More Americans can name the Three Stooges than the three branches of government. Only 38 percent of U.S. citizens can pass the naturalization test.
And now, with this week’s release of the 2010 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) U.S. History Report Card, we have still more statistics detailing Americans’ appalling civic ignorance. According to the exam results, just 9 percent of fourth-graders can identify Abraham Lincoln while only 2 percent of 12th graders can name the “social problem” Brown v. Board of Education was meant to address.
Given such dismal numbers, it’s not surprising that Americans are deeply pessimistic about schools’ efforts to teach citizenship. In a new report “Contested Curriculum: How Teachers and Citizens View Civics Education,” the AEI Program on American Citizenship asked 1,000 Americans what priorities schools should have around teaching citizenship and how confident they were that students were learning. We then compared the results to an earlier survey of high school teachers, “High Schools, Civics, and Citizenship: What Social Studies Teachers Think and Do.”
What did we find? Not only are Americans not at all confident that students are learning, they have markedly different priorities from teachers for civic education. While teachers were more apt to prioritize the social lessons of tolerance and community service, the public wants schools to focus on teaching facts and instilling good work habits.
Second, there’s a big disconnect between the items the public thinks are important for civic education and how confident they are that high schoolers know them—a pattern we term “incongruence.” For example, while while two-thirds of citizens think it is absolutely essential that students understand concepts like federalism and separation of powers, only 22 percent are confident high school graduates have learned to do so.
The opposite also holds true: the four issues the public deems least important for schools to teach—community service, tolerance, activism, and global citizenship—are the same four they feel most confident students are actually learning.
Finally, we examined the data across partisan lines and found Republicans were more likely than Democrats to view teaching facts and understanding American government as top priorities, while Democrats were about three times more likely than Republicans to view internalizing core values (such as tolerance and equality) as a top priority.
These divisions—between teachers and the general public, and Republicans and Democrats—suggest that attempts to reemphasize or reform civic education may trigger traditional fault lines in American politics.
Nonetheless, there is room for common ground. Americans are largely in agreement that students should be able to identify the protections in the Bill of Rights, understand basic concepts like the separation of powers, and have good work habits. In other words, we conclude, “schools should teach students a base of knowledge about American government and prepare them to be productive citizens. Perhaps these are the areas where the reform of citizenship education should begin.”