The victory was bittersweet.

Khoa Ta, then a sophomore at Owensboro High School from Daviess County in Western Kentucky, was elected as a student board member for the local board of education last May. It was a role Ta was eager to build on, having helped to write and lobby for a statewide bill that sought to put a student board member in each Kentucky school district.

After the pandemic, school boards became a political battleground. Since they enact policies that affect students, Ta says, it seemed like students should have a voice in the decisions they were making.

But the happiness of winning the election was soon tampered with a sense of frustration and incompleteness. The position felt “superficial,” because it does not hold voting power, Ta says. While Ta can explain how students think about an issue to the board, they can also blithely ignore it. So embedded in the victory was also the next struggle. Having a voice is one step in trying to create change in your community, Ta says, adding that the ultimate goal is to prove that students can hold the exact same power and agency as adults.

Unlike many students in the country, Ta is politically engaged. Among long-standing democracies, American youth aren’t all that politically active. When it comes to voting, countries such as Australia make it compulsory and even fine those who don’t vote, with the number of young Australians enrolled to vote hovering around 90 percent, according to the Australian Electoral Commission. In comparison, young American voter registration is much lower and participation spiked in 2018 — when 28 percent voted, a record percentage — though it’s dipped since then. So perhaps it’s not so surprising that American politics can skew old, with the average age of House lawmakers a youthful 58, and the average age of those in the Senate more than 65 years old.

But some states seem to want younger people involved. In recent years, a number of states have passed civics testing mandates to pressure students to become more civically active. But can you really force young and student voters to take part? And how useful is civic education for those who chose to get involved?

Challenging the Gentrocacy

Compared to test scores and academic performance, people often forget about how vital civic development is, says Jilli Jung, a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University. Schools have the potential to foster really effective citizens, Jung says. But while there’s broad agreement that education should be the main way young people learn to become good citizens, it’s often forgotten about because schools don’t seem to be doing a good job and the United States seems worse at this than other democracies, she says. There isn’t much empirical evidence at how good the education system is at turning these students into active citizens either, she adds.

One idea that’s taken root is forcing students to take a civics test as a requirement for high school graduation.

Last year, Jung co-authored a report investigating the Civics Education Initiative, the standardized civics test that at least 18 states now require in the hopes it will leave students with a “bare minimum” of civics knowledge, preparing them to become active in shaping their communities. But Jung and her co-authors found that the mandates did not increase voter participation.

While civic education could help to introduce some students to political engagement, the effect of these mandates is less positive. Schools don’t devote much time to civic education, usually only one class per week and now that time is going toward preparing students for the test, Jung says. It’s possible that this means that students from marginalized communities — for example, immigrant communities — may not have any place to learn about civic education and politics and no place to talk about meaningful political issues, Jung speculates. However, the evidence for this from her study was weak.

In general, when it comes to lifting student participation rates broadly, it’s a common misconception that youth aren’t motivated, Jung says. Youth are motivated to participate, she says. But it’s hard to overcome barriers, such as registering to vote. Other countries are less restrictive in that way, she says, and have higher participation rates. So giving students practical guidance is useful, she argues. For example, she says, the civics exam asks a question about what the longest river in the U.S. is. That’s less likely to help students than showing them how to register to vote, taking them to visit legislators or holding mock elections, she argues.

Kentucky, where the students interviewed for this article attend public school, has a version of the civics test policy, which the state passed in 2018. It requires students to score 70 percent on a standardized civics test or to take a one-half credit civics course. The questions mostly probe facts, including the names of one of the state’s senators and the length of a presidential term. For some politically active students who have taken it, the civics test the state mandates was, “in every conceivable way, surface level”: memorize the answers, take the test, never think about it again. It also didn’t move them to get involved in their communities.

Incentivizing Change

Some hope to reinforce civics in other ways.

Sal Khan, founder of Khan Academy, doesn’t think the civics mandates will make students engaged. But it is a sort of minimum effort that districts should be doing. It’s not enough, though. Social media in particular has served as a rumor mill, exaggerating distrust and polarization, Khan says. In reality, he adds, Americans are more aligned than they seem and there’s a hunger for high-quality civic instruction.

Khan’s company offers civic instruction that he hopes will promote mastery of civics material. But another component is to facilitate discourse, Khan says. In its work with university admissions, Khan’s company is also launching the “Dialogue Project,” a series of facilitated Zoom conversations about hot-button topics that he hopes will help with constructive conversations. Students who participate in the sessions will get “an Uber[-style] rating” about how well they can make others feel heard and whether they take part in constructive conversations. That will then be passed on to admissions officers.

Khan says that he hopes it will motivate students to become engaged. It will be a “carrot and not a stick,” he says. If a student takes part in 30 of these conversations and has a good score, then adding it to their application could give them a bump, because it’s a value these universities say that they want. The versions of this that colleges tend to offer already don’t scale well, Khan says. The project has been announced, though the full list of colleges planning to use this haven’t been named yet. Khan says that he hopes it will be mainstream by the next admissions cycle.

Khan says he has no illusions that this will serve as a “silver bullet” to the problems of the country. However, it is perhaps a necessary part of the growing pains of a democracy.

