Most students in U.S. schools are getting some civics lessons before they graduate—but their schools may not be offering many opportunities to practice civic engagement, like visiting a courthouse or participating in a voter registration drive, a new survey finds.
The RAND Corporation and the Center on Reinventing Public Education surveyed 325 K-12 district leaders from October to December 2025 about civics education in their schools.
A large majority, 90%, said their schools taught civics within a different required academic class. Thirty-eight percent said they had a required standalone civics course, and 40% said they offered a civics elective.
But hands-on civics learning was less common. A little over a third of district leaders said their schools presented optional experiential civics learning, while 13% required it. Community service and volunteering was more popular, with 61% of districts giving students the option to participate and 23% requiring it.
“Civic learning is happening … but a lot of that is within a required academic class. It might be more fact-based, the systems of the government and the judicial branches,” said Lisa Chu, a research analyst at CRPE, and one of the authors on the report.
“In our conversations with district leaders, that didn’t seem to line up with what they wanted civic learning to look like,” she said.
The findings speak to a tension in civics education over what the focus of the subject should be.
On one side are proponents of an emphasis on civic knowledge: ensuring students understand the laws, foundational documents, and systems of government that shape how the country functions. On the other are those who want students to spend more time practicing civics in action—participating in political processes, especially at the local level, or advocating for changes in their communities.
Major civics education organizations often advocate a both-and approach. But in recent years, some conservative politicians and pundits have pushed back against “action civics,” arguing that it encourages political indoctrination in the classroom. In 2021, Texas banned schools from requiring students to engage in a handful of experiential civics activities, including contacting elected officials.
But political pushback wasn’t the only barrier to hands-on civics learning that district leaders cited in interviews with RAND and CRPE researchers, Chu said.
Leaders want training for teachers on facilitating difficult conversations
In interviews with 11 district leaders, those educators said their teachers needed more instructional resources and professional learning—especially when it came to facilitating discussions around difficult topics.
About half of districts required professional learning on state civics standards, survey results showed, but only about a quarter offered training on using specific civics instructional materials. Thirteen percent said they required training on teaching “controversial topics” in civics.
“This gap in professional learning is particularly important because civic dialogue is not politically neutral in many communities,” the report reads. “Teachers may be asked to help students discuss current events, democracy, rights, identity, conflict, or public policy in environments where adults disagree sharply about what belongs in the classroom.”
Civics and government teachers have said discussing current events is a particularly thorny challenge now, as questions about the limits of executive authority and the constitutionality of some of President Donald Trump’s administration’s policies have dominated political news.
But interviews with district leaders suggested that focusing on schools’ local communities might offer a less politically charged avenue for civic engagement.
“Political polarization does make prioritizing civic learning and these experiential learning experiences more difficult,” said Chu.
“But what was interesting is that in interviews, district leaders said their parents and local communities actually supported civic learning more when it was framed around community engagement—this might be things like community service projects or learning from your local mayor,” she said.
CRPE and RAND plan to publish two more briefs later this year with additional findings about the state of K-12 civics education.
