Can you answer the following questions?
- What is the supreme law of the land?
- What do we call the first ten amendments to the Constitution?
- What are the two parts of the U.S. Congress?
- How many Justices are on the Supreme Court?
- Who wrote the Declaration of Independence?
- What ocean is on the East Coast of the United States?
- What are the two major political parties in the United States?
- We elect a U.S. Senator for how many years?
- Who was the first President of the United States?
- Who is in charge of the executive branch?
Hopefully you can answer all of these basic questions correctly. But these questions were presented to 1,134 [public] high school students in Arizona, and not a single one could answer more than seven out of ten correctly.
The biggest shocker (for me) is that more than 73% couldn’t name George Washington as our first president.
However, one might suggest that government funded schools haven't failed. They have succeeded beyond all expectation.
1 comment:
I'm awfully skeptical of the finding that 73% couldn't name George Washington was the first president. A Common Core study conducted last year found that 73% of high school students knew he was commander of the Continental Army, so something isn't quite right about the Arizona finding--unless, of course, Arizona is dramatically different from the rest of the country. The Common Core finding is entirely consistent with years of data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
This is not to argue that students know nearly enough--The whole point of the Common Core study was to raise an alarm about Americans' ignorance of history, literature and other subjects. But the study authors should check their methodology.
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