For Republican Governors, Civics Is the Latest Education Battleground

Lisa Phillip, a seventh-grade social studies teacher at an Orlando charter school, appreciates many of Florida’s new guidelines for teaching civics.

She has enjoyed discussing, as the state requires, the advantages that the U.S. government and economy have over socialism and communism — something that some of her immigrant students feel innately, she said.

And she doesn’t mind teaching about “the influence of the Judeo-Christian tradition” on the nation’s founding documents. The subject prompted her students at Central Florida Leadership Academy to reflect on how the country’s politics, they believed, fell short of the basic morality in the Ten Commandments.

This fall, Ms. Phillip is one of thousands of social studies teachers adjusting to a hotly debated overhaul of civics in several conservative states. The revamp is led by Republican governors — Ron DeSantis of Florida, Kristi Noem of South Dakota and Glenn Youngkin of Virginia — who have also restricted how race and gender are discussed in schools.