The nation’s report card is poised to expand its assessment of American students’ civics knowledge, potentially creating the nation’s first state-by-state results on a topic with strong bipartisan interest.
The National Assessment Governing Board voted May 15 to move forward with plans to allow states to voluntarily participate in receiving state-level civics results on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, beginning with the 2028 administration for grade 8. It also voted to restore several cuts made to the testing schedule last year due to staffing cuts at the National Center for Education Statistics, including adding back grade 12 reading and math for 2028 and 2032 and allowing for state-by-state results in those subjects, too, as well as in science for grade 8.
The National Assessment Governing Board sets policy for the NAEP exams while NCES administers them. The Trump administration last year cut almost NCES’ entire staff.
The governing board last week decided not to reinstate NAEP’s writing test, which was canceled for all three grades in 2032, because it is still deciding how to adapt the test for rapidly changing writing norms in the wake of digital and A.I.-enhanced writing tools.
But the possibility of state-by-state civics results generated excitement in the field because it has never happened before. Few states currently administer their own exams in civics, making it challenging to gauge whether state and local investments in civics courses have paid off in terms of improvements to students’ knowledge, voting habits, or other skills.
The decision to pursue the state results “will ensure that states devote additional resources to students’ civic preparedness,” said Shawn Healy, iCivics’ chief policy and advocacy officer.
The move comes as both Democrats and Republicans push for more civics education—although below the seeming bipartisanship are deep divides about how the discipline should be taught.
It’s unclear how many states might sign on to receive state-by-state results, which would mean testing a larger sample of students in those states. NAGB board members and staff have had early conversations with states and said that about 40 participated in a recent conversation about the option.
This year’s administration of the civics NAEP will use a test framework that dates back to 1996. But the board at its meeting also took steps to begin the process of developing a new framework for the civics exam, which would debut in 2032, also with state-by-state results for grades 8 and 12.
The last NAEP civics exam, testing 8th graders, happened in 2022, and marked the first-ever decline in the test’s more-than-two-decade history.
Who will get to shape the next civics framework?
That process of expanding the exam to include state-by-state results could present a few sticky wickets. Officials are trying to navigate the complications of an active, heated national political fight over who gets to define American civics and citizenship for the next several decades.
Scott Marion, a testing expert and a NAGB member, said contention around civics knowledge and skills will be “the major challenge” to approving a new NAEP framework for the test.
“There’ll be arrows coming at this, just like in reading,” Marion said, referring to contentious debates that accompanied the development of NAEP’s latest reading framework.
While NAEP frameworks are not standards or curriculum, states do consider them a “gold standard” for testing in the subjects.
Already, the civics framework has drawn arguments around what NAEP can measure, how to test civics reasoning as well as content knowledge, and the role of media literacy in students’ civics skills, among other concerns. Public comments on a plan to commission a new framework showed a partisan divide over which organizations should be allowed to contribute to it, and whether specific vocabulary and concepts should be excised.
Comments submitted by the conservative National Association of Scholars and the Civics Alliance and Defending Education include highly prescriptive suggestions, such as aligning the framework with its NAS’ American Birthright standards and another set of standards promulgated by Hillsdale College. It also suggested the board attempt to avoid any language that appears to endorse “action civics,” a teaching approach through which students try to solve local problems, often engaging with local government.
Other organizations, including the Education Trust, which advocates on behalf of marginalized students, and civics commissions in Hawaii and Illinois, directly called such suggestions threats to NAEP’s integrity.
NAGB members, who are appointed by the secretary of education and fill a defined set of roles in education, largely tried to avoid the political debate on Friday.
“We are not going to solve, nor should we, nor can we solve all the great pressing debates of, what does a high-quality civics curriculum look like?” said Patrick Kelly, a board member and veteran AP U.S. Government and Politics teacher at Blythewood High School in Columbia, S.C. “Right now we’re focused on, what does a high-quality civics assessment look like? And if you keep the focus there, then the areas of disagreement become more nuanced and not potentially as tension-filled.”
Even if the board keeps the framework discussion tightly focused on assessment-related issues, the related reporting requirements and background questionnaires included in the NAEP could spark some of the most heated discussion. These context documents can affect how states frame their results and the survey data that inform how the results are interpreted. Such context has become increasingly polarized as student performance on the civics exam declined in 2022.
According to NAEP data that year, only half of 8th graders had taken a full civics class, though nearly another third had taken a class with at least some focus in the subject.
Kelly said NAEP’s civics framework may “elevate the assessment dialogue in a field where it’s either nonexistent in some states or it’s woefully inadequate.”
Next steps for the new civics framework
Over the next several months, the governing board will hash out framework issues related to areas including media literacy, constitutional foundations, and civics skills and participation.
After NAGB approves an overall framework, the board will convene a panel to develop more specifics for the new test with representatives from teachers in the tested grades and civics content experts from different geographic and ideological backgrounds, as well as those with “differences of opinion or perspective on some of the core debates in the content area,” according to Lesley Muldoon, NAGB’s executive director.
She said the panel would be “balanced across all those characteristics” but did not detail any specific groups that would be included or excluded.
The board plans to finalize the new framework by August 2027, and the assessments that use it would begin in 2032.
“I’m looking to see [NAEP civics] brought into the 21st Century and address changes that we’ve seen in our political processes over the last 30 years,” Kelly said. “We need the assessment to be relevant to the world that students are entering as citizens.”
