Nearly four in five American 8th graders score below proficient in civics, the federal government spends roughly 100 times less per student on the subject than on STEM and about one-third of Americans under 30 say democracy is no longer a viable system of government. 

A new report from the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) argues those trends are connected — and warns they pose a particular threat to Jews and to support for Israel.

The report, titled “Teaching American Democracy: Understanding Who We Are as Americans and Why,” is authored by Richard Kahlenberg, director of PPI’s American Identity Project, and Lief Lin, a PPI policy analyst. It calls for rebranding civics as “American Democracy” and requiring three years of it in high school, the same number of years that is required in most states for math and reading education.

“Across the country, civics education is falling short on all fronts,” Kahlenberg said. “Without a course that teaches students who we are as Americans and what makes America unique, the nation is unlikely to regain its place as the world’s leading example of how a multiethnic liberal democracy can flourish.”

The report documents deficiencies in three areas: On knowledge, the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress found 79% of 8th graders were below proficient in civics and 86% were below proficient in U.S. history, the weakest results of any subject tested. 

On belief in democracy, 31% of Americans ages 18 to 29 agreed the country should explore alternatives to democracy (compared with 5% of those over 65) and four in ten young Americans describe the founders of the country as villains rather than heroes. 

On communal participation, U.S. voter turnout trails the OECD average, and only a quarter of Americans report a strong sense of belonging to a community.

Speaking with Jewish Insider, Kahlenberg said the new report is not about antisemitism per se, but that its findings reflect “the same troubling trends” he has been writing about: a decline in belief in liberal democracy and American identity that, he argues, is helping fuel rising antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment among young people.

“The fundamental purpose of public education historically has been to teach young people what it means to be an American,” Kahlenberg said. “Right now schools are not doing a very good job of conveying that exceptional civic inheritance … There is also deep skepticism among young people about the principles of liberal democracy, and so a third of young people say they want alternatives to democracy.”

Kahlenberg’s concern is that when schools stop teaching liberal democracy as a distinct system — rooted in individual rights, equal citizenship and protections for minorities — Jewish students become more vulnerable to both left‑wing and right‑wing illiberalism.

“Jews have flourished in America because of the foundational idea that we should treat people as individuals and not as members of groups,” he said. “Failing to teach that has particular consequences for groups that have, statistically speaking, higher levels of success in academia or business.”

On the right, he pointed to rhetoric from Vice President JD Vance and others suggesting that some people are “more American” than others based on heritage or religion — a hierarchy he called “dangerous to many groups, including Jews.” On the left, he worries that rigid oppressor‑versus‑oppressed frameworks can give “a veneer of academic respectability” to old stereotypes of Jews as powerful and devious people.

Teaching that the United States is defined not by ethnicity or faith, but by “fundamental ideas around liberty and political equality … that apply to everyone,” Kahlenberg said, “pushes against that deeply disturbing idea.” 

He applied the same logic to Israel and the broader Middle East. If students are no longer taught why liberal democracy is valuable, he warned, Israel’s identity as the only liberal democracy in the Middle East becomes less meaningful.

“If young people don’t appreciate the value and importance of liberal democratic values, then there’s much less reason for non-Jews to value Israel,” Kahlenberg said. In that case, conflicts in the region are reduced to “fights between different groups, and therefore America wouldn’t have any particular reason to support the one society that subscribes to Western liberal democratic views.” 

One recommendation in the new report — expanding enrollment in AP Comparative Government — is explicitly aimed at showing students what life without democracy looks like.

“There’s a wonderful AP class that does this, but almost no one takes it,” Kahlenberg said. “For the 31% of young people who want alternatives to democracy … having a fuller appreciation of how troubling [Iran’s] system of government is would help highlight the ways in which there are good guys and bad guys in the fights in the Middle East … It’s also a fight between different systems and sets of beliefs.” 

The report traces the decline in civics education to five failures: ideological fights that have lowered standards of content and chilled classroom debate; chronic underfunding and weak accountability; poor teacher preparation; a failure to teach what life in nondemocratic societies looks like; and cuts to extracurriculars such as debate and student newspapers that build civic habits.

To address that, Kahlenberg and Lin recommend renaming and expanding civics into a multi‑year “American Democracy” course that teaches an “honest and hopeful” account of U.S. history — confronting failures to live up to liberal ideals while showing how those ideals enabled progress — and that devotes as much time to democracy as schools now devote to math and English. 

At the federal level, they urge a “Race to the Top” competition to reward content‑rich, nonpartisan civics; revived federal civics funding similar to the proposed Civics Secures Democracy Act; required state participation in NAEP civics and U.S. history; earmarked Title II-A funds for civics and history teacher training; and grants for debate teams, student newspapers and programs like We the People, especially in Title I schools.

Kahlenberg described the report as part of PPI’s broader American Identity Project, which he said aims to “teach students what it means to be an American” and to confront “the twin issues of preserving liberal democracy and fighting antisemitism.”