Civics Education, Democracy, and Voting
To mark our country’s significant birthday this year, the theme of the 2026 Civics Learning Week now underway is Learning and Liberty: Civic Education at 250. The keynote speaker, Harvard Professor Jill Lepore, noted that civics is not just something you study, but “something you study how to do. You do that by participating in democratic society, by exercising your rights and your duties as a citizen.”
I’m a huge Jill Lepore fan. I love her historical work in The New Yorker, and I devoured These Truths and her Secret History of Wonder Woman. I couldn’t agree more about the urgent need to connect the study of civics with the real-life practices that a democratic society needs in order to flourish.
How I wish Civic Learning Week would take its own ambitious and optimistic message about full participation to its logical conclusion. What I mean is voting in a democracy is a critical practice that reinforces our safety and security and allows for the peaceful resolution and revisiting of complex problems and solutions.
Everyone eligible should be registered and ready to vote before they graduate from high school, and quality civics education should include preparing students to achieve this baseline goal as a key ingredient for full participation in a healthy democratic society.
Too often, however, voting is left out of conversations about civics education. It’s missing from most classrooms even when mandated by state law. States may not provide the funding, training, monitoring, and other essential resources to actually deliver results. But we need high levels of participation to have a robust democracy; indeed significant research shows that “voter turnout and engagement are crucial for maintaining democratic stability in the face of backsliding.”
It’s uncomfortable to be making this point when civics itself is under attack, along with other foundations of civil society. The organizers of Civic Learning Week are visionary leaders who have created an event of great meaning and importance in the face of these challenges.
Agendas have power. They define what is in and out of the arena for discussion. It is not easy to set the agenda for discussions about civics, especially now. If we believe that young people should learn how to participate fully in public decisions that impact their lives, their families, their communities, and their futures, where does education about voting belong, if not as a fundamental part of civics education? Where does voting sit in the civics education agenda?
My focus is not to preach from the sidelines. It is to equip students, educators, state and local partners, and all who care about democracy and civic participation, with the tools to make nonpartisan voter registration part of high school life.
So, in honor of Civic Learning Week, here are some essentials: when students don’t learn how and why they should register to vote, we end up with terribly low rates of youth registration, contributing to low turnout, distrust in democracy, candidates not reaching the unregistered, and young people feeling left out.
My lightbulb moment was realizing that California law would allow my kids to preregister to vote at 16, so they would be automatically added to the voter rolls when they turned 18. I even found a state law requiring high schools to help students with voter registration - yet under 20% of the state’s 1,300+ high schools had complied. The problem is not unique to California. We see low levels of compliance and implementation of preregistration and high school voter registration all over the country. And the results show it. On average in midterm years, under 30% of 18-year-olds are registered.
You read that right, under 30%. And right now, in some states, it’s below 25%, even though deadlines to register to vote in primary elections in dozens of states for the midterms are just around the corner.
Compare the rates for 18-year-olds to those 45 and above in these charts and you see the outcomes of omitting to build voter registration into high school life.
This has been happening for decades, often blamed on young people or treated as par for the course. But that’s not right. We shouldn’t be ok with these disparities. Instead, when we look at these maps and charts, what I hope we see is a problem in urgent need of fixing and worthy of their attention.
It’s a challenge of multiple dimensions, including law, policy, culture, expectations, and, perhaps most of all, funding. What if a fraction of the billions that go into last-minute political ads was channeled into lasting investments in basic civic education infrastructure, including getting everyone registered and ready to vote?
If we are serious about protecting against democratic backsliding, and we believe that nonpartisan voter education and registration is part of the equation, then it’s reassuring to know that low youth registration rates are a very fixable problem. There are proven pathways to make progress right now that do not depend on new legislation or other authorizations.
Most states allow teens to preregister at 15, 16 or 17, and about half of U.S. states have laws requiring high schools to help with voter registration. Even in the others, high schools have authority to build voter registration into their civics education curriculum and to make youth leadership a part of it. The challenge is, few people know about preregistration, most of those laws are not effectively implemented or enforced, many educators have not had training or support to create effective programs, and most schools have not built the traditions to get voter registration up and running.
As part of Civics Week, I hope more schools will jump in and try. At The Civics Center, we’ve been running training sessions to reach students and partners across the country. Because rules and traditions vary from state to state, we organize with local groups who can walk students through the process and help them understand the stakes in their community. Attending is free, and we help students and educators come up with the solutions that fit best for their own communities.
Our democracy depends on broad participation and we shouldn’t keep shutting out most of the 4 million Americans who turn 18 every year. So we’re celebrating National Civics Week with our fellow democracy activists and educators, and urging them to help our youngest voters to exercise their rights and duties - starting with registering the Class of 2026 before they graduate. That’s a great way to celebrate 250 years of our democracy.