Civic educators watched last week's riotous assault on the Capitol with a mixture of alarm and hope. The mob's brazen disregard for the truth and the rule of law shook teachers around the nation, but also made a stunning case for the need to invest in civic learning, which could enjoy a breakthrough year in 2021.
A bipartisan bill to invest $1 billion in civic education, a teacher-friendly incoming president, popular support for civic learning, a surge in youth activism — and the fragile state of American democracy itself — have all combined to create "sort-of a Sputnik moment" for civics, says Louise Dubé, the executive director of iCivics.
Her organization, the nation's leading provider of civic learning resources, is leading a 144-member CivXNow Coalition of civic education groups that is working to mobilize allies from the Girl Scouts to the American Bar Association, along with legions of educators, students and teachers, to support the bipartisan Educating for Democracy Act.
Authored in the Senate by Republican John Cornyn of Texas and Democrat Chris Coons of Delaware, a close ally of President-elect Joe Biden, the bill would dole out $1 billion to states for American history and civics programs and ramp up teacher training and student assessments. A House version was introduced by Connecticut Democrat Rosa DeLauro and Oklahoma Republican Tom Cole.
The bill sets out to reverse chronic underinvestment in civic learning, which now receives just 5 cents in federal funding per student each year — compared with $50 per student annually for STEM education.
"I'm really heartened by the fact that the bill in the House and the bill in the Senate are bipartisan, despite the billion-dollar price tag," says Dubé. "That tells me that our political leaders recognize the depth of the problem. And it would be transformative for this field, for students and for educators."
The same hurdles that have plagued civic education for decades remain, of course.
Civic learning tends to get lost between the cracks of social studies, history and geography, can spook teachers wary of political controversies, and has triggered partisan disputes over whether students should learn facts and dates or how to transform communities. Only nine states and D.C. required a full year of civics or government studies to graduate as of 2018, though dozens of state legislatures will be mulling bills in their 2021 sessions to mandate more civic learning.
President Trump has undermined civic education both directly and indirectly, some argue, by modeling uncivil behavior as well as by roiling partisan disputes over what students should learn.
He has bullied and jeered at detractors, flouted the truth and the rule of law, assailed representative democracy with his unfounded voter fraud claims — and has now ended up as the first president impeached two times. Even as the nation grappled last year with racial reckoning, and students clamored for greater equity and diversity in classroom materials, Trump signed an executive order to promote "patriotic education" that he said would counter efforts to "paint America as a systemically racist country."
The Trump era may also have created an opening for civic education, however.
Americans' civic knowledge actually increased in 2019, according to the Annenberg Public Policy Center, a product of the president's constant clashes with Congress over budgets, immigration, impeachment and executive power. Trump's controversial presidency also helped spur record voter turnout, including among young Americans fired up over issues like race, global warming and gun safety.
Public support for civic learning cuts across party and ideology. Pollster Frank Luntz found in a survey last year that more than half of voters in both parties identified civic education as the best way to strengthen American identity.
Curriculum standards for civics, history and social studies, which vary by state but which in many cases have drawn fire as outdated, facts-heavy and lacking diverse perspectives, may also be in for a reset. A bipartisan group of national educators is poised to unveil a new roadmap for civic learning with the help of a $650,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Education Department.
Led by iCivics — in collaboration with Arizona State, Harvard and Tufts universities — the roadmap is expected to stress critical thinking over rote memorization, and to encourage students to embrace and actively engage in constitutional democracy. To be unveiled in March, the project is dubbed "Educating for American Democracy: A Roadmap for Excellence in History and Civics Education for All Learners," and sets out to define what students should know with an emphasis on civic agency, equity, diversity and inclusion.
Both the roadmap and the $1 billion legislation may find allies in the top ranks of the new administration. Biden is poised to move the Education Department in a new direction and the new first lady, Jill Biden, is a community college professor. Betsy DeVos, Trump's only Education secretary until quitting last week after the mob stormed the Capitol, clashed with teachers and promoted controversial charter schools, but Biden has pledged to invest in teacher salaries and training.
The biggest hurdle facing the bill may be the coronavirus pandemic, which will continue to suck all the oxygen out of the education policy room until schools and politicians figure out a way to safely reopen classrooms and help students make up what they've lost during virtual learning.
Another challenge is that the Educating for Democracy Act will likely be considered as part of the reauthorization of the federal law governing federal aid to elementary and secondary schools, which invariably stirs up disputes over the shared role of states and the federal government over testing, standards and unfunded mandates.
Nevertheless, Dubé is cautiously optimistic civic education may finally be ripe for revival. If nothing else, the mandate for it may never have been more evident. "Clearly, we are a nation so polarized as to be dysfunctional," she said. "And that polarization cannot keep going on in a system that asks for compromise."
Carney is a contributing writer. She also heads The Civic Circle, a member of the CivXNow Coalition.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.