Real Americans?
Via Cookie Jill at skippy’s, an Oklahoma City TV station reports: 75 Percent of Oklahoma High School Students Can’t Name the First President of the U.S.
The survey was commissioned by the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs in observance of Constitution Day on Thursday.
Brandon Dutcher is with the conservative think tank and said the group wanted to find out how much civic knowledge Oklahoma high school students know.
The Oklahoma City-based think tank enlisted national research firm, Strategic Vision, to access students’ basic civic knowledge.
“They’re questions taken from the actual exam that you have to take to become a U.S. citizen,” Dutcher said.
A thousand students were given 10 questions drawn from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services item bank. Candidates for U.S. citizenship must answer six questions correctly in order to become citizens.
About 92 percent of the people who take the citizenship test pass on their first try, according to immigration service data. However, Oklahoma students did not fare as well. Only about 3 percent of the students surveyed would have passed the citizenship test.
Dutcher said this is not just a problem in Oklahoma. He said Arizona had similar results, which left him concerned for the entire country.
The questions are below the fold, but I won’t include the answers because if you stop by here and are an American citizen you know the answers.
Questions [percentage correct]
- What is the supreme law of the land? [28%]
- What do we call the first ten amendments to the Constitution? [26%]
- What are the two parts of the U.S. Congress? [ 27%]
- How many justices are there on the Supreme Court? [10%]
- Who wrote the Declaration of Independence? [14%]
- What ocean is on the east coast of the United States? [61%]
- What are the two major political parities in the United States? [43%]
- We elect a U.S. senator for how many years? [11%]
- Who was the first President of the United States? [23%]
- Who is in charge of the executive branch? [29%]
It’s not like they asked the name of the first President actually born in the United States.
Maybe they all missed the first day of civics.
27 comments
Or it could be that the students were too lazy and apathetic to bother actually reading and answering the questions, after finding out that a) they weren’t going to get a grade on it, b) they weren’t going to get graduation credit for it, and c) it wasn’t going to get additional funding for their school, so they just marked whatever. You have to remember that typically school kids today waste at least two weeks a year on the bullsh*t tests that the Every Child Left Behind Act requires. They’re tested out, frankly, and have absolutely no desire to voluntarily take some test that a teacher plunked in front of them and said “here, take this survey.” I can just see the reaction of my students if I did that with them… the raised eyebrows would have taken the roof of the school building off once they found out that it wasn’t a course requirement to do it. Goofing off and answering the questions with nonsense would have been the *least* of my problems…
– Badtux the Former Teacher Penguin
.-= last blog ..Is our children learning? =-.
FCAT, that’s all you have to say to a child in a Florida school to elicit a groan. They waste so much time preparing for the Florida Comprehensive Achievement Test that I doubt they learn anything. If it wasn’t a multiple choice test, I can hear the groans now, but then I never gave multiple choice tests, because I wasn’t interested in how lucky someone was. It was a pain grading by hand, but I could at least figure out what I needed to go over again, because people didn’t understand the first time.
Having talked to recent high school graduates, I’m not surprised by the results, and their parents are no more informed. When all of the effort is put into reading and math, content is left by the wayside. I know four kids whose tuition was paid to in advance by their grandparents, and the money was lost because none of the four went to college. They just weren’t interested.
Umm… so… I know the answers. 😐
Bu… but… I don’ wanna be an Amerikan!!! Nooooooooooooooooooooo…
:'(
Hmmph!
Heh… Funny… I was chatting with LadyMin about this kind of thing yesterday. Our news services here are all over comparing Aus today with the USA, because some OECD report was just released that said we are ahead in almost every aspect. Economy, education, health, living standards, etc.
OT: The site has been up over a week and we’ve got 8 people (including myself and LadyMin) testing it and it hasn’t broken yet. 😉 Found lot’s of minor annoying bugs… but nothing major. It’s not real pretty right now, because I wanted to test the functionality of things first. I’ll be putting up another test site in the next day or 2 with some major changes.
I’d like to get you, Bryan, and maybe Badtux to register and have a look (if you have a little time badtux. I really could use a knowledgeable Mac user.) We had a mac user try to register and he couldn’t. Nobody else has had a problem, even on a blackberry!
URI: http://lotusmarques.com/lm_test02/
Unless you are registered, you won’t see a lot. 🙂 Most of the features etc are only for approved members. There is an IM (Instant Messaging) and PM (Private Messaging) system there so we can chat, also comments on articles etc are working. The blog part is currently offline while I do some tweaking to the code (It’s my own design). There isn’t much content yet, but I am working on a FAQ/Help for testers to explain how everything works, this will become the help system for new members.
If you *really* have some time to spare (I know… ha, ha!) 😉 It would be appreciated. 🙂
When the new test site is up, Any of the other regulars would also be welcome to come and play. 🙂 I’ll explain in more detail soon(ish).
