In a small ballroom just blocks from the White House, a group of 27 middle school students showed an impressive command of civics and the ins and outs of the constitutional process at a time when those very things are being hijacked and rejected by political movements keen on bending education to their will.

The event was the first-ever National Civics Bee Championship, and it was hosted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce at its Washington, D.C., headquarters. The event was sponsored by the Daniels Fund, a Colorado-based nonprofit organization that has helped fund the new initiative over the past several years and build Civics Bee programs in cities across the country. The competition was open to students regardless of where they attended school.

That work culminated in the national championship, which saw 27 state Civics Bee champions compete for the grand prize of a $100,000 scholarship.

Keen to see how civics education could be turned into a competition amid the emergence of divisive political concepts such as critical race theory, I attended the event. What I saw was an impressive display of young people eager to engage in the civil process to better their communities in a decidedly nonpartisan atmosphere.

Good civics

Civics education is a fraught matter. At the state and local levels, lawmakers, governors, school board members, and parents have tangled over what exactly schools should be teaching students about history, government, and the citizen’s role in that ecosystem.

The blame for this contentious environment lies with the liberal education activists who have been the primary cheerleaders of a civics education that seeks to undermine the foundational philosophies that informed the founding of the nation while effectively turning an entire generation of young people into partisan activists. Aided by teachers unions such as the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, civics education has often wholeheartedly embraced divisive concepts such as critical race theory while falsely painting the founding generations of the United States as evil invaders who displaced a peace-loving native population.

In a Washington Examiner column three years ago, Stanley Kurtz, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, outlined how the political Left was embracing “action civics” that used the cover of civics education to push its political agenda.

Under the framework of “action civics,” students were given school credit for engaging in a protest for a political cause or lobbying in some capacity. When Massachusetts adopted action civics in 2018, it did so at the expense of one of its then-highly regarded curriculum standards that emphasized the great achievements that Western civilization had accomplished.

At the Chamber of Commerce ballroom, such overt partisanship was nowhere to be seen. Instead, students answered some increasingly difficult questions about Supreme Court cases, laws such as the Freedom of Information Act, and the structure of Senate committees.

Championing a cause

The structure of the competition was fairly simple. Aided by TV host Marc Summers, the competition was divided into several rounds, two of which required quick answers to questions about government, history, and the political process. There was also a team project round that took place before the main competition. Based on the results of each round, the finalists earned points, and the winner of the event was the student who earned the most cumulative points across all four rounds.

The first round featured a 20-question multiple-choice quiz. Audience members such as myself were invited to try and see how many we could answer. Several questions were difficult, such as one about what kind of committee the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs is. (I incorrectly thought it was a standing committee, but the right answer is a “select” committee, and I guess that means I have to spend more time brushing up on my Capitol Hill coverage).

The third round of the competition, which, at this point, had been whittled down to just a few contenders, featured a Jeopardy-style buzzer quiz. The round delivered one of the more amusing parts of the competition, as the students aggressively pressed their buzzers in a bid to beat their fellow finalists and secure the chance to answer the question.

While the Civics Bee embraced a quiz-style game show for a large portion of the competition, the most fascinating and compelling part of the event was the second round. 

Facing a panel of judges, each student gave a presentation about an essay he or she had written that addressed a problem in the student’s community and offered a solution. Among the 10 finalists who competed in that round, the most remarkable aspect was how most of the students had chosen topics uniquely relevant to their communities rather than selecting a partisan cause. They were asked by the judges how the government, businesses, and nonprofit organizations could contribute toward solving the problem that the student had identified.

The topics exemplified the unpartisan nature of the competition and ran the gamut from a finalist from Washington advocating the restoration of the 1990s-era “assault weapons” ban to a finalist from Arkansas who wanted the revitalization of his hometown’s downtown and to eventual champion Emily Brubaker of Alaska, whose presentation centered on the Ensuring Lasting Smiles Act, a rather obscure piece of legislation that has garnered bipartisan support in both chambers of Congress and would require insurance plans to cover the treatment of a congenital anomaly or birth defect.

A nationwide movement for civics

The first National Civics Bee Championship only featured 27 state champions, but plans are in the works to expand that number next year. 

Hanna Skandera, the CEO and president of the Daniels Fund, told me in an interview that the 2025 edition of the event will feature finalists from 40 states as the program expands. The goal is to have Civics Bees in all 50 states and as many local Chambers of Commerce as possible.

“We want to make sure we replicate that opportunity to interface with other young people from different places and different spaces,” she said, noting the grassroots nature of the competition, which began in 200 cities nationwide.

“These are local chambers saying we’re going to host this for our community,” she added. “We’re going to give prizes for the young people to win, we’re going to make this part of our community, and we value civics, we value our young people being engaged. That’s powerful, and I think, compelling. … It’s community-driven and owned at the local level.”

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The adage that “all politics is local” is especially relevant to the Civics Bee, not because it is “political” in the partisan sense but “political” in the sense of its original meaning: the organization of people into a “polis” or city, the organization of people into a community. 

Each of those young students chose a cause they believed would make their community, their “polis,” better, and in doing so, showed an impressive command of the civic and political process that today eludes many adults, perhaps even including some lawmakers and politicians. It was a refreshing reminder that good civic engagement, regardless of one’s political inclinations, is a virtue worth inculcating from a young age. Who knows, with its group of 27 finalists, the inaugural National Civics Bee Championship may have introduced us to a future senator, Cabinet secretary, or maybe even a president.