Can a civics teacher persuade her students to believe in democracy? (2024)

ALLENTOWN, Pa. — Shannon Salter checked the results of an online poll that she gave each year to her high school civics students. One of the questions asked whether they would support lowering the voting age to 16.

“Everyone said no,” Salter told her students in late April. “That has never happened before. So, I am dying to dig into why.”

Salter, a 53-year-old White woman, stood at the front of the classroom. Her students, Black and Hispanic teenagers drawn from Allentown’s working-class neighborhoods, were arrayed around her. All were seniors. Most were weighing whether they will become first-time voters in the fall when the presidential election could come down to their state, Pennsylvania.

One student complained that social media had polluted his peers’ minds with misinformation and fried their attention spans. “A 16-year-old nowadays — that’s not old enough,” he said. “There’s no maturity or knowledge there.”

Another, who had spent much of the coronavirus pandemic living with his mother in an abandoned building, talked about the social and emotional damage that the restrictions had inflicted. “As kids, we’ve become way more social distanced,” he said. Some of his classmates were so isolated that they barely spoke to anyone, he added. Surely, they weren’t qualified to choose the next president.

Like most civics teachers, Salter wanted her students to believe that their voices and opinions could shape the nation’s future — that their participation in politics was essential to improving their country, their neighborhoods and their lives. A big part of her job, as she saw it, was persuading her students to vote.

Whether young voters will turn out to vote in November is one of the essential unknowns of the upcoming presidential election. In 2020, nearly 50 percent of the population between the ages of 18 and 29 cast ballots, one of the highest levels since the voting age was lowered to 18 in 1971, according to the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University. Those young voters — particularly young voters of color — were critical to President Biden’s victory.

So far, polling suggests that young voter turnout in 2024 may not match 2020’s rate. In April, only 41 percent of Black people 18 to 39 told a Washington Post-Ipsos poll that they were certain to vote this year, down from 61 percent in June 2020.

The poll mirrored what Salter was seeing among her students, whose interest in voting had been hobbled by poverty, racism and two aging presidential candidates seemingly far removed from the world of a struggling Allentown teen. “I’m pushing against more pessimism than I ever have before,” she said.

And so, on this morning, she decided to hit her students with a blast of idealism in the form of a clip from “The West Wing,” the television drama from the early 2000s that Salter called her “happy place.”

Salter’s classroom filled with the sound of the show’s stately theme. On a screen at the front of the room a teenager in a suit was badgering the president’s communications director to rethink his position on teen suffrage. “I’m going to be drinking the water and breathing the air after you’re long gone, but I can’t vote to protect the environment,” the young man said.

Minutes later, the young advocate was challenging the president at a packed White House news conference.

Salter hit the pause button and the students in her classroom picked up the debate, unmoved by the earnestness of their fictional counterpart. Their memories of politics began with the bitter 2016 presidential election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton and included the U.S. Capitol riot two months after the November 2020 election.

To these students, American politics was an ego-driven, aimless mess. Adding younger, less-mature voices to the toxic mix would only produce more chaos and disappointment, they said.

After class, a few of the students congregated around Salter’s desk, continuing the argument until Salter realized that they were running late for their third-period classes. She shooed them on. Salter hadn’t changed any minds, not yet.

But she still had more than a month to go before the end of the term to convince her students that their participation in American democracy was worth it. She had no idea how hard a sell that would turn out to be.

Turning ideas into action

Salter teaches at a public high school called Building 21, housed in an old banking call center just beyond the edge of Allentown’s urban core.

The eastern Pennsylvania city, which once helped power America’s industrial revolution, had undergone a transformation in recent decades. Its factories had given way to sprawling e-commerce warehouses. Today, more than half of its 125,000 residents — many of whom came from New York City in search of cheaper housing — are Hispanic.

Salter arrived at the school in 2015, when it opened as an alternative to the city’s two big, underperforming high schools. Building 21 wasn’t much to look at. It didn’t have athletic fields or a gymnasium. On sunny days, gym class was a badminton net strung up in the school’s cracked asphalt parking lot. The classrooms were windowless.

