Recent scholarship on civic education has introduced some useful ways to engage students in learning about controversial topics, debating them, and participating in democratic life. However, while those are valuable tools for active citizenship, they're not sufficient. Democratic education should focus on issues that matter intensely to students' local communities, the author argues, and it should be grounded in the core skills of the academic disciplines. To illustrate, he describes a social studies unit he taught at an urban high school in Oakland, Califronia, focusing on a pair of competing narratives about the crack epidemic of the 1990s, with attention to the ways in which public perceptions depend on the source of the given argument and the context from which it originates.