Policy Mechanisms That Shape Social Studies Course Taking

• In Event: How State and Local Policy Can Help Shape Students’ Civic Development

Abstract

According to the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS), social studies is an integrated course of study—requiring instruction in a diversity of disciplines like economics, geography, history, and political science—to develop civic competence and equip students with the knowledge, skills, and dispositions necessary to become good democratic citizens (NCSS, undated; Vinnakota, 2019). Accordingly, the “College, Career, and Civic life” or C3 framework developed by NCSS and others to guide development of state standards in social studies calls for K–12 instruction in the four core social studies disciplines: history, civics, economics, and geography.
Subject-specific coursetaking, especially in high school, matters for several reasons. Previous research has shown that students who take more rigorous courses have better academic outcomes, including high school completion and postsecondary enrollment (e.g., Attewell & Domina, 2008; Long et al., 2012; Morgan et al., 2018). Another strand of research has shown that students who take civics courses are more likely to vote, a rough proxy for civic engagement (e.g., Siegel-Stechler, 2018; Bachner, 2011).
Students’ high school social studies coursetaking can be shaped by a variety of policy levers like states’ graduation requirements, the structure of schools’ schedules, schools’ course offerings, and local gatekeeping policies around higher-level coursework. For example, state policies around high school social studies coursetaking vary widely. Some states require students to take three or four social studies courses while in high school and specify in what disciplines these courses must be. Others provide very little guidance on students’ high school social studies course taking.
Using the C3 framework as a guide, this paper investigates the extent to which these various policy mechanisms shape students’ high school social studies coursetaking and contribute to disparities in course enrollments across student subgroups. I first descriptively investigate national and state trends in students’ high school coursetaking, including which and how many subject-specific social studies courses students take while in high school. I then use regression-based analyses to investigate what policy mechanisms (e.g., state graduation requirements) explain patterns and disparities in students’ high school coursetaking.
To investigate these research questions, I use data on roughly 20,000 students from the 2009 High School Longitudinal Study. HSLS:2009 contains high school transcript information on class of 2013 graduates. Although HSLS:2009 is designed to produce nationally representative estimates, HSLS:2009 also includes oversamples in 10 states, allowing users to investigate coursetaking patterns in different state policy contexts.
I find that high school social studies coursetaking varies significantly across states and across school contexts. Analyses show that students’ social studies coursetaking is more scattered in states that do not provide adequate policy guidance. And even within states, there is a high degree of variation in students’ social studies coursework, suggesting much local autonomy in shaping students’ social studies instruction. Overall, results suggest clear disparities in students’ high school social studies coursetaking, raising questions about whether students across the United States are receiving equitable opportunities to learn in this subject area.

Author

• Melissa Kay Diliberti, Pardee RAND Graduate School