Aside from generalized fretting over “curricular narrowing,” educators and education policy types have been so consumed in recent years by the crises of the moment—the fracases over Common Core, the new assessments (and their opt-outers), the worrying achievement reports that may follow in the autumn, and how all that does or doesn’t intersect with NCLB reauthorization—that practically nobody has focused on “social studies” courses like history, geography, and civics. (Yes, there have been pot-shots aplenty at the AP framework for U.S. history, but little or no attention to what’s happening in earlier grades.)
Today’s hot-off-the-presses NAEP results should refocus us, at least briefly, because they’re anything but hot. In truth, they’re chilling.
NAEP tested eighth graders in all three subjects last year, and the reports are just out. The bottom line: “In 2014, eighteen percent of eighth graders performed at or above the Proficient level in U.S. history, 27 percent performed at or above the Proficient level in geography, and 23 percent performed at or above the Proficient level in civics.”
Which is to say that three quarters of the kids are less than proficient, a worse showing than in reading and math (both now around 36 percent proficient among eighth graders). And they’re not getting better, even while there’s been modest improvement in both subjects at the center of standards-based reform. And, as always, the news gets more complicated—but not much better—when the student population is disaggregated. Although individual racial subsets do show gains (masked in the overall scores by the phenomenon known as “Simpson’s Paradox”), it remains the stark fact that “proficient” black and Latino youngsters numbered only in the single digits in 2014.
Overall, these data mean that the overwhelming majority of American fourteen-year-olds cannot correctly answer questions like this one:
Which of the following is a belief shared by most people of the United States?
A. The country should have a single political party.
B. The country should have an official religion.
C. The government should be a democracy.
D. The government should guarantee everybody a job.
Particularly as another election season heats up, it’s not crazy to ask whether we Americans truly know enough to govern ourselves wisely.
If that thought is too cosmic or depressing, you can instead reflect on the challenge awaiting our high schools (and colleges) as these kids walk through their doors. But since nobody is paying any attention to history, geography,y or civics, it’s hard to imagine those institutions successfully rising to that challenge.
Thanks, NAEP, for another freezing shower.
