in which one resides?
Should lessons in civics and history concentrate on core information (e.g., how a bill becomes a law, what federalism is, what President Lincoln did) or on attitudes, concepts, and skills? Closely related, should such lessons emphasize what one knows about government or how one participates in it (sometimes termed “knowledge civics versus action civics”)?

These are important differences, to be sure, especially in a time of political polarization, and it is possible they could lead to radically different curricula and instruction in various parts of the land—a “red state civics” and a “blue state civics,” diverging most on topics such as race and gender.

Today’s “culture wars” undoubtedly make the job of teachers and school leaders harder, as they try to navigate conflicting pressures from parents, officials, and interest groups. In more than a dozen states, lawmakers have been seeking to limit what can be discussed in class, even as the airwaves, social media, and official missives signal from Washington that national officials are “cracking down” on topics and practices they do not favor and teachers are reported to be “censoring themselves” to avoid criticism and controversy.[2]

Reasons for Optimism

There is ample reason for concern but no cause to panic. Conflicts like these need not paralyze those seeking to strengthen the teaching and learning of civics and history in 2025, the semiquincentennial year of the Declaration that follows, and the decades thereafter.

Much of the curricular Sturm und Drang in civics and history appears to be the handiwork of a relatively small number of “conflict entrepreneurs” whose daily fare consists of hurling brickbats and stirring up trouble and whose visibility and income are derived from the same. By overwhelming numbers, ordinary Americans agree to a great extent about what schools should teach and children should learn about civics and history.

In February 2025, the University of Southern California’s Dornsife Center for Applied Research in Education reported widespread agreement (71 percent) that US schools are doing a mediocre or poor job of preparing students to be good citizens. But they also found strong, often bipartisan agreement about what schools should teach their pupils in this realm as well as what civics-related activities students should engage in and schools should encourage. Agreement is not total, but it is sufficient for the analysts to conclude that:

Contrary to political rhetoric, there is high overall support—and a recent narrowing of the partisan divide—for students learning civics topics in school. There is high overall and cross-partisan support for students learning about civic education topics through a wide range of instructional activities.[3]

A second source of optimism for civics-education boosters is the emergence in recent years of worthy consensus-seeking efforts at curriculum development. These generally start with the well-founded conviction that the correct response to the “big choice” questions above is some version of “yes, both.” There are several examples:

The Educating for American Democracy “roadmap” spans K-12 civics and history. It contains a comprehensive roster of probing questions (but not answers) that students and teachers should grapple with at various grade levels.[4]
The Civic Literacy Curriculum developed at Arizona State University starts with the 100-question US naturalization test but goes far beyond it.[5]
A model K-12 social studies standards called American Birthright was developed by the conservative-leaning Civics Alliance.[6]
The exemplary Advanced Placement course in US Government and Politics, developed by the College Board in collaboration with the National Constitution Center.[7]

In addition, groups such as iCivics, the Bill of Rights Institute, and the Jack Miller Center have amassed sizable collections of resources (including games) to deepen educators and students’ knowledge and understanding of American history and government.

Structural Challenges

These efforts do not resolve all the challenges that await conscientious policymakers who want their schools to help young people grow into good citizens who are well informed, principled, and engaged. But the toughest challenges are not hot arguments and angry politics. They are structural, involving priorities, accumulated negligence, and institutional rigidities. I count six main ones.

Academic Standards. By themselves, standards do not teach anyone anything. Rather, they describe a desired result, usually one grade at a time. They thus serve as a starting point for curricula, assessment, teacher preparation, and more. To quote George Harrison, “If you don’t know where you’re goin’, any road will take you there.”

At least since enactment of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) in 2002, state leaders have taken standards seriously in the federally mandated subjects of reading, math, and science. Civics and history do not typically get the same attention.

My colleagues at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute reviewed state standards for those two subjects in 2021, examining their content, rigor, clarity, and organization. The reviewers gave “honors” grades to civics standards in just 18 states and to US history standards in 17. Only five were “exemplary” in both. Twenty were rated “inadequate.” The authors dinged standards that “[p]rovide overbroad, vague, or otherwise insufficient guidance for curriculum and instruction; omit or seriously underemphasize topics that are essential to informed citizenship and historical comprehension; and make poor use of the early grades or fail to revisit essential content in later grades.”[8]

Standards are malleable—and entirely within the control of state leaders. Several jurisdictions have revised their standards since publication of the Fordham study, and others are working on them. However, changes do not always improve the result.

