You're listening to Civics 101. I'm Nick Capadice. I'm Hannah McCarthy. I'm going to start today with a little bit of a

throwback. Hannah, do you remember this? The good news is we've actually reversed that dynamic now. We're up to 50 cents per kid on civic education. All right. So, hey, we're moving in the right direction now.

But look, look, now we can say we hit bottom, right? Because we've turned,

we've turned it. We turn the corner. We've gone up from five cents to 50 cents. So that's

better on the poke in the eye. Yeah, I do remember this. That's Daniel Allen from our episode on

the State of Civics Education. Daniel is currently the director of the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation at Harvard, by the way, also the director of the Democratic Knowledge Project. But in this case, she was telling us a piece of good news that funding for civics has increased tenfold.

So we interviewed Danielle at Civics Learning Week two years ago. And I do mean two years ago, this is an anniversary of sorts, because this is Civic Learning Week. Right now, Hannah and I are going to the Hoover Institution at Stanford on Thursday. We're going to interview attendees. Any listeners out there can go themselves if they wish or they can live stream it.

I've got a link down there on the show notes.

But I bring all this up because today is an update on the state of civics education in the United States.

And without falling into hyperbole here, I want to say that civics ed is in trouble.

What we know when it comes to civic learning is we don't have nearly enough of it.

This is Emma Humphreys. Emma is the chief education officer at I-Civics. They organize

Civics Learning Week every year. And if you don't know I-Civics, you should.

They are an organization that we've worked with and collaborated with ever since our show began.

There's a lot of support for it, widespread, ideologically diverse support for more and better civic education.

But we're still in a situation where students are not getting nearly enough, especially when you compare social

studies or civics instruction to instruction in STEM or ELA.

So Hannah, I'm using this anniversary of civics learning week as an excuse to do two things today.

First, to tell our audience why civics education is both extremely important and in a rough spot right now.

And secondly, I'm going to share what students themselves see as the most important issues in the country.

All right, Nick. So Emma said that there is support for civics education, that people want it.

How do we know that?

...