Supporting the Roadmap for Educating for American Democracy (EAD) in Massachusetts
In recent decades, we as a nation have failed to prepare young Americans for self-government, leaving the world’s oldest constitutional democracy in grave danger, afflicted by both cynicism and nostalgia, as it approaches its 250th anniversary. The time has come to recommit to the education of our young people for informed, authentic, and engaged citizenship.
Educating for American Democracy (EAD) is an unprecedented effort that convened a diverse and cross-ideological group of scholars and educators to create a Roadmap to Educating for American Democracy. This roadmap provides guidance and an inquiry framework that states, local school districts, and educators can use to transform the teaching of history and civics to meet the needs of a diverse 21st century K–12 student body.
The Educating for American Democracy (EAD) initiative was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the U.S. Department of Education through a grant to iCivics in collaboration with Harvard University, Tufts University, CIRCLE, and Arizona State University. First proposed in July 2019, the initiative brought together a national network of more than 300 scholars, classroom educators from every grade level, practitioners, and students from a diversity of viewpoints, demographics, and roles, who pooled their expertise to craft a strategy for providing excellent history and civic education to all students.
The initiative is a call to action to invest in strengthening history and civic learning, and to ensure that civic learning opportunities are delivered equitably throughout the country.
At the federal level, we spend approximately $50 per student per year on STEM fields and approximately $0.05 per student per year on civics. A lack of consensus about the substance of history and civics—what and how to teach—has been a major obstacle to maintaining excellence. The Educating for American Democracy initiative provides tools to make civics and history a priority so that we as a country can rebuild our civic strength to meet the modern challenges we are facing.
This detailed consensus, presented in a broad roadmap, allows states, localities, and educators to assess and reprioritize their own approaches and will encourage investments in civics and history at all levels. It also serves as a valuable resource to help educational leaders and practitioners rethink and reprioritize what goes into curricula.
In Massachusetts, we have already begun this work. In 2018, the Commonwealth successfully passed a comprehensive civic education law, An Act to promote and enhance civic engagement. This bipartisan legislation was created to strengthen civic education in Massachusetts public schools. Now we are working to ensure its successful implementation and are proud to support the Educating for American Democracy initiative.
More about the Roadmap:
The Roadmap is not a set of standards or a curriculum. It recommends approaches to learning that:
Inspire students to want to become involved in their constitutional democracy and help to sustain our republic;
Tell a full and complete narrative of America’s plural yet shared story;
Celebrate the compromises needed to make our constitutional democracy work;
Cultivate civic honesty and patriotism, creating space to both love and critique this country;
Teach history and civics both through a timeline of events and the relevant themes.
The EAD Roadmap suggests educational strategies for every grade level, curated examples, and ways for each state and district to implement the recommendations to fit the needs of their own, unique communities. It details benchmarks for state-level accountability to support continuous improvement—as well as recommendations for investment in developing a corps of history and civics educators.
Are you an educator?
Explore resources on how you can implement the roadmap in your classroom with robust curricula tailored to your students. For example, the Pedagogy Companion focuses on techniques that best support the learning and development of student agency and sample lesson plans that align with the principles of EAD.
Are you a student?
Some of the best ideas students generate come through the creativity and innovation they tap into when designing solutions to real problems or complex questions. To encourage students to reflect on the principles of EAD and share what these ideas mean to them, students can submit their artwork to the K-12 Student Design Challenge Contest for a chance to win a cash prize and have their original artwork featured on the Educating for American Democracy website.