Should high school students be required to pass a citizenship test?
The study of civics could get a big push in seven states where laws are being considered to require high school students to pass a basic citizenship test to get a diploma.
North Dakota, Arizona, Louisiana, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Utah are looking at new laws that would require students to pass the same test administered to people who want to become naturalized United States citizens.
The Civics Education Initiative, a group devoted to the project, and civics education in general, has also targeted Alabama, Georgia, New Mexico, North Dakota and New Hampshire as the next set of states on its radar.
North Dakota first lady Betsy Dalrymple talked about her state’s proposed law on Monday in Bismarck.
In September, Arizona State Rep. Steve Montenegro introduced his state’s proposed bill, which will receive formal consideration next month.
Also in September, three former South Carolina governors pushed for the law in their state.
“This is not a partisan issue. It is an American issue,” said former Governor Richard Riley, who also served as President Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Education.
Two former United States Senators from Arizona, John Kyl and Dennis DeConcini, also advocated for the requirement in an online editorial.
“Think of it: People from all over the world legally immigrating to the United States, many speaking different languages, are passing this basic American history and civics test – in English – while too few of our own students can,” DeConcini and Kyl wrote. Former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor is also part of the initiative.
Jonathan E. Johnson, the chairman of Overstock.com and co-chair of the Civics Education Initiative in Utah, explained his concerns in an editorial this fall that appeared in the Deseret News.
“According to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service, 92 percent of immigrants who take the test pass it. When high school students in Arizona and Oklahoma took the same test, fewer than 4 percent passed. That’s unacceptable. Across the nation, our civics soul is ailing,” Johnson said.
Johnson was referencing a study done by the Goldwater Institute in 2010 where a group of 1,350 public high school students were asked to take a 10-question quiz based on the naturalization test. Not one student got a perfect score.
At the time, one teacher remarked that students weren’t taught history and civics, since science and math were emphasized in efforts to improve scores for standards testing.
A 2011 Newsweek study of the general population showed better results, but not at the 92 percent success rate achieved by new citizens, in a study called, “How Ignorant Are Americans?”
About 62 percent of people in the Newsweek study passed the test by getting at least 60 percent of the questions answered correctly. But many people struggled with the most basic of concepts.
In the Newsweek survey, 45 percent of people couldn’t define the Bill of Rights and 73 percent couldn’t identify why the United States fought the Cold War.
Recent survey results haven’t shown a big improvement when it comes to civics knowledge. A September 2014 study from the Annenberg Public Policy Center revealed that while 36 percent of Americans could name all three branches of the U.S. government, another 35 percent couldn’t name a single one.
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