Instructional Time. The second big challenge is the trivial place those subjects occupy in most states’ curricula and graduation requirements. RAND reported in 2023 that the typical US elementary school devotes just three hours a week to social studies.[9] The Council of Chief State School Officers reported in 2018 that almost half of US school districts had reduced the time given to this subject in the aftermath of NCLB’s failure even to mention it, much less to measure student and school performance in this realm.[10]

Middle schools tend to give one period a day to social studies, but that may also encompass world history (or global studies), geography, economics, state and local history, and perhaps a bit of sociology, psychology, and anthropology. In Maryland, for instance, the state’s sixth- and seventh-grade social studies framework describes it as “a two-year experience in which students employ geographic, economic, civic, and historical tools to understand how big geographic questions link the past to the present.”[11] All worth doing, to be sure, but quite a lot more than US history and civics.

In high school, students are usually required to take such courses as American History and Civics (or American Government)—but just once. Civics often lasts just half a year if there is a separate course at all, although some states require students to pass a civics exam. My team at the Hoover Institution tabulated graduation requirements in civics in 2024:

Eight states—Alaska, Delaware, Kansas, Maine, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Wyoming—require neither a civics course nor a civics test.
Four states—Idaho, Louisiana, Virginia, and West Virginia—require a full-year civics course and the passing of a standard civics test.
Sixteen states require a half-year civics course and passing a civics test.
Sixteen states and the District of Columbia require a half- or full-year course but no test.
Pennsylvania and Wisconsin have no course requirement but require students to take a civics assessment—although Pennsylvania does not require passing it.[12]

Bear in mind that those half-year and one-year requirements are typically the only civics requirements during a typical high school education, though schools may offer electives such as the AP class “United States Government and Politics.”

Accountability. Few states incorporate civics learning into their assessment and accountability systems for students, teachers, or schools. The main exceptions are the 20 states that require high school pupils to pass a civics test before graduating, although in most of them the passing bar is low and the test deals only with basic knowledge, usually drawn from the naturalization test. As RAND researchers observed:

[S]tudent achievement in social studies remains largely absent from states’ accountability frameworks … and, in the rare cases in which states do factor in social studies achievement, it is weighted at much lower levels than student achievement in other core subjects…. One factor that severely limits states’ ability to include indicators of social studies achievement in their accountability systems is a lack of social studies assessments…. [O]nly a handful of states use a statewide summative assessment in social studies like they do in ELA and math. Typically, states do not assess at all in this subject area…. Furthermore, some of the states that historically assessed students in social studies suspended their assessments because of the COVID-19 pandemic—while retaining test requirements in other subjects—a signal that social studies is seen as a lesser priority.[13]

Teacher Preparation. The fourth challenge is the slipshod preparation of civics instructors, who typically get certified as “elementary” or “middle school social studies” teachers with minimal obligation to have studied civics, American government, or US history, nor any requirement to pass a proficiency test in those fields. One can often elect to major in psychology or sociology while taking few courses in history or American government, emerge with a generic social studies license, and then teach those key subjects.

Unsurprisingly, many teachers report feeling ill prepared. RAND analysts concluded this from a 2020 survey:

We asked teachers to tell us, on a scale from “not prepared at all” to “very well prepared,” how prepared they felt to promote their students’ civic development within their classes. A little more than 60 percent of all teachers indicated they felt “somewhat prepared,” and only 19 percent responded that they felt “very well prepared”.… About one-quarter of all elementary teachers indicated they felt that they were “not prepared” or “not very well prepared” to teach civic development.[14]

Civics Learning Everywhere. Citizenship is not something one learns in a single class. It is shaped by so much that one learns and experiences in school and the rest of one’s life—or fails to experience. Learning in literature, science, and the arts also shapes civics learning, as does what happens on playing fields, in student government, and in other extracurricular pursuits.

Role models also matter greatly: teachers, coaches, neighbors, preachers, team captains, and, of course, parents and family members. If the adult influencers in one’s life seldom vote, do not scrupulously obey laws and rules, seldom engage in civic or neighborhood activities, pay scant attention to current affairs, ignore or berate those who disagree with them, and fail to treat others with civility, even the finest civics class likely cannot compensate. The formal education system must do its part, but it occupies only a portion of childrens’ lives and cannot do it all.

Curriculum. All the solid curricula, frameworks, standards, and supplemental materials for teaching civics and history will not matter if they are not widely used. Surveys show that social studies teachers, especially in the earlier grades but frequently in middle and high schools, too, are scrounging, improvising, and piecing together lessons rather than deploying top-notch curricula for which they have received suitable professional development and ongoing support.[15]

What Should a State Policymaker Do?

State education leaders and policymakers who are serious about civics learning have several powerful levers within their grasp—and even more that they can do by way of leadership and suasion in realms where they are not entirely in charge.

