Leveraging the U.S. Naturalization Test...

...to encourage schools to teach more civics

I’ve had an idea to encourage schools to teach more civics (a topic that longstanding readers know is important to me), but I fiddled and dawdled and then another smart person came along and proposed a version of it on a podcast. So it was a couple of weeks back when John Avlon said the following on episode #543 of The Fifth Column Podcast:

This is why we desperately need to reinvest in civic education, right? I feel really strongly about that. I think we need to make sure that every graduating high school senior can take the same naturalization exam that new citizens do.

Fortunately, Avlon did not say my whole idea, leaving me some space to elaborate without being an absolute lightweight copycat.

Back in September, the Trump administration announced “First Changes to Naturalization Test in Multi-Step Overhaul of American Citizenship Standards,” which was positioned by the press in the most negative possible light (worst example here, which makes no sense whatsoever). Notwithstanding a brief spate of stories, there was relatively little discussion on social media and my sense is that even “very online” partisans haven’t much focused on it.

The test was not obviously made any more difficult, at least yet. Under the old version, you had to study 100 questions and answers. An applicant would then be given ten of those questions, and have to get six of them correct to pass. Now there are still 100 questions, and you have to get 12 out of 20 correct, also a 60% passing score. Several stories have positioned this as “harder,” but I’m not statistician enough to see how it is harder.

The new questions are not obviously more difficult than the old questions - both are almost laughably easy to any reasonably educated American, and certainly anyone who reads Substack posts. Perhaps more difficult questions are coming in a subsequent revision. I hope so. In a future post I’ll propose some improvements, which are obviously needed. See, e.g.:

Regardless, I agree with Avlon’s point about asking American students to take the same naturalization test that we require of immigrants.

I would not make a high school diploma turn on passing the naturalization test. That opens a very smelly can of worms - the federal government setting specific graduation requirements for public school students. I think that is a bad idea that could go all sorts of ugly places. Imagine the politician you most deplore with that power, and perhaps you’ll see it my way.

However, I (obviously) think it should be national policy to reinvigorate the teaching of civics. It was a big mistake to all but abandon it, and we’ve paid the price in the degradation of our national discourse and quality of our political leadership.

If I were making these decisions in the Trump administration, I’d propose simply requiring that public schools demonstrate that 75% of their graduating seniors have passed the naturalization test in order to receive any federal funds.

Of course, give schools a few years to catch up. Suggest they administer the test to 10th graders, and then re-administer it to those who fail it the next two years. Otherwise, do not dictate how to teach civics, or whether the diploma should hinge on it. That would do nothing more than provoke the usual thermostatic reaction, with the inevitable counterproductive result in the end. Tie a reasonably high pass rate to federal funds, however, and public schools will have all the incentive they need to make sure their students are at least up to the standard we demand of new citizens.

That, it seems to me, is something that most Americans who aren’t professors of education would endorse.

Until next time.