Friday, January 16, 2015
PHOENIX (AP) — Arizona's new law requiring high-school students to pass the U.S. citizenship test in order to graduate appears likely to be adopted in a handful of other states this year, though educators warn it's not a fix-all solution to the nation's dire knowledge of civics.
Fewer than a dozen states currently require students to take a civics exam, and passing it isn't necessary to graduate in all of them. In most states, civic education instead revolves around a one-semester U.S. history course.
Arizona on Thursday became the first to specifically require the U.S. citizenship test, a 100-question exam that tests knowledge of facts on subjects like the Founding Fathers, the Bill of Rights and U.S. presidents.
"This has been building for a long time," said Ted McConnell, executive director of the Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools, a civic learning coalition co-chaired by former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. While O'Connor supported the initiative, McConnell and others are wary that legislators are only skimming the surface of what students need to know.
"The folks who are civic educators and experts by and large are pushing for a much, much more well-rounded approach," said Paul Baumann, director of the National Center for Learning and Civic Engagement at the Education Commission of the States, a state-led research organization.
For years, education leaders have sounded the alarm on the state of civic education.
Just 13 percent of high school seniors scored as "proficient" or higher in American history on the 2010 National Assessment of Educational Progress.