National Center for Education Statistics
The National Center for Education Statistics recently issued this report on NAEP results in civics, based on exams administered a decade apart. This is not a conventional NAEP report. Rather than reporting student results in relation to "scale scores" or "achievement levels," it takes a series of multiple-choice questions that were asked in both years and shows how students did on them. It also supplies some simple aggregate statistics on, for example, what percentage(s) of questions were correctly answered by various groups of kids (e.g. by gender, race) in the two different years. You can find a wealth of "shocking" specifics. (For example, just half the 12th graders in 1998-down from 59 percent in 1988-know that the "We hold these truths to be self-evident...Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness" sentence comes from the Declaration of Independence. Only two-fifths of eighth graders know that the Supreme Court has authority to determine the constitutionality of a law. And so forth.) As for general trends, the big one can be summarized in a four-letter word: FLAT. Fourth graders did better in 1998 than in 1988, while 8th graders did worse and 12th graders showed no statistically significant change in overall performance. If you'd like your own copy of this 73-page document, you might phone the Education Department's Publications Center at (877) 433-7827. You could also write to that center at P.O. Box 1398, Jessup, MD 20784, you could surf to http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2001452, or you might harass the relevant staffer, Patricia Dabbs, at (202) 502-7332.
