The other morning the happy talkers on 96.3 DVD, a radio station that bills itself as playing Today’s Best Hits without The Rap - a genre then derided as torture in a snappy promotional tag - attempted to answer questions that appeared to come from a ninth-grade civics test. They failed miserably.

Pathetically.

The male host was quizzing his two female sidekicks, and some of the questions and responses included:

What date is the President sworn into office?
Uhm, November 4th? November 5th? November 11th?

How many Supreme Court Justices are there?
Twelve?

I won’t insult anyone’s intelligence by providing the correct answers here. If you’re unsure why the above responses are tragic, then I suggest you do the research and find out. My point is that these radio personalities aren’t stupid. They’re quick-witted, articulate, occasionally insightful, clearly well-versed in the pop culture canon of Kate and John, Taylor Swift, Balloon Boy and Octo-mom. I suspect many listeners would pronounce this cluelessness in basic civics a classic representation of the failure of the American educational system.

Instead of shifting blame to a general anti-intellectualism pervading contemporary culture, I’ll agree. The cluelessness is the result of our failing educational system, but not because of intractable teachers unions, or lazy teachers, or a failure to cover the necessary facts due to a curriculum infested with too much anti-American multicultural mumbo-jumbo, or too much touchy-feely fuzziness.

I’ll bet every civics teacher who’s ever taught has communicated the correct answers to the above questions and, further, gotten a majority of students to be able to properly recite them on a unit test. 

Herein lies the problem. I submit that the issue isn’t what’s being taught in our schools, but how it’s being taught; that the reason the happy talkers are so clueless is not that they never learned how many Supreme Court Justices there are, or which governmental body is responsible for interpreting the Constitution, but that they’ve forgotten what they did learn because they never fully integrated it into a deeper understanding of civic responsibility and citizenship. In short, their pathetic responses are the direct result of our present pre-occupation with teaching to the test.

This obsession stems from a report commissioned by the Department of Education during the Reagan Administration, which first appeared in April of 1983 and was entitled A Nation at Risk. The body of the report begins in the following fashion:

Our Nation is at risk. Our once unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world. This report is concerned with only one of the many causes and dimensions of the problem, but it is the one that undergirds American prosperity, security, and civility. We report to the American people that while we can take justifiable pride in what our schools and colleges have historically accomplished and contributed to the United States and the well-being of its people, the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people. What was unimaginable a generation ago has begun to occur--others are matching and surpassing our educational attainments.

The report then proclaims, in ominous Cold War terms, that -

If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves. We have even squandered the gains in student achievement made in the wake of the Sputnik challenge. Moreover, we have dismantled essential support systems which helped make those gains possible. We have, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament.

While President Reagan attempted to respond to this report with a failed attempt to scuttle the department that commissioned it, the first President Bush declared himself the Education President and bemoaned a lack of accountability in our schools, promising to oversee the development and implementation of a national education progress reporting system. President Clinton then picked up the baton and called for National Education Standards in his State of the Union Address in February of 1997. These efforts culminated in the second President Bush passing the bi-partisan educational reform act in 2001 known as No Child Left Behind.

There’s nothing particularly wrong with any of these leaders wanting to improve our educational system, and as I’ve said before, I believe a tremendous positive benefit of No Child Left Behind has been its impetus to force schools to focus on the achievement of its students of color. The problem is that all our educational policy-makers, regardless of political affiliation, have chosen the same short cut. They’ve chosen to define achievement as how students score on standardized tests and they’ve chosen to define accountability as how effectively teachers and administrators get their students to perform on the tests. They’ve made teaching to the test the norm.

Listen, teaching to the test isn’t difficult. With enough commitment to the task, with model test questions in hand, any half-decent teacher can get students to raise scores and look good on paper. That’s why politicians support these reforms. They provide tangible results to trumpet. The problem is the results don’t hold up over time. Looking good on paper is not the same thing as integrating a deep and enduring understanding of civics or American history or biology into one’s worldview. It’s not the same as developing intellectual curiosity, or creative problem-solving, or analytical thinking. Students memorizing a series of facts, or vocabulary words, or algebraic formulas to score well on a test - and then forgetting them later - constitutes a real phenomenon. It leads to radio hosts who don’t know that the President is not sworn into office on the same day he wins the election.

Am I suggesting we should dump these tests?

No, they do create base-line data which can be useful in determining some aspects of student progress, and I certainly would not want to return to the days when there was less focus on the education we’re providing our students of color, but let’s not pretend raising scores equates to developing an educated population. Let’s not pat ourselves on the back when getting students to perform on these tests should be the bare minimum of what we’re after.

We’ve got real problems to deal with - global poverty and malnutrition, resource depletion and climate upheaval, war, terrorism and, yes, human rights abuses and torture.

Let’s not pretend teaching students how to look good on paper is the same thing as teaching students how to approach these complex and difficult challenges.

** NOTE ** Speaking of challenging yourself … The Ann Arbor Book Festival is offering a special fall Writer’s Conference on Saturday, Nov. 14 at Pioneer High School. A spectacular slate of instructors includes Eileen Pollack and Michael Byers from U-M’s #2 nationally ranked MFA program in Creative Writing, as well as local poets and incomparable workshop leaders Keith Taylor, Scott Beal and Susan Hutton; and I’ll be offering a seminar on how to present/perform your work in public. The day’s a great value @ $95 including 3 workshop sessions, lunch, a panel discussion on publishing options and a participant reading. $50 for students. To register and/or glean additional info, go to aabookfestival.org.

Jeff Kass teaches Creative Writing at Pioneer High School in Ann Arbor and at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti, and directs the Literary Arts Programs at the Neutral Zone, including the VOLUME Youth Poetry Project which meets every Thursday night at 7pm. He will post new blog entries every Tuesday and Thursday morning throughout the school year.