By The Editors

Apparently, Sam Cooke, the great soul singer of the 1950s and 1960s, speaks for this generation of American elementary and secondary school students, too.

Like the love struck swain of his 1958 hit song, they, too, “don’t know much about history.”

But, unlike listening to Cooke’s catchy lyrics, there’s no pleasure to be derived from the results of the latest “Nation’s Report Card” test of fourth-, eighth- and twelfth-graders’ knowledge of American history. Instead, the results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress examination, given last year to a representative national sample of just over 31,000 pupils in the three grades, are dismaying, to say the least.

Federal education officials put the results in positive terms: 20 percent of fourth graders, 17 percent of eighth graders, and 12 percent of high school seniors showed, in the parlance of the test, “proficiency” in the subject. That is, they showed they knew and understood the subject matter.

Of course, considered from the opposite perspective, that means that 80 percent of fourth-graders, 83 percent of eighth-graders, and a truly astonishing 86 percent of high school seniors failed to exhibit a “proficient” knowledge and understanding of the nation’s history.

One may try to find some comfort in the fact that the tests showed 73 percent of fourth-graders, 69 percent of eighth-graders, and 45 percent of twelfth-graders performed at the basic level. That is, they showed some knowledge and understanding of some aspects of the different stages of American history. There’s also evidence of significant advances over the last two decades in the scores of students at the bottom of the scoring charts; and in the narrowing of the scores among white, Latino and African-American students.

But those glimmers of good news, and the fact that in overall terms these scores constitute the best showing in the history of the examination, ought to provoke a fierce determination among policy-makers, school officials and school board, and parents to raise the quality of the content and the time of instruction devoted to  teaching youngsters in American schools their American history. In fact, history teachers have long complained about the neglect that’s long been the lot of the subject in American public schools, a neglect now exacerbated by the emphasis the focus on math and reading of the No Child Left Behind Act.

Isn’t it ironic that in America, a nation awash now as always with very public references to and declarations of allegiance to historical precedent, we get – again – proof of how little commitment adults have in enabling its youth to truly understand the nation’s past.

Isn’t it ironic that this further evidence of the continuing neglect of our history in the schools should come at the very moment the “adult sector” is fervently reconsidering two pivotal eras in American history: the 150^th commemoration of the Civil War, and the 50^th anniversary of the climatic years of the Civil Rights Movement. The NAEP examination showed that most fourth-graders don’t know why Abraham Lincoln is an important American figure. It also showed that 98 percent of twelfth-graders could not explain the issue at the heart of the landmark Brown v Board of Education decision – even though the answer was actually embedded in the way the question was posed.

Referring to that depressing result, educational historian Diane Ravitch exclaimed to the New York Times, “The answer was right in front of them. This is alarming.”

It certainly is.