Anyone? Anyone?

The good news from Arizona is that twice as many charter high school students could pass a basic citizenship test than could their district peers. The bad news is that their pass rate was 7%.

Since A Nation At Risk the civic illiteracy of Americans has become a running joke -- I mean literally.  After Finn and Ravitch published What Our 17-Year-Olds Know, Saturday Night Live did a hilarious Jeopardy-style takeoff. More recently Jay Leno’s “Jaywalking” series caught pedestrians mistaking Groucho for Karl Marx and worse (far worse). But then the hard stuff started happening – like when Common Core launched last year by doing another national survey of student’s civic understanding and, well….. the following is their snapshot of the findings, from a plausible test answer:  “Senator Joseph McCarthy investigated people who protested the war in Vietnam, better known as the Second World War. Fortunately, that war was over before Christopher Columbus sailed to America; otherwise, we might have never experienced the Renaissance..”

So, I guess here’s where it stops being funny. The Goldwater Institute just surveyed Arizona student using questions from the citizenship-test item bank. Yes, the questions immigrants have to answer before they get to be US citizens. Not exactly brain-twisters. I already spilled the overall results but when you read the individual questions it’s excruciating. Asked “Who was the first president,” a whopping 26% answered “George Washington.”  (Now, about that 3.3% who answered “Ronald Reagan”…!!).  And 9.9% knew there are nine justices on the Supreme Court, while 42% said “don’t know.” And on, and on.

Helpfully, the report reprints the Arizona social studies standards and says that kids should have mastered the material needed for the citizenship quiz by eighth grade. So what’s going on? How do these kids pass from grade to grade without grasping these really, truly basic facts about their country?

NS