As for school… I delivered my first training course Tues, and it went very well. I designed it as a lecture/presentation on the evils of spam, spoofing, phishing and web bugs! LOL (I only had 25min’s for the entire presentation + questions). All the feedback was very good. 🙂 Next one will be tougher, as I have to design it to the Nationally recognized standards, and that will be 45 min’s, the third must follow National, State and industry standards and will be independently audited! That’s 1.5 hours. I also have a couple design assignments due. *sigh*
OK… That’s it!
PS. You’ll be happy to know that when the new site is live, I will have my own blog. 😉 LOL
Good luck on the course.
I started the registration process, but no promises on how often I’ll be able to “kick the tires” and such. It did give me a weird message about my e-mail address not accepting e-mail, but I’ll see how it goes.
Yeah, the Hedgemony did a pretty thorough job of screwing up everything. It will take a couple of decades to get back on track, even if they do everything correctly, and that isn’t likely to happen with the crew in DC.
Hmmm. The registration system uses an AJAX based facility to check that the email address is valid (eg. the mail system is actually real and working. It’s been tested with several POP/IMAP servers, and gmail, yahoo, hotmail (MSN) etc. and has worked). You should get a green tick (from memory) if the mail system is OK. Otherwise, your registration will not proceed (I won’t even get a notification in me ‘pending registrations’ admin panel, and I don’t see one for you, so your registration failed. 🙁
It doesn’t (yet) check that the username is real, only that it is a valid user name, but the mail server must be real and findable. 🙂
Can you tell me exactly what happened, please? 🙂
And… trust you to cause me another headache! 😛 LOL
OH… make sure you have java enabled in the browser. It’s been tested in FF 3.0, 3.5, Opera 9 & 10, Google Chrome 2 & 3, IE 6,7,8 and Safari (win) 3 & 4, and Konqueror (linux).
Ahhh! You just came up in my admin system. 🙂
Seems it doesn’t like your mail server, it get’s a ‘server not found’ when checking it exists. Curious… I’ll look into that.
I have approved you, but I don’t know if you well get the email with your reg details. Let me know.
Ahh… the fun of live testing in the wild! 😆
PS. If you *DO* get a confirmation email, you must confirm (the email will tell you what to do). 🙂
Good luck!
Nothing yet from you, but I used the dumka.com mail server, which I have been using for years.
It’s always possible that the server is down for maintenance, as it is Friday night, but I just pulled several messages off of it from two different accounts [whynow and bryan], so anything is possible.
I’ll check again later.
I’ll be using FF 3.5.3 and updated Java about a week ago on this machine.
I saw the attempt at checking when I entered the address, but continued on because my ISP address is functionally useless. The Phone Company can’t be depended on to do anything right, even e-mail.
Sorry… I got called away. 🙂 Sat afternoon here.
I’ll delete the pending registration (which won’t let me activate you anyway because it hasn’t received a confirmation email).
Try again. 🙂
I’ll try tomorrow my time and ensure the mail server is up just before trying.
OK. 🙂 There’s always something. 😉 LOL
Thanks! I’m working with LadyMin now anyway. 🙂
Our country is so “pooched.”
.-= last blog ..Restaurants are finding innovate ways =-.
1. What is the supreme law of the land? [28%]
cats rule, dogs drool.
2. What do we call the first ten amendments to the Constitution? [26%]
addenda, errata, and other things we left out of the first edition.
3. What are the two parts of the U.S. Congress? [ 27%]
democrats and republicans.
4. How many justices are there on the Supreme Court? [10%]
justice?
5. Who wrote the Declaration of Independence? [14%]
dude, that is so french!
6. What ocean is on the east coast of the United States? [61%]
technically, you can’t have an ocean on a coast. it’s more like next to.
7. What are the two major political parities in the United States? [43%]
odd, and even odder.
8. We elect a U.S. senator for how many years? [11%]
for life. but we give them money every six years.
9. Who was the first President of the United States? [23%]
iron roger rackham
10. Who is in charge of the executive branch? [29%]
hard to say for sure, but glenn beck has been throwing his weight around a bit lately.
Too true, Jill.
Hipparchia, you are Badtux’s stereotypical student.
Disagree Bryan! Hipparchia has obviously thought about her answers! 😆 If she were a real teenager, there’d be at least a few “whatever” or “Say what?” in there! 😉
Too funny! Really… 😆
Actually, the fact that so many answered the question on the East Coast ocean, makes me believe they really were trying, and really are this uninformed.
OT: Bryan, I see you used a different e-mail acc’t. 😉 Anyway, I’ve approved you (with apologies for the delay. Seems my host is messing about with the backend and I can no longer SSH in to do my admin stuff, and of course, as a dutifully paranoid security type, I have disabled telnet (in fact, removed it totally!) and my BIND server decided to fall over. *sigh*). Anyway… you should get another e-mail with details. 🙂
Any idea what might have been the issue with your site e-mail? I couldn’t see anything obvious at my end (all the logs relating to the system showed nada for your IP/domain). Ah, well… 😉 We continue onwars… 😀 (It’d be nice to find out what and where the problem lay though). 😉
Cheers, and thanks!
what i found in school was that i could answer the questions correctly and have lots of time left over in which to either become bored or get into trouble, or i could take my time making up interesting, and usually wrong, answers.
