What’s wrong with a proposed civics quiz for Kansas students? It’s a test for America
America is at war with ignorance and apathy — about America itself. Steve Huebert is a lonely warrior in that fight.
The state representative from Valley Center last year, and now this legislative session, has been a lone voice pushing Kansas to mandate a civics test for graduation from high school. And oddly, he’s doing it against the mighty headwinds of the state’s educational coterie — the Kansas State Department of Education, Kansas Association of School Boards and Kansas National Education Association — which are all foursquare opposed to it. They say this is none of the Legislature’s business.
“That’s what I’m fighting,” says Huebert, a former school board member and House Education Committee chair. “I’m trying to tear down the walls between the state board and the Legislature.”
It’s not like high school seniors would suddenly hit a supposedly immense barrier of knowing the basics of American self-government on the last day of school: Huebert’s bill, HB 2039,would let students take the test, over and over if need be, from grade seven on. Good grief. Is that asking too much of a citizen?
“I didn’t expect this much resistance. The opposition, in my mind, is misguided,” Huebert says.
Agreed.
First, the righteousness and urgency of his cause:
Since this nation, unlike most, is bound not by ethnicity but by ideas and ideals, it’s sort of important for the future of the country what those ideas and ideals are — and whether they’re being passed down to succeeding generations.
Spoiler alert: They’re not being passed down. They’re just not.
Studies show only 1 in 4 Americans can name the three branches of government. Just 1 in 3 can pass the easy citizenship test for immigrants, and a mere 24% of high schoolers score proficient on the National Assessment of Educational Progress civics test.
Social studies teachers aren’t worried?
“Our students are performing at an incredibly low level,” says Louise Dubé, executive director of iCivics, a national nonprofit formed by former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor to inspire our frighteningly uninspired civic education.
“Students just don’t know very much about America, about American history, about American institutions,” says Frederick M. Hess, director of Education Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
And get this: A Rand Corporation survey seems to suggest a lot of social studies teachers are OK with that.
“Just 32%,” Hess wrote of the Rand survey of social studies teachers last August, “think it’s essential for their graduates to ‘know facts (e.g., the location of the 50 states) and dates (e.g., Pearl Harbor).’ Knowledge about ‘periods such as the American Founding, the Civil War and the Cold War’ fared little better, with 43% of teachers viewing such knowledge as essential.”
And, Rand says, just 1 in 5 social studies teachers feel very well prepared to even teach American civics.
Worried? You should be. If you’re building a beach house and don’t know where the foundation is, you’re likely building on the shifting sand. Can you say “collapse”?
As important as all this is and as poorly as we’re doing in civic education, Hess says, “At a minimum I think we want to know how much civic knowledge our kids have.”
Should a civics test be required? Rep. Huebert thinks so anyway, and so do I, as well as some 17 other states.
“The policy solution that has garnered the most momentum to improve civics in recent years is a standard that requires high school students to pass the U.S. citizenship exam before graduation,” writes the Center for American Progress.
For his part, Hess is non-committal, but says when a test is required for graduation, “Schools make some effort to teach those things more thoroughly.”
‘Decades of disinvestment in civic education’
iCivics is neutral on requiring tests. But director Dubé and a vast coalition of civics education reformers known as CivXNow say the citizenship test is too narrow to indicate much. CivXNow is expected to release a landmark road map for modern civic education in March.
“We have had decades of disinvestment in civic education,” Dubé says. “Really, we just don’t have the kind of commitment to civic education and history that we deserve. What we have is really not a good situation at all in our country.” Is it a crisis? “Absolutely, it is,” she says.
Indeed, as the Brookings Institution put it last year, our knowledge of and participation in civics “is essential to sustaining our democratic form of government. Without it, a government of the people, by the people, and for the people will not last.”
One huge problem, as I see it: We’ve replaced an admittedly romanticized version of American history with one that may emphasize our admitted shortcomings to the exclusion of American exceptionalism. It doesn’t have to be either/or.
“You can tell that patriotic story while being entirely honest about all of our nation’s struggles and failings and the way we need to do better,” says Hess.
Noting academia’s recent emphasis on teaching the STEM subjects of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics — and the more recent addition of the arts, to make it a “STEAM” curriculum — Hess jokes that we just need to turn civics into a vowel and “wedge it in there.”
No joke. The country’s future may be at stake.
Talk about a test.
