Surreal Junk Science On Civic Knowledge

Last June, Matthew Ladner, Vice President of Research at the far right Goldwater Institute and regular blogger at Jay Greene and the United Cherry Pickers, was madly blogging [see here and here] about the civic ignorance of Oklahoma high school students.

According to Ladner, a survey commissioned by the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs had shown that the overwhelming majority of those students didn’t know who was the first president, who wrote the Declaration of Independence, or that the first ten amendments to the Constitution were the Bill of Rights.

These are old canards, trotted out at regular intervals by the far right to fuel righteous indignation at American civic education. There is much that can and should be done to improve the quality of civic education in our schools [see this Shanker Institute report Education for Democracy*], but this sort of  “know nothing” charade is a huge diversion that only distracts from substantive issues.

Now there is compelling evidence [here and here] that this survey was the sort of fabricated junk science we have come to know all too well from the Wal-Mart Professor of Education Jay Greene and his comrades. Ladner is whining [scroll down to the comment written by Ladner] that he and COPA may have been the victim of fraud by the company which supposedly conducted the survey.

There certainly are a number of victims of fraud here. There are the bloggers and the newspaper reporters who took at face value summaries of this report such as the two Ladner published on Jay Greene’s blog. There are the people of Oklahoma who may have believed all of the reports, and the high school students who were libeled by them. But Ladner? Presumably, he read the entire report before he blogged about it twice, so he knows that among its incredible claims is the finding that 1 in 10 Oklahoma high school students said that the two main political parties in the United States were the Republicans and the Communists. Where on this earth — save perhaps the feverish far right politics of the offices of the Goldwater Institute, where the Democratic Party is seen as creeping communism — would high school students get such a bizarre idea? Where would high school students who could not identify the first president of the United States or the author of the Declaration of Independence have learned that there was such a thing as a Communist Party?

No director of research with the slightest intellectual integrity could pretend that this survey passed the most minimal smell test.

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Full Disclosure: I was among the signatories of the report.

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