In 2020, while their parents planned pilgrimages to the polls, Henderson County public school students from Kindergarten to 12th grade cast ballots of their own. In this civic education exercise, the youngest grades voted on whether there should be more hopscotches painted on the playground and jump ropes for recess, while grades 3-5 weighed in on whether all citizens 18 and older should be required to vote.
Depending on the grade, students also voted in the U.S. president, North Carolina governor, congressional and school board contests.
Of course, none of it counted toward the results. But the exercise counted in other ways. It taught kids about the importance and impact of voting from an early age.
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Research shows that people who practice voting early tend to become more active voters as adults, said Bettie Liebzeit, co-chair of Students Voting for Democracy, a program run by the Henderson County League of Women Voters and Henderson County Public Schools every two years.
That is, until 2024. After the North Carolina legislature passed the “Parents’ Bill of Rights” in mid-2023, parents had to “opt in” before students could participate in surveys revealing political beliefs.
The legislation sounded the death knell for the mock elections, which were interpreted to be included in the policy.
“The problem was how to keep track of parents opting in, and how the digital facilitator was going to know which students had parents opting in and then sending the ballot electronically,” Liebzeit said. “We’re talking about 14,000 kids here.”
It’s not the first time the General Assembly has hindered civic education efforts, perhaps unintentionally.
In 2009, the legislature passed a law allowing preregistration for 16- and 17-year-olds, including a requirement for county boards of elections to conduct preregistration drives at public high schools. In 2013, the law was repealed. While a court eventually allowed preregistration to continue, the county boards of election education mandate never returned.
The exclusion may have had real impacts.
Research shows that a combination of preregistration and a class demonstration has the largest influence on whether a student will ultimately vote, said Duke political science professor Sunshine Hillygus.
But now that it’s not required, a survey of North Carolina high schools found that only about half were doing any sort of voter registration at all, she said.
This is the second article in Civics Unlearned, a three-part investigative series from Carolina Public Press. This article explores how conflicting priorities and inconsistent delivery have hamstrung quality civic education.
The first article in this series showed that deprioritized and inconsistent civic education in North Carolina classrooms has likely hindered it from effectively spurring civic engagement evenly across the state. The final article suggests ways to bolster civic education and engagement, both within and beyond the formal education system.
Civics left behind
Why has teaching civics been given a lower priority and been done in an inconsistent manner in North Carolina? Among the top culprits are standardized testing, STEM education and a polarized political climate, according to interviews with teachers, students and academics.
In 2002, Congress passed a bipartisan education reform bill: No Child Left Behind. The U.S. government was concerned about globalization, and the prospect of competing with the rest of the world economically.
President George W. Bush’s solution? Standardized tests. To get federal funding, states would have to hold their schools accountable by setting standards in subjects like math and reading, seen as measures of economic success.
The problem was, other subjects fell to the wayside as teachers worked frantically to get their students to pass exams. Those subjects included social studies, and more specifically, civics.
“We became very, very concerned about student achievement, especially achievement in the areas that would not only pay people more money, but also would make us economically powerful as a country,” UNC Charlotte political science professor Jason Giersch said.
At the time, North Carolina was already having students take exit exams at the end of each grade in core classes: math, reading, writing, science, history, geography and civics. In 2011, after a testing pushback, the General Assembly removed the state’s civics exams to limit testing to only what was federally required.
Even when there was standardized testing in civics, social studies teachers told Hillygus that it was mostly “smoke and mirrors.” The tests were more about the ability to read a historical passage than actual practical knowledge, they said.
In 2015, No Child Left Behind was axed in favor of the Every Student Succeeds Act, which gave states more flexibility, but still required measuring reading, math and science performance.
Throughout this time period, STEM education — science, technology, engineering and mathematics — was gaining momentum. Again, the focus was on developing a generation of workers who could bring the country economic success.
“There’s a lot of pop these days, especially in higher education, on return on investment,” Giersch said. “So what majors and what classes are going to give a financial return in the form of more earning potential? Not many people argue that your salary is higher if you learn more civics.”
Principals aren’t losing their jobs because of low civics scores or engagement, said youth civic organization GenerationNation executive director Amy Farrell. So naturally, it garners less investment, financially and otherwise.
In fact, according to a 2020 study, the federal government at that time invested 5 cents per K-12 student for civic education, compared to $54 for STEM.
“What we hear a lot from students is that they just don’t hear from adults that this is important,” Farrell said.
Elementary schools might have social studies class once a week, and might have to share the time with science, Farrell said. Civics is perceived as extra, an add-on, despite being one of the primary reasons the public school system exists.
The tides may be shifting. People on both sides of the political aisle are noticing the effects of a civically challenged electorate, Giersch said.
