From Texas to Florida to Arizona, school voucher policies are reshaping the landscape of American education. The Trump administration champions federal support for voucher expansion, and many state-level leaders are advancing school choice programs. Billions of public dollars are now flowing to private schools, church networks and microeducation platforms.
The push to expand school choice is not just reallocating public funds to private institutions. It is reorganizing the very purpose of schooling. And in that shift, something essential is being lost — the public mission of education as a foundation of democracy.
Civic education is becoming fragmented, underfunded and institutionally weak.
In this moment of sweeping change, as public dollars shift from common institutions to private and alternative schools, the shared civic entities that once supported democratic learning are being diminished or lost entirely — traditional structures like public schools, libraries and community colleges are no longer guaranteed common spaces.
The result is a disjointed system in which students may gain academic content or career preparation but receive little support in learning how to lead with integrity, think across differences or sustain democratic institutions. The very idea of public life is at risk, especially in places where shared experience has been replaced by polarization. We need civic education more than ever.
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If we want students who can lead a multiracial democracy, we need schools of every type to take civic formation seriously. That includes religious schools, charter schools and homeschooling networks. The responsibility cannot fall on public schools alone. Civic formation is not an ideological project. It is a democratic one, involving the long-term work of building the skills, habits and values that prepare people to work across differences and take responsibility for shared democratic life.
What we need now is a civic education strategy that matches the scale of the changes reshaping American schooling. This will mean fostering coordinated investment, institutional partnerships and recognition that the stakes are not just academic, they are also democratic.
Americans overwhelmingly support civic instruction. According to a 2020 survey in Texas by the Center of Women in Politics and Public Policy and iCivics, just 49 percent of teachers statewide believed that enough time was being devoted to teaching civics knowledge, and just 23 percent said the same about participatory-democracy skills. This gap is not unique to Texas, but there is little agreement on how civics should be taught, and even less structural support for the schools trying to do it.
Without serious investment, civic formation will remain an afterthought — a patchwork effort disconnected from the design of most educational systems.
This is not an argument against vouchers in principle. Families should have options. But in the move to decentralize education, we risk hollowing out its civic core. A democratic society cannot survive on academic content alone. It requires citizens — not just in the legal sense, but in the civic one.
A democratic society needs people who can deliberate, organize, collaborate and build a shared future with others who do not think or live like they do.
And that’s why we are building a framework in Texas that others can adopt and adapt to their own civic mission.
The pioneering Democracy Schools model, to which I contribute, supports civic formation across a range of public and private schools, colleges, community organizations and professional networks.
Civic infrastructure is the term we use to describe our approach: the design of relationships, institutions and systems that hold democracy together. Just as engineers build physical infrastructure, educators and civic leaders must build civic infrastructure by working with communities, not for or on them.
We start from a democratic tradition rooted in the Black freedom struggle. Freedom, in this view, is not just protection from domination. It is the capacity to act, build and see oneself reflected in the world. This view of citizenship demands more than voice. It calls for the ability to shape institutions, policies and public narratives from the ground up.
The model speaks to a national crisis: the erosion of shared civic space in education. It must be practiced and must be supported by institutions that understand their role in building public life. Historically Black colleges and universities like Huston-Tillotson University offer a powerful example. They are not elite pipelines disconnected from everyday life. They are rooted in community, oriented toward public leadership and shaped by a history of democratic struggle. They show what it looks like to educate for civic capacity — not just for upward mobility. They remind us that education is not only about what students know, but about who they become and what kind of world they are prepared to help shape.
Our national future depends on how well we prepare young people to take responsibility for shared institutions and pluralistic public life. This cannot be accomplished through content standards alone. It requires civic ecosystems designed to cultivate public authorship.
We have an enormous stake in preparing the next generation for the demands of democratic life. What kind of society are we preparing young people to lead? The answer will not come from any single institution. It will come from partnerships across sectors, aligned in purpose even if diverse in approach.
We are eager to collaborate with any organization — public, private or faith-based — committed to building the civic infrastructure that sustains our democracy. Wherever education takes place, civic formation must remain a central concern.
Robert Ceresa is the founding director of the Politics Lab of the James L. Farmer House, Huston-Tillotson University.
Contact the opinion editor at [email protected].
This story about civic education was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s weekly newsletter.
