Quick (and no Googling): How many U.S. senators are there?
Who’s the commander in chief of the military?
Who has the power to make federal laws?
If you can answer these questions—the correct responses are 100, the President, and Congress, by the way—chances are good you have taken a civics class.
Not every student in the United States gets that opportunity. In 2019, Ryan Owens, a professor of political science and the director of the College of Letters & Science's Tommy G. Thompson Center on Public Leadership, co-sponsored the inaugural “Wisconsin Civics Bowl,” the culmination of the Wisconsin Civics Games. The Wisconsin Newspaper Association Foundation launched a statewide high school civics competition in 2019 in response to declining civics education and participation in civic affairs. Owens was surprised to learn that Wisconsin has no specific statewide requirement that public-school students take a civics class in high school (though there is a requirement for a social studies or Wisconsin history class). By contrast, states like Colorado and Idaho require a full year of civics curriculum.
“Our whole structure of government is based on an informed citizenry,” says Owens. “And if people don't know what's going on in government, we've got tremendous problems.”
According to an article last fall in the Cambridge/Deerfield News & Independent, three in five Wisconsin municipalities reported an average of one or fewer candidates for each village board or city council seat, as reported in the 2018 State of Wisconsin’s Cities and Villages (from the Wisconsin Policy Forum and the League of Wisconsin Municipalities). Enter the civics games. The Wisconsin Civics Games are intended to spark more interest in civics at the high school level.
In the wake of those civics games, Owens was curious about how much UW-Madison students, from freshmen to fifth years, knew about the topic of civics. He and the Thompson Center partnered with the UW Survey Center to conduct an online survey of Badgers last fall.
The survey featured roughly 40 questions, like the type asked on the United States Citizenship test, designed to test the students’ awareness of basic facts about the U.S. Constitution and how government functions. Overall, students scored reasonably well on the exam, with an average “score” of 86 percent correct.
Owens was encouraged by those results and noted some likely causes for higher scores.
“The most important takeaway was that respondents who had taken at least one course on civics in high school were considerably more informed and more likely to score higher than people who didn't have any civics classes,” says Owens.
The survey results also revealed that students who graduated from a state that deployed a civics exam as a graduation requirement scored slightly higher than students from states that didn’t use such a test. Wisconsin added the exam as a requirement in 2016-17, but less than half of U.S. states currently require it.
Owens is currently looking for ways to expand the Center’s exploration of this topic, potentially surveying students in other parts of the UW System and looking at ways to make sure students in Wisconsin and across the country graduate with the knowledge they need. As its name suggests, the Thompson Center is focused on developing leadership, and, as Owens points out, it’s difficult for today’s students eventually to lead in the public sector if they don’t understand how government works.
It’s important for all of us to understand how our government works,” says Owens. “And increasing our focus on civics seems to be one way that we can help.”