Op-Ed
By Daniel Stid
The Art of Association
March 20, 2025
I recently participated in a meeting of conservative election officials who periodically gather to discuss how they can improve trust in the elections they administer. We started with a round robin in which they each shared their biggest challenge. These conversations tend to focus on wonky topics – e.g., pre-processing mail-in ballots, or updating voter rolls. Things took a sharp turn, however, when a county clerk from Kentucky spoke up.
This official declared the biggest problem she faced was the complete failure of our system of civic education. Until we fixed that, she argued, our elections and by extension democracy itself would be in trouble. She was fed up with people who believed everything they read on the internet, and she was flabbergasted by the disrespect and threats that conspiracy mongers posted on facebook about her and her team of poll workers – most of whom were volunteers. Building up to her final point, she insisted that lesson #1 in the remedial civic education class she was calling for had to make clear that when you hold free and fair elections, sometimes your side loses, and you just need to move on! Judging by the nodding heads and rueful looks of her peers around the room, this county clerk was not alone in her frustration.
I thought of this beleaguered group, and the hopeful prospect that help might be on the way for them, just last week as I participated in the Civic Learning Week National Forum co-hosted by iCivics and the Hoover Institution’s Center for Revitalizing American Institutions. I moderated a keynote lunchtime panel on “Investing in Our Nation’s Future” with three foundation leaders whose institutions are showing peers how to go about it: Dame Louise Richardson DBE, President of the Carnegie Corporation, Hannah Skandera, President and CEO of the Daniels Fund, and Kathryn Bradley, Director of the Purpose of Education Fund at the Stuart Foundation. I then joined Kristen Cambell, Senior Fellow at PACE, to co-lead a breakout for funders on “Overcoming the Barriers to Investing in Civic Learning.”
These conversations, other sessions at the forum, and the general buzz that spilled out into the hallways left me encouraged about realizing the ambitious goal of the event: “making civic learning a nationwide priority for a stronger democracy.” Relative to where the field was a decade ago, there is a palpable sense of momentum. To maintain and build upon it, however, philanthropy will need to rise to the challenge in ways it has struggled to in the past. Especially amid the current turmoil, its contributions will be an essential piece of the puzzle.
Hallmarks of a burgeoning field
Let me start by noting five signs I observed at the event that suggest organizations and leaders in the civic education field are poised to make a constructive difference.
The first is the emergence of a powerful and shared framework for what civic education should consist of and do in the years ahead. While multiple sources have informed this framework, the overarching contribution has come from the Educating for American Democracy (EAD) initiative. The promising and sturdy roadmap for civic education that EAD has developed accomplishes several things. It speaks to and integrates both history and civics at all levels of K-12 education. It enables teachers, schools, districts, and states to adapt the framework from the bottom up, avoiding the problems of top-down national mandates. It candidly acknowledges creative tensions and design challenges rather than glossing over or resolving them in ways that work for one constituency but not others. It includes and does justice to the great and the good as well as the bad and ugly parts of our nation’s history – as the vast majority of Americans on both sides of the partisan divide expect civic education to do.
Second, and on a related note, the cross-ideological coalition of civic educators that came together to produce the EAD roadmap and that continues to advance its recommendations may ultimately prove to be as important as the document itself. These leaders include, to name just a few, Danielle Allen of Harvard, Jane Kamensky of Monticello, and Peter Levine of Tufts, all of whom have bona fides on the left, as well as Paul Carrese of Arizona State University, Checker Finn of the Fordham Institute, and David Bobb of the Bill of Rights Institute, who have equally strong reputations on the right. Having diverse leaders of this caliber continue to champion the vision of civic education that they share sends a powerful message to potential skeptics who might otherwise subject it to a crossfire from their ideological foxholes.
Third, involving civic educators working in higher education has brought additional substantive credibility and insight as well as fresh thinking to the field. Alongside the university-based scholars noted above who are participating in EAD, my AEI colleagues Benjamin and Jenna Storey are making a timely contribution through their work to develop and expand the emerging field of civic thought and university-based centers and programs that are nurturing it. The Jack Miller Center is another key institution on the center-right that is supporting research and teaching on America’s founding principles and history in post-secondary education. The efforts of these leaders and groups, and the scholars they have enlisted, are improving civic thought and education not only at the university level but also, increasingly, in K-12 education.
Fourth, in an emergent development, theorists and practitioners in the field are seeing civic learning in formal educational settings as one component in a broader system of civic formation. This system includes extra curricular activities like debating clubs, political unions, and student exchanges; programs developed by enterprising libraries and museums; community, state, and national service opportunities; military service and veterans groups. Pulling the camera back even more, civic formation also includes the lessons young people learn and the examples they observe in the families and neighborhoods in which they grow up.
Social entrepreneurs and innovative funders have joined forces to start all sorts of nonprofits and programs that spur these broader patterns of civic formation. An especially compelling example is the National Civics Bee, an annual competition for middle schoolers “to enhance civic literacy, skills, and participation.” The Civics Bee is hosted by The Civic Trust and is underwritten by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation and the Daniels Fund, among other supporters. The Civics Bee dissolves the apparent yet ultimately false dichotomy between acquiring deep content knowledge and action-oriented — dare we say fun? — civic learning. It enables students to opt in and go as far as they can based on their interest and dedication without having to rely on schools or teachers who may not be interested or up to the task. And it is intergenerational, involving the parents and grandparents driving the kids to these competitions and participating along with them in the audience.