To Salter, though, the school and her civics class sat squarely on the front line of a nationwide battle to save American democracy. Public school is one of the few American institutions where people from all sides of the country’s political, social and cultural divides still come together. In her view, it was the place where a new generation — the most diverse in the country’s history — could learn the skills needed to revive America’s creaking system of self-governance.

Salter played a role in shaping civics curriculums nationally through iCivics, an educational nonprofit organization founded by former Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’Connor, and the Educating for American Democracy initiative, a coalition of 300 historians, political scientists and education leaders. Her Allentown classroom was the place where she sought to put those groups’ lofty ideas about voting and democracy into practice.

One of the students she thought she could win over was Bryan Sticatto, the senior who had spent much of the pandemic living in an abandoned building.

Bryan was one of the stars of the school’s Ethics Bowl team, in which he debated issues such as the morality of mining precious metals or the use of semiautonomous robots in war. “I’d be shocked if Bryan doesn’t end up becoming a voter,” Salter said in late April.

She didn’t see the other forces — outside of her classroom and the school — that had played an even greater role in shaping Bryan’s views of the country and his place in it. One of the biggest was his experience during the pandemic, when he and his mother lived in a house that lacked heat and water.

There were other families living in the two-story building, Bryan said. So he and his mother fashioned privacy screens out of cardboard boxes. Today, when Bryan recalls that period of his life, he talks about the loud music that played late into the night, the drinking and the fights.

He remembers the bucket he used to take “bird baths,” the hours he spent alone watching YouTube videos on his phone and the two jobs his mother worked so that they could escape.

At the time, she was only earning $12 an hour, $3 less than he made last summer at a local amusem*nt park. “You can’t even afford a good meal at McDonald’s at that wage,” Bryan said. The experience left him believing that he shouldn’t dream too big or expect too much.

It was a lesson his mother reinforced over pizza one evening this spring after school. She had just finished her shift caring for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Her pay, thanks to a recent raise, was now $17 an hour, enough to afford a clean apartment in which Bryan has his own room. But the extra money still didn’t cover rent in a decent neighborhood, she said. A day earlier, the police had booted her car and she had borrowed $400 so that she could pay the parking fines she owed and make it to her job.

“The system just doesn’t work,” Bryan’s mother said. “It’s literally meant to keep us down.”

Bryan’s mother had last voted in 2012, when she cast a ballot for Barack Obama, but she had no interest in voting this year.

“I have no hope,” she said.

In school, Bryan listened as his civics teacher talked about how hard some Americans, particularly Black people, had fought to earn the right to vote and how they had used their new power to improve their lives. In an early May class assignment, Bryan argued in favor of extending voting rights to felons in states where they were currently denied.

“How can you put someone back into society and then tell them that they are not allowed to vote to change it — that their voice doesn’t even count?” he asked.

But when Bryan considered whether he would vote in November, the first election he’ll be eligible, the loudest voice in his head belonged to his mother. Neither Biden nor Trump seemed like candidates who understood or cared about his life, he said. Neither was likely to make it materially better.

“I don’t think my rent is going to get any cheaper. I don’t think jobs are going to get any better,” he said. “So, honestly, I don’t really care.”

A system worth saving?

Salter knew her experience of America and its democracy was starkly different from that of her students. She had spent her high school years in Singapore, a prosperous and clean city-state, where her father was an executive with a big, U.S.-based company. After college in the United States, she worked in marketing, married a computer programmer, and then returned to school to become a teacher, a job that would give her time at home with her two children.

Now, her children were grown. Her marriage had ended a decade earlier in divorce. Home was a townhouse in a newish suburb, carved from farmland, about an hour south of Allentown.

Most mornings, she passed time on the drive to work listening to left-leaning podcasts. The view through her windshield spoke to the anger and disillusionment in the country: An “Arrest Trump” flag was followed a few hundred yards later by a “Make America Great Again” banner. A “Taylor Swift 2024” flag stirred in the wind across the street from a yellow sign that warned: “Today’s Illegals Are Tomorrow’s Democrats.”

Salter said she tried to bring an “optimistic patriotism” to class. She had seen American democracy work for people with “privilege” like her, she said. She wanted to teach her students the rules that would give them access to that same system.

