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Foreign-born students vie for civics honors

April 29, 2011 by

Top civics students will compete in the We the People: The Citizen and the Constitution National Finals in Washington, D.C. this weekend. Randallston High’s team will represent Maryland, reports the Baltimore Sun. Eleven of 13 team members were born in Nigeria, Liberia, Grenada and Egypt.

“Most of them have this great interest because it was starkly different from what they experienced. They have the appreciation for the Constitution and U.S. Bill of Rights that you wish the natural-born citizens would,” said Richard Weitkamp, whose entire Advanced Placement U.S. Government class at the Baltimore County school is taking part in the competition.

Students portray experts testifying on selected constitutional issues in a simulated congressional hearing. They must answer questions from a panel of judges that includes Supreme Court justices, historians, attorneys and political scientists.

Team members are top students who’ve taken gifted and AP classes together for years. Six come from Nigeria. Nearly all are female.

Christiana Ilufoye, a 17-year-old whose parents left Nigeria when she was 9 so that she and her siblings could get a better education, wants to become a lawyer, so she was eager to study the Constitution.

. . . Oluchukwu Agu, who came from Nigeria to Randallstown in 10th grade, is still trying to adjust. “The values and the culture are so different. In Nigeria, education comes first. … No one here is going to take a D home,” he said.

“We have some bonds because we all have a purpose here,” Ilufoye said of the competition. “We all know why we take this seriously.”

It’s inspiring and depressing at the same time.

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38% flunk citizenship questions

March 21, 2011 by

When the Daily Beast asked 1,000 Americans to answer questions from the U.S. citizenship exam, 38 percent failed to answer six out of 10 correctly, reports Newsweek.

According to the Beast, only 27 percent of Americans knew we fought the Cold War to turn back communism. Only 19 percent can name one power of the federal government. Only one third could name the economic system of the U.S., though it’s likely the test rejected “screwed up” as an answer.

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Why we need government

January 21, 2011 by

Why do we need a government? Russ Roberts at Cafe Hayek looks at the answer provided for children in kindergarten through second grade by the U.S. Government Printing Office’s web site.

Why do we need a government? Imagine what your school would be like if no one was in charge. Each class would make its own rules. Who gets to use the gym if two classes want to use it at the same time? Who would clean the classrooms? Who decides if you learn about Mars or play kickball? Sounds confusing, right?

This is why schools have people who are in charge, such as the principal, administrators, teachers, and staff. Our nation has people who are in charge and they make up the government.

Despite the use of Ben Franklin on the site, the Printing Office seems a little weak on democratic government.

Roberts’ challenge: Remembering that the audience is five to seven years old, write a better explanation.

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Students aren’t citizenship-ready

October 21, 2010 by

Preparation for active citizenship — an understanding of the nation’s founding principles and documents, the structure of government, and the ability to analyze and think critically about politics and power — isn’t on the education agenda, complains Diana Jean Schemo on Remapping Debate. Education advocates want students to be “college- and career-ready,” but not necessarily “citizenship-ready.”

Broadly speaking, preparation for active citizenship really connotes two related areas: civics and citizenship education. Civics, said Mary McFarland, past president of the National Council for the Social Studies . . . teaches (students) about the Bill of Rights, the Constitution, and the Federalist papers, among other key documents. Civics explores the relationship between the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government, and the role of a free press. It explains the tension between state and federal law, the role of judicial precedent and what kinds of issues might turn up at the ballot box.

. . . (Citizen education teaches students)  to distinguish between fact and opinion and between fact and fictions masquerading as facts. Citizen education teaches students to evaluate the strength of arguments on a given issue, to separate reason from emotion, and to challenge assumptions.

But civics remains a stepchild, Schemo writes. In the U.S. Department of Education,  “civics falls not under the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, but under the Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools.” It’s seen as a way to “build character” and improve the school climate, not as training for citizens of a democracy.

Citizen education went awry in Cincinnati when Hughes High School students of voting age were bused to a polling place and handed Democratic sample ballots only.

Mark Stepaniak, an attorney representing CPS, admits students were taken on school time in donated church vans to vote last week and were given sample ballots listing only Democrat candidates. But the ballots weren’t handed out by a school employee. They were handed out, Stepaniak said, by Gwen Robinson, a former CPS principal.

A Republican candidate and an anti-tax coalition filed suit but appear ready to settle for an agreement to ban electioneering at school-related events.

