Business leaders have complained for years that public schools aren’t turning out graduates ready to take part in a skilled work force. Now, a new test suggests America’s schools aren’t turning out adults ready to take part in its democracy. Producing good citizens, after all, was the major point of requiring universal education in the first place. Yet the 1998 results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress in civics showed major gaps in American students’ knowledge of how the U.S. government works and even how it came to be.

Is there something wrong with civics education in America?

Yes, says Margaret Branson, associate director of the Calabasas, Calif.-based Center for Civic Education, if you consider that last year’s 12th-graders will be next year’s voters and jurors.
"Any time you discover that 35% of students getting ready to graduate from high school fall below a basic level of knowledge - that ought to be very disturbing. The research we’ve done shows us that very little attention is being given to the teaching of government and civics. And you can’t expect students to learn what isn’t being taught."

The NAEP test showed that 35% of America’s high school seniors didn’t even have an understanding of civics that experts consider "basic." Another 39% only scored at the basic level.
Just 22% of seniors had a "proficient" understanding of how the American government works. And one in 25 scored at the "advanced" level.

Results for the other grades tested - 4th and 8th - mirrored those of the high-school seniors, with less than one in four students scoring at or above the level deemed "proficient."
And a closer look at high-school seniors’ responses to individual questions often suggests they do not know why American government is set up the way it is. For example, just one in four seniors could come up with two ways the U.S. system of government prevents the exercise of "absolute arbitrary power" on the part of the government. Among the 14 possible answers were such basics as the Bill of Rights, an independent judiciary, civilian control of the military - and the right to vote.

On a multiple-choice question asking the purpose of the Bill of Rights, one-third of high school seniors did not know that it was written to limit the power of the federal government.
Not one in 10 seniors could identify two ways that a democracy benefits from the active participation of its citizens. Just over a third knew that the Supreme Court pointed to the Constitution’s 14th Amendment when it began to overturn segregation laws.

That shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. Other surveys, both formal and informal, suggest that America’s future voters and jurors simply do not know much about the country’s founding.

In a 1998 poll conducted by the National Constitution Center, not one in 50 American teenagers could identify James Madison as the father of the U.S. Constitution. Not even half could name the three branches of the federal government. And not one in ten could name the landmark Supreme Court case (Brown vs. Board of Education) that ended segregation in the public schools. And in an informal survey of Bay area teenagers, San Francisco Examiner reporter Emily Gurnon found that less than half of the 4 dozen teens she quizzed could name the country from which the U.S. won its independence.

Gurnon asked what July 4th celebrated. One high-school graduate told her, "It’s like the freedom. Some war was fought and we won, so we got our freedom." From which country? That graduate didn’t know.

Another high school graduate also knew that July 4th celebrated America’s independence. From which country? "I want to say Korea," he told Gurnon. How long ago did it take place? "Like 50 years," he guessed.

Teenagers do know some things, says Richard Niemi, Watson professor of political science at the University of Rochester, and the co-author of "Civic Education." That book analyzed the results of the 1988 NAEP civics test, although the questions in that test and the present one were too different to afford a close comparison. "I won’t say American students are woefully lacking, although you’d always like them to know more," Niemi said. "They do know a great deal about their rights as citizens. Areas where they know less are how politics, political parties and interest groups actually work."

"One of the things that concerns me is that lack of knowledge of the political process can lead to cynicism about it. Part of what citizens are supposed to do is to watch over the government, to be constantly on guard," Niemi said insisting that cynical citizens tune out politics. An example? If Congress doesn’t pass a law as soon as a problem comes to light, lack of quick action often gets blamed on partisan politics, legislative gridlock or a do-nothing Congress. But that’s the way the system works - slow and deliberate, with as little emotion as possible. And many students, indeed parents, don’t understand that, Niemi says.

"A concern with efficiency and getting things done as quickly as possible is to some extent misplaced," he said. "The system is designed to take account of the fact that there are considerable differences of opinion on what should be done."

Niemi points out that deciding what level of knowledge makes a good citizen isn’t easy. In subjects like science, it’s not hard to figure out what facts and skills are needed to make a good scientist, he says. "In learning civics, the goal is participating in American democracy, and there isn’t any test you can apply before you can participate."

Margaret Branson, the previously alluded to associate director of the Calabasas, Calif.-based Center for Civic Education, pointed out that: "Our students have great knowledge of their rights, but very minimal knowledge of their responsibilities." Watch any judge trying to get just 12 citizens to serve on a jury, and you’ll see what she means.

"Some of it is the aftermath of the tumultuous period of the 1960s and 1970s," Branson argues. "As a people, we have tended to be hyperconscious of our rights and to minimize our responsibilities... and those attitudes have tricled down into our schools."

To remedy the lack of civics knowledge, the Center for Civic Education has called for national standards. Many oppose that idea simply because they view education as the concern of state and local governments. Just this year, a Nevada bill that would have required students to study such basic documents as the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Federalist Papers, the Gettysburg Address and the Emancipation Proclamation was quashed. State education officials didn’t want the state legislature interfering with what was taught at the local level, says state Sen. Mark James. "If you lose understanding of the core principles of our government, it will be hard to protect them," James said. "It was clear to me that kids weren’t getting enough of this in the schools. It was getting lost in the mix."

Adopting standards can be tough for other reasons - namely, the culture wars that surround just about every other aspect of school curricula.
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Who is deciding what is important to the children in your District? If not YOU, then who? Is it the graduates of the nationally recognized as intellectually inferior educational programs of teaching colleges? Is it the politcal hacks of your state that sell their legislative votes to political correctness and revisionist history? If so, then do something about it!!!!

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