“I think we all sometimes want to crave a benevolent dictatorship, like Singapore, where they're generally doing good stuff for the people, and it's all orderly, and no one's yelling at each other and there's a high degree of trust in the government,” Khan says.

But maybe American-style debate and discourse is just an inevitable consequence of having more information out there, and being in a democracy means confronting that. These are genuinely new problems brought on by the expansion of democratic participation, he argues:. “To some degree, the more people participate in democracy, the messier it looks, which isn't a bad thing, right?”

The mess is precisely what pulled in some of the students from Kentucky.

Joining In

Peter Jefferson, a senior at Henry Clay High School, a public school in Lexington, Kentucky, is active in politics, especially for someone who is not yet 18 years old.

Last year, Jefferson joined the legislative policy arm of the Kentucky Student Voice Team. There, he tried to give people information about important education-related bills, including the bill that introduced Amendment 2, which would overturn the state’s constitutional restriction that prohibits using public funds for private and charter schools. The amendment is up for a vote this election.

Jefferson was struck by how much of an impact this could have on K-12 schools in Kentucky. So he’s been trying to spread awareness about what he says is the student perspective on the bill, that it will decrease education funding for public schools. Jefferson says that means fewer opportunities for students with disabilities, or for students in rural areas or who want to work in public schools one day.

After the 2016 election, Jefferson started to become more politically aware. Then in fourth or fifth grade, he started reading the news every day, and trying to bone up on political issues.

Most of his education came through AP courses, Jefferson says. Since the information was being filtered through history and politics lessons, it meant he was learning about how an amendment changed women’s right to vote or how Andrew Jackson was able to mobilize the popular vote in the 19th century. It meant there wasn’t really a practical emphasis on how to register to vote today, he says. The knowledge was useful for inspiring more thoughtful social media discourse. It also left him with an understanding of the value of protest, which is motivating. But it wasn’t a “catalyst” for him getting involved in politics, Jefferson says.

His first serious engagement with politics, he says, occurred in seventh grade when a town he was living in was looking to put in a new steel recycling plan. Jefferson spent hours pouring over the public environmental impact reports. He was moved to circulate a petition among his friends — which got about 50 signatures, he recalls — and that was the first time he felt as though he was part of the process. Nobody ever explicitly told him that he could get civically involved, by say, canvassing or registering to vote. But over time, he says, he noticed more opportunities passed along by his high school government teacher.

Even some who feel lucky question how handy their education was for real civic life.

Ta, the student board member, feels like their district does better than most in civic education. “I myself have kind of been more fortunate in a lot of standpoints, because I feel like the public education system itself really does do the minimum,” Ta says.

While Ta is too young to vote in this election, they are highly engaged in politics. Still, the path was winding and not limited to school. When Ta was in middle school — when the country was embroiled in the 2020 presidential election and reeling from COVID-19 — political questions seemed suddenly relevant for them. Controversy over those issues meant that they were barred from really discussing them in school, almost like there was a stigma, Ta recalls. But for the first time, Ta found the news interesting. While the controversy pushed some people away, Ta found they enjoyed having critical conversations.

Later on, Ta opened an email from their school that mentioned the Kentucky Student Voice Team, a state-level group that was started in 2012 to bring students into the advocacy process. It seemed like good resume padding, Ta says. It was an “almost selfish thought,” they add. From there, now a freshman in high school, Ta joined the team as a student journalist, where they tried to put a “human touch” on complex issues. For instance, when the state legislature banned gender-affirming care — overriding a governor’s veto to do it — it also censored a lot of queer content, Ta says. For Ta, the care is potentially life-saving for those who might be struggling with suicidal thoughts, including their friends. “And a lot of people that I knew that are queer, like, were genuinely afraid,” Ta says. So being able to bring a voice to that felt powerful.

It also convinced Ta that elections are important. When the Young Democrats started canvassing for Kentucky’s 2023 gubernatorial election, Ta joined. In all, they went out five times, volunteering in spare moments on the weekends. Ta’s candidate won re-election, and has since banned conversion therapy in the state via executive order.

Practical Practice

So what was useful for those students who did get involved?

Ta says the biggest opportunity their school gave them at an early age was when social studies teachers began class by turning on the daily news. It pulled them in, revealing that there was a big world out there. School also taught Ta to conduct research, which was helpful. Plus, outside of school, Ta’s city had civic programs such as The Wendell H. Ford Government Education Center — a development program meant to turn students into “leaders who practice civility, cooperation and compromise” — that gave them an opportunity to research and understand candidates for office. There was also the National Honor Society, which stresses community service.

Jefferson, also with the Student Voice Team, says that making students in middle school and high school get involved with their local government in some way would help. That creates more personal connection and investment into what's going on, he says. That’s how he got involved.

But there’s a problem with how schools and civic groups try to reach out to students, Ta says. They happened to see the email about the group, prompting their own participation there. But more often than not, students don’t check their emails, they add.

It would be more useful, Ta argues, if schools were more direct about teaching how to practically apply civic knowledge so students can make themselves agents of change in their communities. Without that, it seems like schools don’t necessarily promote engaging with the broader community, Ta says. Perhaps schools should make community service mandatory, Ta suggests.