.-= last blog ..[what curmudgeon cat sees when he looks in the mirror] =-.
If teachers would teach more than the test and would show how each discipline intersects with each other while revealing the fascinating stories and rivalries that go into the subject of history instead of vomiting out a bunch of random facts and dates, then this wouldn’t be an issues.
.-= last blog ..Quote of the Week =-.
I know what you mean, Hipparchia. There was a notation in my permanent record to give me a book to read when a test was being taken because I always finished early and would be a disruptive influence. I finished a lot of books during tests. My First Grade teacher, Miss Delores Smith, made the notation. I became aware of it about a decade ago when I ran into my Third Grade teacher.
The problem, CK, is that teachers are required to “teach the test” because the administrators have made the test the most important thing in school. It’s almost to the point that you can graduate if you pass the FCAT, even if you class grade is F because you never turn in any work. The kids who really want to go to college have to teach themselves, because schools only teach the test anymore. It is a totally brain dead situation, and the “conservatives” have a lot of damn gall complaining about it since it was their idea. Of course Obama is continuing the practice.
those must have been the good old days. i got to stay in from recess and write sentences on the board ‘i will not talk in class’ or sit at my desk with my head down. it took them until about 4th or 5th grade to figure out that they could just send me to the library.
.-= last blog ..We’re number one 37! =-.
Miss Smith became the acknowledged expert on dealing with me. They tried it without the book. but I would get up to something that was usually, but not always, non-destructive, but was extremely annoying to people actually trying to take a test.
They had provisions for holding people back, but the rules precluded skipping grades. It was a huge waste of time, but I read a lot of decent books towards the end. The draw back was that my writing skills weren’t being developed at the same time. There was a lack of English grammar and composition books in my reading list.
I used to fall asleep in my chair (in College), and it was discovered that when this happened… I snored, loudly! It was also discovered that it wasn’t safe to attempt to wake me except from a long distance as I generally had a violent reaction to having my sleep so rudely interrupted! (Especially in my late teens after having practiced Aikido and Weightlifting at competition level for a few years). One brave fool decided to try prodding me with a broom, and discovered what a weapon a broom is in the hands of an expert barely awake. 😉 I spent an hour in the Gym or dojo every morning before school, and usualy worked for a few hours after school (I did security and crowd control in pub’s and clubs a few nights a week). So, I was usually in need of sleep at any opportunity. 🙂 They eventually decided to just allow me to leave an exam as soon as I’d finished. I finished with a Distinction avg. I could have studied more and probably gotten a High Distinction or better (as the coordinator or Dean often complained to me), but i couldn’t be bothered. A distinction was all I required to achieve my goals at that time, and I was far more interested in aikido & weightlifting back then. In a way, if it wasn’t for that, and my Grandfather teaching me to shoot very well at long ranges, I would probably never have ended up in Cambodia or even the Military at all. I don’t honestly know if that would have been a good thing or not… I have days where I wish I’d never been, and others where I’m glad I did and that I could help at least some of the poor innocents from the evil bastards there.
Oh… and yes, I did have a very healthy (generally healthy anyway) interest in ‘Girls’! Luckily for them, I had little time or any real inclination to really pursue that interest, to the disgust of a few. 😉 😆 Especially when most of the bobbleheads my age discovered I generally had more interest in their mothers (there were a couple of attractive single-mom’s) or women that age anyway! I discovered early that maturity and experience can make life a whole lot more interesting! 🙂 And… just for all you dirty-minded people with no lives, reading this… I do NOT mean the ‘sex’ part either. At least… not exclusively! 😉 😛
The education system in the West is only good at teaching people how to go to school. There’s a total disconnect between what you learn in school, and real life for no defensible reason. The classes people really need, like personal finance, are electives if they are offered at all. You are allowed to start voting at 18, but don’t have the skills to evaluate those who are running. The media have totally abrogated their educational function by offering two views on every issue with no analysis of the claims made, and fact checking.
The “experts” in every field that people see on the media are all compromised by conflicts of interest. There is no scoring system indicating how accurate their judgment has been in the past, and no review of why they are famous/noted/known-to-exist.
People come out of high schools with the primary goal of existence. They hope to continue their lifestyle with a minimum of effort and a maximum of wealth, who no idea what anyone actually does in the real world. Trying to deal with people in the computer science curriculum who think that writing code is real PITA, and not something they enjoy doing, but people say this is “the best field for future success” is totally frustrating. Trying to get through to them that if they don’t like writing code, or aren’t very good at it means that if they land a job they will hate it, but their chances of landing a job are minimal.
Education is wasted on students.
OT: I received the e-mail notification on the comment. Real life is kicking my butt at the moment.
OT: No problem Bryan. Same here. I wasn’t able to complete both assignments due today and got an extension until Fri for the one I wasn’t able to complete. I haven’t had a chance to even look at the site today. 🙂
So… yeah… real life… etc… 😉
I know the feeling well.