One of her most meaningful moments as a teacher came the day after Trump won the presidency in 2016. Salter arrived at Building 21 and found two dozen students lined up outside her classroom desperate to talk about what had just happened. Most were old enough to remember Obama’s groundbreaking victory in 2008, which seemed, in the moment, to symbolize America’s overcoming the stain of slavery and racism. They had been expecting to wake up to another historic moment — the country’s first female president.

Many students felt betrayed by their country and fellow citizens. Several were the children of immigrants — some of whom were undocumented. They worried that their parents were going to be deported by the incoming president’s administration.

Salter reassured them, saying that nothing would happen imminently and that there were laws and processes that would protect them and their families. The anger and shock they and millions of other Americans felt fueled a surge in activism that dominated Trump’s term — the Women’s March, the March for Our Lives protests of gun violence, the Black Lives Matter protests.

In 2024, Salter’s students saw American democracy through a different prism. They were fifth-graders in 2016 when Trump defeated Clinton, and freshmen when rioters, inflamed by Trump’s disproved allegations of election fraud in his loss to Biden, stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Now, Trump and Biden were headed for a rematch, with both insisting that the foundations of the republic could be irreparably harmed should the other guy win.

Salter was determined to convince her students that as damaged as American democracy might be, it was still a system worth saving.

Two years earlier, she had persuaded the Lehigh County elections office to hire high school students as Election Day poll workers. The county had an urgent need for Spanish speakers that her students could help fill.

Building 21’s students could benefit, as well. Salter knew that many of their parents didn’t vote because they weren’t citizens or because they had lost faith in politics. She hoped that working the polls would make her students feel more invested in the country’s elections. She also believed it would help them see through Trump’s repeatedly disproved allegations of voter fraud.

This year, one of Salter’s student poll workers was Vanessa-Lusianne Belony.

“How did yesterday go? What did you notice?” Salter asked her the day after Pennsylvania’s April 23 primary.

“There were a lot of White people,” Vanessa replied.

She told Salter that she could probably count the number of Black voters she saw “on both of her hands.” There were even fewer Hispanic and Asian voters, she said. Most of the 250 people who came through her polling place — located in an old banquet hall — were in their 50s or older.

Vanessa, 17, lived with her parents, grandparents and four siblings in a modest two-story house a short distance from downtown. Her mother and father — a nurse and long-haul truck driver — emigrated from Haiti more than two decades earlier and spoke often of moving back home.

Vanessa, who grew up speaking Creole and English, was born in the United States. But lately, she said she felt more Haitian than American, and she was filled with doubts about the country where she lived.

One of her earliest childhood memories was of the police stopping her father as he was leaving a store in Allentown. “I remember being terrified. I was so confused,” she recalled. Vanessa said it seemed as if the police officer was using his power to intimidate her father “for no reason.”

The experience continued to resonate in the years that followed as she watched demonstrators flood Allentown — and dozens of other American cities — to protest the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer.

Salter asked if she thought she could work to help fix the problem of American policing through voting or activism. “It’s been like this forever, like, since the country’s founding,” Vanessa replied. “If it hasn’t changed now, I doubt [it] … It feels like a systemic thing.”

The relatively small number of Black people who had turned out to vote in the primary had surprised and disappointed Vanessa. But it also didn’t fuel a determination to vote when she turns 18 or drive a desire for greater civic engagement. Instead, she said it left her feeling alienated.

“I don’t think I’ll ever feel that I belong in this country,” Vanessa told Salter before heading off to her next class.

Empty desks, distracted students

The toughest students for Salter to reach were the ones who weren’t there because they rarely made it to her 9 a.m. class. She was supposed to have 12 students, but most days only six or seven showed up.

During the 2022-2023 school year only 54 percent of Building 21’s students were classified as “regular attendees,” down from about 80 percent before the coronavirus pandemic, said Jose Rosado Jr., the school’s principal. This year, the number rebounded, with about 74 percent of the students attending regularly.

But students still struggled to make it to morning classes. Several of Salter’s students worked after-school jobs that kept them out until 10 p.m. or later. One student worked on the cleanup crew at the PPL Center, Allentown’s downtown arena, and didn’t get off some nights until 4 a.m. He told Salter that he had been working since he was 12 and landed a job washing dishes on the weekend at a cafeteria-style restaurant near Allentown’s mall. “I lied about my age,” he said. “I don’t know why they believed me.”