The starting point should be the state’s academic standards, ensuring that these do a solid job of specifying the K-12 system’s desired outcomes in civics and US history. They should be rigorous and content rich. Skills and dispositions matter too, and it is good to give students experience in the real world, possibly via student government or community service.

One may start by checking Fordham’s five-year-old review of the state’s extant standards.[16] Consider the criteria used as well as what the reviewers found and recommended. Perhaps look at the standards of states that aced that review and what can be learned (or borrowed) from them.

Consider the Educating for American Democracy roadmap, which has the makings of exemplary K-12 standards in both subjects, and take a look at the Civic Alliance’s model. Oversimplifying, the former asks the right questions while the latter supplies much factual content that students will need to develop thorough answers to those challenging questions.

When the standards are in good shape, state leaders should ensure that their schools have access to high-quality curricula aligned with the standards. Though local discretion is needed in the touchier elements of these subjects, any state-sanctioned (and paid-for) materials should focus on top-notch content from the earliest elementary grades through high school.

Yet exemplary standards and curricula do not accomplish much unless schools have ample space in their days and years to give these subjects their due, whether in distinctive social studies classes, infusing this content across the curriculum, or both. (There is room within English language arts, for example, for many history and civics topics and examples.)

Nor can this work be accomplished unless states also ensure that schools successfully teach it and students successfully learn it by building civics and history into results-based accountability and report cards for elementary, middle, and high schools. State leaders might also consider an end-of-course exam or something similar for students at least once during the K-12 years. The naturalization test, focused as it is on basic information, is a starting place, but a sophisticated assessment and accountability plan contains much more.

For any of these reforms to succeed, teachers must be well prepared to help their students learn civics and history, which means policymakers—including those responsible for higher education—should review certification and licensure requirements with these subjects in mind. They should also ensure that high-quality professional development is delivered to those already teaching to boost their knowledge and pedagogical skills.[17]

Finally, state leaders would do well both to ensure that ample attention gets paid—in school and out—to the upcoming semiquincentennial of the Declaration of Independence in 2026 and then build on it. View it not as a one-time celebration but as the beginning of a decade in which Americans recall the nation’s founding and its grand if unfinished saga. This renaissance in civics and history education might culminate in the 250th anniversary of that hot Philadelphia summer of 1787 that produced the Constitution. State leaders, as well as educators and students, should bear in mind Benjamin Franklin’s response when asked what sort of government was forged at that time: “A republic,” he said, “if you can keep it.”

Notes

[1] McCourtney Institute for Democracy, “Mood of the Nation: Americans’ Belief in Democracy,” poll, January 18, 2023.

[2] See, e.g, American Historical Association, “Teaching History with Integrity: Freedom to Learn,” web page.

[3] Anna Saavedra et al., “Agreement across the Aisle: Schools Should Prepare Students for the Rights and Responsibilities of Citizenship,” report (University of Southern California, February 2025).

[4] Educating for American Democracy, “Educating for American Democracy: Excellence in History and Civics for All Learners,” report (iCivics, March 2, 2021). (Full disclosure: I’m on EAD’s steering committee.)

[5] Arizona State University, Center for American Civics, “The Civic Literacy Curriculum,” website.

[6] Civics Alliance, “American Birthright,” web page.

[7] College Board, “AP United States Government and Politics,” web page.

[8] Jeremy Stern et al., “The State of State Standards for Civics and US History in 2021,” report (Fordham Institute, June 2021).

[9] Melissa Kay Diliberti, Ashley Woo, and Julia H. Kaufman, “The Missing Infrastructure for Elementary Social-Studies Instruction: Findings from the 2022 American Instructional Resources Survey,” research report (RAND, 2023).

[10] Chief State School Officers Association, “The Marginalization of Social Studies,” infographic (2018).

[11] Maryland State Department of Education, Grade 6 and 7 Social Studies Framework, September 2023.

[12] Sophia Craiutu and Jed Ngalande, “State Civics Requirements in 2024,” essay (Hoover Institution, December 2024).

[13] Diliberti, Woo, and Kaufman, “The Missing Infrastructure.”

[14] Laura S. Hamilton, Julia H. Kaufman, and Lynn Hu, Preparing Children and Youth for Civic Life in the Era of Truth Decay: Insights from the American Teacher Panel (RAND, 2020), 48.

[15] Diliberti, Woo, and Kaufman, “The Missing Infrastructure.”

[16] Stern et al., “The State of State Standards for Civics and US History in 2021.”

[17] Educating for American Democracy, “Pedagogy Companion to the Roadmap to Educating for American Democracy.”

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