The Committee developed and implemented professional development programs with nationwide participants supported by the Danforth Foundation, Ford Foundation, and the U.S. Department of Education under the National Defense Education Act and the Education Professions Development Act.

The Committee developed and implemented curricular programs in civics and government entitled, Your Rights and Responsibilities as an American Citizen; Conflict, Politics and Freedom; and Voices for Justice.

The Center became affiliated with the State Bar of California.

The Center became a program of the State Bar of California.

With funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Center produced the first editions of the Law in a Free Society/Foundations of Democracy multi-media curriculum materials.

With funding from the U.S. Department of Justice, the Center began the Youth for Justice program in conjunction with the Constitutional Rights Foundation, Street Law, the American Bar Association, and Phi Alpha Delta. The Center promoted the implementation of its Foundations of Democracy program through this funding.

The Center published the We the People texts at the elementary and middle school levels.

The Center began The Disney Channel Salutes the American Teacher and The Walt Disney Company Presents the American Teacher Awards.

The We the People program continued as a direct line item in the budget of the U.S. Department of Education and became an authorized program of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act for twenty-three years.

The Center published the National Standards for Civics and Government, developed in conjunction with more than two thousand scholars, educators, and members of the general public. The National Standards have been widely used as a model for state curricular frameworks and standards throughout the country and in a number of other nations describing what students should know and be able to do in the field of civics and government at the end of grades 4, 8, and 12.

Congress passed the Goals 2000: Educate America Act (P.L. 103-227). Two of the eight national goals the law established deal specifically with civic education: Goal 3: Student Achievement and Citizenship, and Goal 6: Adult Literacy and Lifelong Learning. The Center led the effort to establish “civics and government” as a core discipline in our national dialogue on improving student performance.

The Center, in cooperation with the United States Information Agency, sent teams of teachers into Bosnia and Herzegovina shortly after the war ended to institute an education for democracy program entitled Civitas@Bosnia-Herzegovina.

The Civitas program becomes an authorized federal program in the ESEA providing a basis to help emerging democracies through Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, and the Middle East to establish civic education programs in their schools. The program led to the Center’s curriculum being translated and adapted in more than 80 countries.

The Center started the Campaign to Promote Civic Education, a fifty-state effort to encourage states and school districts to devote systematic attention to civic education from kindergarten through twelfth grade.

The Civics Framework for the 1998 National Assessment of Educational Progress (sometimes called the “The Nation’s Report Card”) was developed by Center staff and was based  upon the Center’s National Standards for Civics and Government.

The Center started the nationwide School Violence Prevention Demonstration Program, which became an authorized program in the ESEA with dedicated funding. The program was designed to improve students’ civic knowledge and attitudes as they relate to tolerance for the ideas of others; civic responsibility; authority and the law; and social and political institutions.

With the assistance of scholars and educators from around the world, the Center published Res Publica: An International Framework for Education in Democracy. The document is an expression of a cross-cultural consensus on the central meanings and character of the ideas, values, principles, and institutions of democracy.

The Center launched Representative Democracy in America, a federally funded program implemented in cooperation with the National Conference of State Legislatures and the Center on Congress at Indiana University. It was a national project that educated Americans through videos, e-learning modules, and other innovative instructional materials on the critical relationship between government and the people it serves.

The Center conducted four Congressional Conferences on Civic Education in conjunction with the National Conference of State Legislatures, the Center on Congress at Indiana University, and delegations from every state in the country as part of the Representative Democracy in America program. The Joint Leadership of the U.S. Congress served as honorary hosts for these unprecedented events.

The Center published Elements of Democracy, a resource for high school, college-level, and adult audiences that consists of the range of ideas that make up the vocabulary of democracy.

With funding by the Arsalyn Foundation, the Center developed Citizens, Not Spectators, a program to increase the voting rate among young Americans by providing engaging voter education.

The Center published electronic versions of all of its curricular publications.

The Center published the Enhanced Ebook edition of We the People: The Citizen & the Constitution for middle school students.

The Center published the fourth edition of We the People: The Citizen & the Constitution.

With funding from the U.S. Department of Education’s Supporting Effective Educator Development program, the Center began the James Madison Legacy Project, a major teacher professional development initiative in conjunction with civic educators in forty-seven states.

The Center and its national network of We the People coordinators influenced significant improvements in the “Every Student Succeeds Act” that was signed into law on December 10, 2015, including language that allows the Secretary of Education to award grants for “programs that educate students about the history and principles of the Constitution of the United States, including the Bill of Rights.”

The Center for Civic Education received a three-year grant from the U.S. Department of Education for the Project Citizen Research Program. The grant will engage teachers from across the country in professional development and will measure the effects of the professional development on them and on their students. Each year, new groups of teachers will learn how to use the Project Citizen curriculum in their classes from scholars and master teachers. Students will conduct civic action projects and learn about public policy in the process.

In the James Madison Legacy Project Expansion Program grant from the U.S. Department of Education, twenty-eight middle and high school teachers from across the country developed new instructional support materials in the We the People: The Citizen and the Constitution curriculum that aim to foster positive civics and social-emotional learning outcomes among English learners, students with disabilities, and students of color.

The 2022 Project Citizen Research Program National Showcase featured students from five U.S. regions that tackled topics important to their schools and communities, such as preserving the local tree canopy, decorating graduation caps, needing a school holiday for Eid-al-Fitr, supporting teen mental health, and enacting prison reform. Each region in the PCRP submitted three class portfolios to the national showcase that provided concrete solutions for resolving their communities' issues.