Chester Finn, president emeritus of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and frequent visitor; education next The contributor enjoys telling stories from his time as a senior official at the U.S. Department of Education under Secretary of Education William Bennett. In 1987, after telling a Chicago reporter that the city's schools were the worst in the country, Bennett called Finn into his office and asked him if he was right. “Well, Chicago has some competition from Newark, St. Louis and Detroit.” Finn answered. “But you’re not wrong.” With much less participation at the state and local levels in the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and long before the introduction of widespread statewide testing, Bennett's claims appear to have survived contemporary fact-checking efforts.
I often reflected on that conversation while working for Senator Lamar Alexander, then a member of the Senate Education Committee. In his speeches, Alexander had a habit of referring to American history and citizens as “our worst subjects.”
“Is that right?” he would sometimes ask when preparing to speak. Well, I couldn't say it was wrong.
According to NAEP, in 2022, only 14% of eighth graders nationwide scored proficient in U.S. history, while only 22% reached that standard in civics. Both are significantly lower than the 27% and 31% who scored proficient in math and reading, respectively. You may wonder whether the National Assessment Governing Board has set too high expectations for American history and civics, but a look at the item-by-item results provides good reason for concern. For example, only one in three students can accurately link the three branches of government to their respective core functions. This means that 1 in 6 people can do this correctly if they answer at random. Whether this is our worst topic or not, we definitely have a problem.
In this issue, Yale law professor Justin Driver proposes a new method for civic education, which he calls “student-centered civic education” (see “Building Better Citizens Starts in the Classroom”). characteristic). This approach “brings to the forefront key Supreme Court decisions that have shaped the daily lives of students across the country: rulings on student speech, corporal punishment, religious expression, and more.” He argues that adopting it would construct students as “active participants in shaping the constitutional order” while also providing a starting point for exploring “the more abstract concepts that underpin civic knowledge.”
The driver's suggestions may not interest all readers. Some may believe there is too much focus on judicially defined rights at the expense of the responsibilities inherent in citizenship. Others may feel that the emphasis on student activism resonates too much with so-called “action citizenship,” which often downplays the importance of basic knowledge about how government works.
“I welcome this discrepancy,” the driver said. . . Because its existence would indicate that civic education is being actively discussed in places where such debates still remain rare.” I would too. And he hopes his work will spark a lot of conversation.
But improving civic education requires more than curriculum reform. We also need more and better data on the results generated by competing approaches.
Since Secretary Bennett commented on Chicago's national standing, the ability to compare student math and reading achievement across states and districts has changed. The NAEP program provides a new set of results to all 50 states and 26 urban school districts every two years. Monitoring systems, although imperfect, provide a broad measure of students' success (or lack thereof) in developing literacy and numeracy skills. .
In contrast, in U.S. history and civics, NAEP provides a single national data point approximately every four years. The program will allow states to test enough civil society students to produce state-level results in 2030, but recent history suggests fewer than a dozen will take up the opportunity. Requiring them all to do so would lead to congressional action.
The first recorded use of the phrase “our worst subject” by Senator Alexander was in the title of a 2005 subcommittee hearing on a bill requiring states to separately participate in the NAEP U.S. History and Civics tests. Now, nearly 20 years later, we have little reason to believe he was wrong. Now would be an appropriate time for Congress to provide another perspective on citizen evaluations.