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What social studies teachers think and do

October 1, 2010 by

Social studies teachers share the values of ordinary Americans, concludes High Schools, Civics, and Citizenship: What Social Studies Teachers Think and Do, a new American Enterprise Institute study.

Eighty-three percent of high school teachers surveyed believe that the United States is a “unique country that stands for something special in the world,” and 82 percent say high school students should “respect and appreciate their country but know its shortcomings.” This tracks closely with surveys of the general public.

Only 36 percent say it is absolutely essential to teach high school students “facts (e.g., location of the fifty states) and dates (e.g., Pearl Harbor).” Factual knowledge ranks last on list of 12 items. Knowing what’s guaranteed by the Bill of Rights ranks first. (One could argue that’s factual knowledge.)

Only 56 percent of teachers agree that “by graduation, virtually all students in my high school have carefully read the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.”

Teachers split on whether their school districts sees social studies as “an absolutely essential subject area.”

  • Seven in ten (70 percent) say social studies classes are a lower priority because of pressure to show progress on statewide math and language arts tests.
  • Yet social studies teachers want to hop on the testing bandwagon: 93 percent say “social studies should be part of every state’s set of standards and testing.”

    • Teachers stress things that embody a certain spirit of America,” such as the Bill of Rights, “but not about how that spirit is translated into governance” through concepts like federalism and the separation of powers, writes Rick Hess.  Only 24 percent of teachers are “very confident” their students can identify the protections in the Bill of Rights by the end of high school; 15 percent think their students understand federalism and the separation of powers, and 11 percent believe their pupils understand the basic precepts of the free market.

    If teachers with “some confidence” are factored in, half say their students are graduating with an adequate understanding of civics and citizenship.

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    OK students do OK on civics re-test

    November 11, 2009 by

    Are Oklahoma students so ignorant of civics that they averaged 2.8 correct answers out of 10 questions taken from the citizenship exam passed on the first try by 92 percent of immigrants applying for naturalization. We’re talking about a test that asks: Who is George Washington?

    An Oklahoma legislator repeated the Strategic Vision survey with high school seniors in his district, reports FiveThirtyEight. They aced the exam.

    They answered an average of 7.8 out of the 10 questions correctly. By comparison, the high school students that were purportedly surveyed by Strategic Vision had gotten just 2.8 out of the items correct. 98 percent of the students on Cannaday’s survey — not 23 percent — knew that George Washington was the first President. 81 percent — not 14 percent — knew that Thomas Jefferson had written the Declaration of Independence. 95 percent — not 43 percent — knew that the Democrats and Republicans are the major political parties.

    Why the stark difference? In comments on The Quick and The Ed, Matthew Ladner says he and the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs, which commissioned the poll, are investigating the survey’s validity. It’s possible that students didn’t bother to try on a phone survey.

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    The know-nothing party

    June 27, 2009 by

    To become a citizen, immigrants must answer six of 10 basic civics questions, such as: Who wrote the Declaration of Independence? What do we call the first 10 amendments to the Constitution? Who was the first president of the United States?  When the Goldwater Institute asked Arizona public high school students 10 random questions from the citizenship list, only 3.5 percent got six or more questions right, writes Matthew Ladner in a preview on Jay Greene’s blog. Half the students got only one question right.

    Fifty-eight percent knew the Atlantic Ocean is off the east coast and half identified the two major political parties. However, only 29.5 percent identified the Constitution as the supreme law of the land, 25 percent identified the Bill of Rights as the first 10 amendments to the Constitution and 23 percent knew Congress was made up of the House and Senate. Only 9.4 percent said the Supreme Court has nine justices.  Thomas Jefferson was named as the writer of the Declaration of Independence by a quarter of students; 14.5 percent answered that Senators are elected for six-year terms and 26 percent knew the president runs the executive branch.
    Finally, only 26.5% of students correctly identified George Washington was the first President. Other guesses included John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, George Bush and Barack Obama.

    Seniors did no better than freshmen. Ethnicity made little difference.

    Profound ignorance is quite equally distributed in large measure across students in the public school system.

    Arizona eighth graders are supposed to be taught everything needed to ace the civics test, Ladner writes. Charter students passed at twice the rate of students in district schools; private school students were four times more likely to pass. “Still pathetic,” he writes.

    Here’s part one of Freedom From Responsibility.

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