Why civics test scores are falling in American schools

Twenty years ago, one of the most popular bits on late-night television was “Jaywalking,” where Tonight Show host Jay Leno quizzed passersby on world events, geography, history and more. He would ask random people on the street about literature, who the vice president was, or who we fought in World War Two.

The clips that made the cut inevitably involved embarrassingly ignorant answers. Today, America is a nation of Jaywalking Allstars; whereas it was once a punchline for someone to be that ignorant, ignorance is now the norm.

In early May, news emerged about record low scores for history and civics for eighth grade students nationwide. More and more students were falling short of the basic standards set out on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). The New York Times reported that “about 40 percent of eighth graders scored ‘below basic’ in US history last year, compared with 34 percent in 2018 and 29 percent in 2014.” And just 13 percent of eighth graders were considered “proficient,” compared to 18 percent nearly a decade ago.

The scores match record lows in science, math and reading. The Times explained that “in history, it’s possible that reduced reading comprehension played some role in student performance.” So perhaps students can’t express a basic grasp of history because they can’t read. Reassuring, isn’t it?

The Biden administration’s education secretary Miguel A. Cardona zeroed in on the real culprit for the failures: Republicans, of course. Cardona explained that “banning history books and censoring educators from teaching these important subjects does our students a disservice and will move America in the wrong direction.”

Last I checked, Republicans aren’t running teachers’ unions, teacher-training programs, the Department of Education, textbook or testing companies. In May, Cardona tweeted: “Teachers know what is best for their kids because they are with them every day. We must trust teachers.”

Imagine if flight schools had the same success rates as America’s teachers. Would anyone get on an airplane again? Would we hear the FAA telling us to just trust America’s pilots? Of course not; we’d see a full ground-stop until we could verify that planes wouldn’t fall out of the skies anymore.

American children are spending less time learning history as schools triage to help catch students up on math and reading. Time is part of the problem, but we can’t ignore how the study of social studies, history and civics has transformed from facts, dates and places to increasingly aggressive political indoctrination.

No longer do students learn about how the Battle of Yorktown marked the end of the Revolutionary War; now they spend their history hour learning about how the Founding Fathers were slaveholders. Where once students learn about Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech — in which he famously proclaims “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character” — now students learn that the only way of understanding race relations is to assign identities: oppressors and oppressed. If they’re especially unlucky, their teacher might even segregate black and white kids to really hammer home the point.

It was this framework that Florida governor Ron DeSantis rejected in February, when the Advanced Placement course in African-American Studies was banned by the state for promoting critical race theory. The modern components of the course were only presented from a radical perspective, and included instruction on the Black Lives Matter movement, Black Queer Studies, mass incarceration and reparations. Assigned texts included readings by Ta-Nehisi Coates, a journalist and author who in 2014 published “The Case for Reparations” in the Atlantic.

This manipulation of history for children doesn’t just leave them vulnerable to political indoctrination, it leaves them unable to recognize they’re being indoctrinated in the first place. And that’s the point.

Those working to rewrite history target adults and kids alike. This summer at the Kennedy Center, with corporate sponsorship from Altria, the company that owns Philip Morris, a show called 1776 hits the stage. It’s advertised for age ten years and up. Its producers promise “a glorious multiracial cast of female, transgender, and nonbinary actors” who “portray the fiery founders of this country, putting history in the hands of the humans who were left out the first time around — and the result is an epic show of passion, debate, and roof-raising musical fireworks.”

It would be a stretch to call such a show historical fiction. With this sort of radical reworking now the norm, is it any surprise that American kids are a little hazy on the basics?

The revolutionaries are rewriting history for the College Board (the company which administers Advanced Placement courses). They are at the (government-funded) Kennedy Center putting on 1776, they’re behind the Tony Award wins for such productions, and they’re at companies like Altria, which on its website boasts that “for the fourth year running, the Human Rights Campaign has given Altria a perfect score on its Corporate Equality Index (CEI).”

The same powerful ideology present in corporate America can be found throughout teachers’ colleges, unions, school districts, and in every corner of the Biden administration’s cabinet.

In his reporting on the drop in test scores for Forbes, Frederick Hess explained, “In a 2022 survey of K-12 teachers… the RAND Corporation found that more teachers thought civics education is about promoting environmental activism, rather than about ‘knowledge of social, political, and civic institutions.’ In 2020, a RAND survey of high school civics teachers reported that just 43 percent thought it was essential for graduates to know about periods such as ‘the Civil War and the Cold War.’ Less than two-thirds thought it essential for graduates to know the protections guaranteed by the Bill of Rights.”

The 2020 RAND survey explained that “civics today covers much more than just how a bill becomes a law… Most of the high-school teachers who responded said their students ‘absolutely’ need to learn to be tolerant of different people and groups. They wanted their students to see themselves as global citizens, to develop good work habits and to embrace the responsibilities of government by the people. They weren’t overly concerned that students memorize the fifty states, or learn about important periods in American history.”

In other words, teachers have rewritten their job description. Out: civics basics. In: indoctrination. They believe that their mandate isn’t to teach history or civics, but instead, to brainwash children; and lo and behold, just a few years later, children are falling ever further behind in competence in this newly hyperpoliticized subject area. Dawn Duran, author of the new A Reasoned Patriotism: Critical Thinking and Civic Duty in an Age of Polarization, told me, “There is an appalling lack of understanding regarding how our government works, yet it is critical that students develop this understanding in order to be contributing members of society who can engage in the democratic process. Citizens who understand the structure and function of the society in which they live are more likely to recognize that citizenship comes with responsibilities and not merely rights.”

From the Department of Education on down, these new test scores (along with the other falling scores) haven’t been met with a ground stop. Expecting different results when you do the same thing over and over has been called the definition of insanity. The progressive left are many things, but insane isn’t one of them. The goal of the public education system is not education; if it were, those in charge wouldn’t be doing the same thing over and over again. The freefall of the American government-run education system is a feature, not a bug, of this woke revolution.

We’re not just watching history being rewritten; it’s being intentionally obscured from the next generation. History and civics teachers aren’t teaching their subjects, so declining test scores are no surprise. If things continue this way, the revolutionaries’ jobs will only get easier: there’s no need to lie to children about who George Washington was or what his accomplishments were if they don’t even know who Washington was or what he accomplished. In this dark future — nowhere near as far away as one might think — students who might have had a healthy sense of patriotism, love for and basic understanding of their native land will feel no obligation to it. And that, perhaps, is the point.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s July 2023 World edition.