Who’s the chief justice? Judge Judy?
Who is the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court?
Who was president during the Great Depression and World War II?
What did the Emancipation Proclamation do?
What happened in the United States on Sept. 11, 2001?
Name your congressman.
These are all questions on a basic civic literacy test given to immigrants seeking to become U.S. citizens. It’s more than a little ironic, in a political season where many voters are clamoring for the “extreme vetting” of immigrants, that many Americans who were born here, whose families have been here for generations and who graduated from high school, would be unable to correctly answer almost half of the 100 questions on the test.
A 2012 survey by the legal information website FindLaw.com found that a full two-thirds of Americans couldn’t name a single justice serving on the U.S. Supreme Court, never mind being able to identify the chief justice. Also in 2012, the Center for the Study of the American Dream at Xavier University in Ohio found that about one in three native-born citizens could not pass the test administered by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service – and that’s with a passing score of 60 percent. If the passing score had been raised to 70 percent, half of all native-born citizens would fail.
Pretty appalling, eh?
A bill moving through the Pennsylvania House of Representatives would require students in the commonwealth’s high schools take the same test in civic literacy as immigrants do before they receive their diplomas. It has the support of the Veterans of Foreign Wars and former Gov. Ed Rendell and was subject to a hearing before the House Education Committee last week. If it is eventually approved by the House, the Senate and then is signed into law by Gov. Tom Wolf – see, there’s a little bit of a civics lesson right there – Pennsylvania would become the 15th state to require the test. Twenty-five more are considering it.
State Rep. Bill Kortz, a Democrat from Dravosburg and a co-sponsor of the bill, told the Philadelphia Inquirer that it’s “pretty pathetic” that “a lot of people coming out of high school don’t even know who the president of the United States is.” He also noted that education in the STEM subjects – science, technology, engineering and math – has been elevated and emphasized to such an extent that the nuts and bolts of our history and governance have taken “a back seat.”
According to the Inquirer, some teachers and administrators are crying foul, arguing that students are having to shoulder too many high-pressure standardized tests as it is, and the Keystone Exams, which test high school seniors in language arts, biology and algebra, have been suspended for the next two years as a graduation requirement. With that test in limbo, critics say, why put forward another?
But the requirements for taking the test, as currently envisioned, are pretty relaxed. Students could take it multiple times and even take it on their home computer – it’s hardly sitting in a room for hours with nothing more than a No. 2 pencil and beads of sweat on your forehead.
So while it is important that students know the basics of biology, it could be even more imperative that they understand how our government works and how, for better or worse, we arrived at this moment. After all, how strong can our democracy be if too many of us guess that Ronald Reagan enacted the Emancipation Proclamation to free small business from regulation, that Theodore Roosevelt led the country through the second world war and the Depression, or that the chief justice is Judge Judy?