Today, the U.S. Department of Education joins the National Task Force on Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement, the American Commonwealth Partnership, and the Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools in a new national call to action to infuse and enhance civic learning and democratic engagement for all students throughout the American education system. The Department is broadly supportive of the five priorities for action that these groups have developed. In abbreviated form, those priorities are: (1) Advancing civic learning and democratic engagement in both the U.S. and global contexts by encouraging efforts to make them core expectations for elementary, secondary, and postsecondary students--including undergraduate and graduate students; (2) Developing more robust evidence of civic and other student achievement outcomes of civic learning, and of the impact of school- and campus-community partnerships; (3) Strengthening school- and campus-community connections to address significant community problems and advance a local or regional vision and narrative for civic engagement; (4) Expanding research and the range of public scholarship, with a special emphasis on promoting knowledge creation for the good of society; and (5) Deepening civic identity by sharing stories of civic work in social media and organizing deliberative discussions about the roles of higher education in communities across the country, and by creating initiatives in science, arts, and other fields to catalyze civic agency. In this report, the Department outlines directions for advancing civic learning and democratic engagement from grade school to graduate school, with special attention to the federal role and civic learning in higher education. It concludes by proposing nine steps that the Department can take to help expand and elevate civic learning. A bibliography is included. (Contains 3 footnotes.)