Other students had simply fallen out of the habit of making it to school on time. Instead of demanding they come to class, Salter worked with them during their free periods or after school. “I’ve only got one shot to convince a 17-year-old of the benefits of our democracy,” she said. “I’d rather they learn social studies than die on the hill of insisting that they show up in my room on time.”

In early May, Salter’s class studied the factors that tended to drive or suppress participation in presidential elections. The students discussed why turnout dropped precipitously in 1820, when James Monroe effectively ran unopposed for the White House, and why it spiked to about 80 percent in 1860, when Abraham Lincoln was elected amid rancorous division over the future of slavery in America.

Bryan often spent class reading Japanese manga novels on his phone or playing chess on his school-issued laptop. Some days he rested his head on his desk. Vanessa paid attention but rarely participated in class. The other students didn’t appear any more excited or engaged by the material.

Salter blamed some of the students’ apathy on this election’s uninspiring choices. Her students knew Biden from memes and short videos showing him slipping on the stairs of Air Force One or appearing to walk into a bush. They saw Trump as loud, profane and largely focused on helping the rich.

Salter envisioned her classes building to an exercise that she hoped would drive home the importance of voting no matter the candidates’ appeal. She had worked with a geospatial data analyst at Lehigh University to map 2016 voter turnout in more than 50 Allentown voting districts. The plan was to have students compare their district’s turnout with wealthier, Whiter and better-maintained parts of the city.

In early May, Salter was helping a couple of seniors who rarely made it to school before 10 a.m. — Yeimy Lorenzo and Jinessa Gonzalez — catch up on their work. She decided to try the assignment out on them before she unveiled it to the full class. The two seniors noticed that voter turnout in Allentown’s wealthier west side, which has big green parks and wide, tree-lined streets, typically averaged nearly 80 percent.

Jinessa then zeroed in on her voting district, a couple of miles north of Building 21, where turnout in 2016 was less than 40 percent and the roads were full of potholes.

“This is why our sh*t is so sh*tty!” Jinessa exclaimed.

“Tell me more,” Salter replied.

“When you vote, that’s when [the politicians] look at you more and stuff,” Jinessa said. “And look at us. We aren’t voting.”

Salter was delighted that her students had made the connection. “I want you to bring all of these awesome ideas to class tomorrow,” she told them.

The next morning, a rainy Friday, only four students showed up for class; neither Yeimy nor Jinessa was among them. The students were restless and distracted. Salter directed their attention to the high voter-turnout rates in Allentown’s wealthier and Whiter western districts.

“What do you know about the west side?” she asked, brightly.

“I didn’t even know there was a west side to Allentown,” one senior replied.

“I don’t go outside, man,” Bryan added, dully.

“It’s nicer,” Vanessa finally volunteered.

The class proceeded fitfully. “What’s going on?” she snapped at Bryan. “Why can’t you keep your head off your desk?”

Then class ended. There were two weeks until the end of the term. A frustrated Salter told the students that they would try to wrap up the lesson on Monday. The same exercise had succeeded in previous years with other Building 21 students, she said. But, clearly, something had changed.

“What’s not working here?” she asked herself. “What’s messed with my students?”

A new approach

The following Monday, after the students had settled into their desks, Salter asked them to put away their phones and laptops.

“Something happened in my life over the weekend, and it immediately made me think of you all,” she told them. She pulled up a picture from a few years earlier of her sitting in a restaurant in Washington with two white-haired men.

“The two older gentlemen I’m sitting with are my two high school social studies teachers,” Salter said. “In fact, I would describe them as the two voices that kind of sit on my shoulders, whisper in my ear and tell me, ‘Do better for your students.’”

She told them that Bob Dodge, who was seated to her right in the photo, had died of a brain tumor over the weekend.

“Whoa,” one of the students replied. For the first time all semester, everyone’s eyes were fixed on Salter.

Dodge had taught her that if she wanted her students to fall in love with history, then she needed to “be a storyteller,” she said. This was the mistake she had been making. “I realized that I hadn’t been doing enough storytelling with you,” she told her students.

So, she began to tell them a story that she hoped might finally persuade them to become voters. It started with a 1963 photo of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and President Lyndon B. Johnson sitting together in the White House. Johnson wanted to move forward with his War on Poverty, but King insisted that the push for voting rights in the South should take priority.