Fifth, this rapidly growing field has been supported by iCivics’ ongoing work as the backbone organization supporting nonprofits and civic educators working within it. iCivics enables progress in the field in a number of different ways – e.g., by orchestrating the EAD process, hosting CivxNow (the state-level policy advocate for the field), and raising money to support common projects and public goods that other groups can take advantage of, such as Civic Learning Week. Like all good field catalysts, iCivics is helping the whole become much more than the sum of its parts.
Taken together, these five signs represent the good news for civic education. The bad news is that there is currently not enough far-sighted philanthropy flowing into the field to realize its promise, especially given the recent cutbacks and upheaval in federal funding. Stalwarts like the Carnegie Corporation, the Hewlett and Stuart foundations, the Daniels Fund, and the Jack Miller Family Foundation are notable exceptions that prove the rule.
Why philanthropy remains largely MIA from civic education
The overarching problem is that civic education spans – and thus falls into the gaps between – fields of philanthropy that operate in professional silos. The biases and blindspots of program staff and philanthropic advisors working in these distinct fields keep them from seeing the big picture in which civic education stands out as crucial.
Let’s start with education philanthropy, by far the biggest of these fields of funding. In response to its prompting, our K-12 educational system has over time focused less on educating the next generation of citizens for democracy and more on educating individual students so they graduate from high school on track to earn a living in the global economy. (That has been the goal anyway). Education philanthropy fueled the push for higher standards and assessments of students’ proficiency on them. Schools are ostensibly accountable for results in this paradigm, and thus they have zeroed in on teaching and testing in reading, writing, and math. To make room, they have tended to relegate civics and history to the margins of the teaching and learning that students experience. Insofar as some education philanthropists have departed from the “college and career ready” paradigm, it has been to get schools to emphasize social and emotional learning, or diversity, equity and inclusion, not civics and history.
Democracy-related philanthropy has shied away from civic education for different reasons. The first is that to most democracy funders, it feels like a very heavy, longer term lift, one that requires substantial changes in a complex and massive system – K-12 education – that they do not really know. Moreover, over the past decade, increasingly large swaths of democracy philanthropy have gone to underwrite politically adjacent interventions meant to bring about changes in the narrow confines of an electoral cycle. Democracy funders’ time horizons have been shrinking, not expanding, a pattern we can expect to accelerate in the second Trump Administration. Why invest in a civics program that will pay dividends for democracy in ten or twenty years when authoritarian gambits are playing out right now?
Youth development philanthropy is on its face perhaps the furthest removed from the task of civic education, but at its best, it may be the most inclined to support it. At least older school youth programs like scouting, Boys and Girls Clubs, 4-H, the Future Farmers of America, congregational youth groups, and well-led little leagues still assume it is a big part of their jobs to help form the characters and democratic dispositions of the young people in their charge. Hence they guide them in the ways of sportsmanship and reciprocity, collaboration and teamwork, disagreeing without being disagreeable, serving others, respecting authority, standing up for what is right, and even the finer points of Robert’s Rules of Order. Put differently, while these forms of youth development may not be funded by sophisticated education or democracy philanthropists, they are nonetheless helping to provide a broader civic formation.
The way forward
What will it take for more foundations and individual donors to fund efforts to improve civic education? How can they recognize and act upon the imperative of forming rising generations of citizens better able to sustain democracy in America?
In part, the necessary shifts will take interventions by foundation boards and presidents as well as donors who are “giving while living.” Their broader-gauged experience, perspective, and responsibilities should enable them to grasp the relative centrality of civic education in ways that their program staff and advisors cannot. Left to their own devices, and caught up in the hermetically-sealed silos of their field-based professional networks, the staff and consultants making the current grant recommendations are unlikely to see the importance of civic education.
In our funder workshop at Civic Learning Week, we also discussed the need for a philanthropic intermediary or affinity group that spanned the fields of education, democracy, and youth development to help funders tackle civic education and formation in an integrated way. This could occur through a partnership of affinity groups already at work in these respective fields or via a new entity. Whichever route is taken, the entity will need to undertake some serious philanthropic silo-busting.
Enlisting different types of funders could also make a difference. Corporate foundations, already disposed to the political and ideological even-handedness that good civic education requires, could play a constructive role (as for example the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation is doing with the Civics Bee). Community foundations, the individual DAF holders they support, and other place-based philanthropists might also be persuaded to underwrite this work in the communities, regions, and states they serve as stewards. For example, David Cicilline, the former member of Congress from Rhode Island who now leads the state’s community foundation, has made civic education and youth leadership a priority in the foundation’s new “Action Guide for Improving Civic Health in Rhode Island.”
But the biggest shift we need is not so much institutional as it is intellectual. No political regime can long endure without finding a way to form citizens or subjects who are able to uphold or at the very least accept its values and institutions. This is as true for liberal democracies as it is for autocracies. Indeed, the task of civic education is particularly nuanced in a system of self-government. Liberal democratic regimes depend on a critical mass of citizens having civic knowledge, skills, and virtues that do not occur naturally; they must be seeded and cultivated intentionally.
Amid the current upheaval, we have come to see our formal institutions – e.g., the separation of powers, checks and balances, and the rule of law – as the bulwark of democracy. While they are embattled, diverting resources to support civic education might feel like a distraction. I would suggest, however, that our accumulating discontents underscore the real distraction: presuming that citizens can uphold and govern themselves via these institutions while lacking in aggregate the civic learning and virtues necessary to make them work. As the county clerk from Kentucky pointed out, until we fix this problem, all the others we face will continue to fester.