Students Lagging In U.S. History
Earlier this year, a prominent education think tank gave Hawaii a ‘C’ for its U.S. history standards. The latest bad news is that the rest of the country isn’t doing any better.
The Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a D.C.-based think tank, has Hawaii’s U.S. history content standards for being too vague and disjointed.
States on the mainland have their own struggles with the subject, too, apparently. Only 13 percent of high school seniors are proficient in U.S. history, according to released Tuesday by the .
Results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (a test administered to a sample of students nationwide) show that 22 percent of fourth-graders and 18 percent of eighth-graders met the “proficient” benchmark.
Believe it or not, the scores for eighth- and 12th-graders are actually higher than they were in 1994, but not by much. High-stakes testing (read: No Child Left Behind and the state assessments that came with it) is one of the factors blamed for students’ consistently poor performance in U.S. history, because the state tests focus on math and reading skills.
There’s no breakdown of how students in each state performed, because not every state teaches U.S. history in the same grade or grades. Hawaii public school students take portions of U.S. history in fifth, eighth and 10th grades.