“We have low levels of trust in one another, low levels of trust in democratic systems, low levels of trust in the government, low levels of trust in election results, and a lot of people are saying what we need is more civic education,” he said.
Class cancelled: Polarization enters civics class
A few years ago in Wilmington, John T. Hoggard High School social studies teacher Lindsay Noble asked her principal not to assign her civics classes anymore.
She had taught government and civics courses since 2001, and took pride in her work informing students how to vote and participate in civic society. But about a decade ago, the mood changed.
Students got bolder, and less patient with each other, making civil discussions tenser. Parents wary of teachers pushing political agendas paid more attention — and objected — to lesson plans, and constantly got Noble and her colleagues called into the office.
“When I get to the section of immigration, it’s always been a difficult thing to talk about,” she said “And then abortion also has always been difficult to talk about, and now? Pretty much everything.”
In her colleagues’ English classes, book bans are complicating matters. In their science classes, there’s uncertainty about how to cover evolution. There is no break from parental commentary on teaching, Noble said.
For her, the breaking point came during the pandemic when she was teaching a lesson on the influence of polls, using a contemporary political issue: the Black Lives Matter movement.
Noble had her students, half in person and half virtual, listen to a short NPR podcast discussing a recent poll about whether people felt more emboldened to comment online in the midst of the Black Lives Matter movement. The podcast mentioned President Donald Trump’s rhetoric surrounding the issue.
Suddenly, a parent popped into the Zoom call and accused Noble of indoctrinating her students. Noble didn’t know how to react. She went home and cried. While the administration supported her, it was the last straw. She’s done with civics.
“You try to walk a very, very narrow path so that you don’t offend somebody, but at the same time, you’re trying to teach these students facts,” she said.
In Morganton, Burke Middle College civics teacher Timothy Barnsback said the Parents’ Bill of Rights is “the Citizens United of teaching history.”
“We’re becoming customer service as a result, rather than creating an environment for our students that is best for the very diverse population of students that we have in our classrooms,” he said.
In recent years, membership in the Professional Educators of North Carolina has dropped about 65%, Barnsback said. North Carolina Association of Educators membership also plummeted. That tells him that teachers aren’t willing to put up a fight.
“I don’t think enough teachers are fighting because they’re worried about the public pressure that they may receive, or getting called into the principal’s office because we’re not allowed to teach certain concepts, even though they are probably the things that our students desire the most to learn about,” Barnsback said.
Bryan Proffitt is the vice president of the NCAE, but used to be a social studies teacher in Wake and Durham counties until 2015.
When he was in the classroom, he didn’t feel any political pressure, he said. But now, he hears about it all the time from his peers. He feels that there’s an effort to keep people divided politically, and keeping civic education on the backburner serves that purpose.
With the passage of the Parents’ Bill of Rights and legislation targeting diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in schools and public life, teachers aren’t sure what it is that they can and can’t teach, Proffitt said.
“You also have people that are saying, ‘Look, I just need to follow the rules and be consistent with these standards, whether or not it is meeting kids’ needs, because I’m afraid of getting in trouble. I’m afraid of losing my job,’” he added.
At Rockingham Early College High School in Wentworth, social studies teacher Valencia Abbott isn’t going to let any of that stop her from following the standards as she sees fit.
She gets reported to the principal or called out in public probably every month, she said. She’s the only teacher of color at her school, so it’s “par for the course,” she said.
“I’m not concerned about what the political climate is, or if somebody’s going to get upset,” she said. “It is like, this is what the standards are. This is what my students need. This is what I’m going to teach.”
‘You’re losing me’
While civic education is a crucial factor in eventual civic engagement — or disengagement — other variables have to be considered.
Nearly half of North Carolina’s residents are transplants from other states or countries, according to a 2018 report by Carolina Demography. Their range of educational experiences and backgrounds may play a part in a civic detachment.
“They don’t have a longtime involvement in their communities in terms of civic activities,” Giersch said. “They don’t know what the local politicians are. They don’t know what the issues have been over the past few generations.”
Additionally, while North Carolina is technically purple, upon closer inspection, it’s mostly a stitched together quilt of very red and very blue counties that happen to blend into a violet hue. Giersch wonders whether living in local communities where political outcomes appear so “set in stone” might foster apathy.
Catawba College political science professor Michael Bitzer isn’t surprised kids are turning away from politics. They don’t see a system that’s working, nationally or locally.
“They have known nothing other than the two parties at loggerheads,” he said.
“They’ve known nothing but this polarization environment. So it’s not surprising that they probably see politics as merely battles and war, rather than trying to find the common good and seek some compromise and some achievements and then go on to fight the next battle.”
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