![]() ![]() In an email, University of Tennessee geography professor Derek Alderman told The 74 that America students’ lack of knowledge of “place, the past, and politics” would hamper their success both in the labor market and as citizens. Several subject-matter experts were particularly concerned. In the real world, this means students don’t know what the Lincoln-Douglas debates were about, nor can they discuss the significance of the Bill of Rights, or point out basic locations on a map.” ![]() “A quarter or more of America’s 8th graders are what NAEP defines as ‘below basic’ in U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos was no less alarmed, releasing a statement that called the results “stark and inexcusable.” students “don’t know much about history.” Several news accounts even revived the perennial favorite headline, noting that U.S. history and three points in geography (both registering as statistically significant, meaning that they are large enough to not have resulted from sampling bias) and a dip of one point in civics. Even with the state of American public schools thrown into chaos by the COVID pandemic, education journalists noted declines of four points in U.S. That changed when the 2018 numbers were published on April 23. The social studies subjects have been tested less frequently, and their results have attended far less publicity in general, trends on all three subjects have been modestly positive, with eighth graders generally making small gains or holding steady through 2014, the last iteration of testing. After a prolonged period of growth during the early years of the 21st century, scores in the core academic subjects of math and English have either stagnated or declined in repeated rounds of testing, with low-performing students losing ground the fastest. Referred to as “the nation’s report card,” NAEP is the preeminent national exam for K-12 students, releasing semi-regular scores for fourth-, eighth-, and twelfth-graders in a range of academic disciplines. history in the 2018 NAEP than they did four years ago. They received a little more last month, as eighth-graders posted lower scores in geography, civics, and U.S. It was at that moment that I realized that I didn't know where Scotland was! I later discovered that it was located within the United Kingdom, north of England, but it stuck with me how a region that should have been obvious as to where it was, was not able to be recognized by me.Trends in eighth-grade NAEP geography average scores (The Nation’s Report Card)Īmerican education observers have gotten used to receiving bad news from the National Assessment of Educational Progress. The part that really stuck with me was a forgettable piece of information, in which there were three, gigantic snow storms that were hovering over Canada, Scotland, and Siberia respectively. The film is about a sudden, global ice age that was brought about by human climate change. ![]() It was only when I watched a movie called "The Day After Tomorrow" that I realized how dumb I was about geography. I always heard on the news about famines in an obscure country called "Yemen", ongoing wars in faraway places like "Afghanistan" and "Libya", and large protests in distant nations like "India" and "Nigeria", but I never really gave them a second thought. Before I really got interested in geography and geopolitics, I never really thought about things outside my own nation, the United States. ![]()
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