Salter then skipped to 1965 and photos of Alabama state troopers attacking civil rights marchers as they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge on their way from Selma to Montgomery — a day that became known as Bloody Sunday. “Look at the pictures carefully,” she said. “Are these protesters being treated humanely and decently by the police?”

“There’s Black people on the floor!” one student exclaimed.

Salter focused in on Amelia Boynton, a foot soldier in the civil rights movement, whom the troopers were beating unconscious. Just five months later, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, which cleared away many of the barriers that blocked Black people from voting in the South. Salter knew that most of the students in her class were more worried about their economic well-being than voting. So she ended her story with a chart that showed how the passage of the Voting Rights Act had helped open thousands of good-paying state and local government jobs to people of color.

Jalius DeJesus, 17, sat cross-legged on top of his desk. He and Salter had grown close over the semester; sometimes, Jalius would drop by her office just to chat.

After graduation, he was thinking of going to trade school to learn how to be a plumber or an electrician. As for voting, he wasn’t interested. Politicians, he said, seemed more focused on their personal well-being and their party than the good of the country.

Now Jalius, who had been moved by Boynton’s bravery and sacrifices at Selma, had a question for Salter. “What argument do you have if I feel guilty for voting for somebody who I thought was going to do good but didn’t?” he asked. “I’d rather just not vote.”

“Sometimes, you’re going to kick yourself,” Salter replied. But it was still worth trying. Jalius hadn’t committed to voting in November, but at least he seemed to be considering it. The students drifted off to their next classes. For weeks, they had seemed distracted and disengaged. Salter felt that she had finally found a way to grab their attention.

Time for a choice

For their final assignment, Salter asked her students to present a proposal to increase voter turnout and an answer to the most important question of all: Were they going to vote?

Bryan, soaking wet from a heavy storm that hit as he was walking to school, focused on the need for more voter education in middle and high school. Some students learned about politics and the importance of voting from their parents, he said. Bryan said he didn’t have that opportunity. He and his mother were too busy trying to survive.

The other students listened quietly or fretted over their presentations. Bryan began to walk back to his desk. “So, what are you going to do?” Salter asked. “What are the chances that you show up on Election Day?”

He was going to register but didn’t plan to vote, he said. He was waiting for a candidate who deserved his support.

Vanessa suggested that a better, more diverse set of candidates might boost turnout. When she thought about voting, her mind went to a bridge that she passed over on her way home from school. Beneath it was a stream, a grassy bank and a homeless encampment. “We need to fix homelessness. We need to fix poverty. Inflation is crazy. Gas prices are crazy,” she said. “I think that’s part of the reason why people don’t vote.”

She thought of Boynton and the marchers beaten at Selma. “We, as Black people, fought so hard for this chance to vote. … We came from such inspiring and amazing people, and it feels like we’re here stuck in the dirt, not able to find a way out of it,” she said. “How would voting even begin to change that?”

In the fall, Vanessa plans to attend Temple University’s campus in Tokyo. She isn’t going to be old enough to vote, but even if she were, she didn’t think she would participate. “I feel like it’d be a matter of which choice isn’t as bad as the other,” she told the class.

Jalius proposed getting rid of the two-party system, which he said fed politicians’ “egotistical tendencies” and inhibited cooperation. More humility and compromise, he argued, would lead to more progress and higher voter turnout.

But like Bryan and Vanessa, he didn’t plan to vote. “I don’t consider myself well-versed enough,” he said.

In all, nine of Salter’s 12 students completed their final presentations. Only four said they planned to vote in November’s election. None seemed particularly enthusiastic.

Salter was disappointed by the final tally. She had underestimated the damage the pandemic had wrought on her students’ learning and social development, she said. She hadn’t fully grasped the ways in which the last decade’s angry and divisive politics had filled them with a deep mistrust of government and the collective wisdom of their fellow citizens.

But she didn’t feel that she had failed. All of her students had described voting as important. They hadn’t entirely quit on the idea of democracy — even if many of them were choosing not to take part. Eventually, she told herself, some issue would energize them, or some politician would inspire them. They would find a reason to have their say.