America's Students Are Not Stupid

A while back, the conservative think tank called the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs (OCPA) hired a firm to conduct a survey of Oklahoma students -- ostensibly to see if they were being properly educated. The firm that conducted the survey was Strategic Vision LLC, and the results they released from the survey were nothing short of shocking.

Strategic Vision LLC said they gave high school students a 10 question open-ended test. According to the company, the test showed that only 23% of the students knew that George Washington was our first president, only 14% knew Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, only 28% knew the Constitution was the supreme law of our land, only 26% knew the first 10 amendments are called the Bill of Rights, and only 43% knew our two major parties are the Republicans and Democrats.

The students didn't fare well on any of the 10 test questions. In fact, the only question where a higher than 43% got the question right was that 61% correctly identified the Atlantic as the ocean off our east coast. If this survey is valid, then Oklahoma students are downright stupid, and since they are educated much as students are educated in the rest of the country, by inference, American students in general must be stupid.

Thankfully, one Oklahoma legislator just could not accept the results of the survey. State Rep. Ed Cannaday, who had been both a teacher and school principal, thought there had to be something wrong with the survey and he set out to prove it.

Cannaday gave the same test with the same questions asked in the same way to 325 high school seniors in his district (House District 15 -- which is very representative of Oklahoma in general). The scores these seniors recorded were vastly different than those that Strategic Vision LLC had reported.

In Cannaday's test, 98% knew George Washington was the first president, 81% knew Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, 78% knew the Constitution was the supreme law of our land, 91% knew the first 10 amendments were called the Bill of Rights, and 95% knew the names of our two major political parties.

You can consult the above chart for the huge discrepancy on all ten questions between the results reported by Strategic Vision LLC and OCPA, and the results of the test given by Cannaday. Nate at fivethirtyeight.com, who is one of the best at examining polls and surveys and showing their shortcomings and strengths, believes the two results are too far apart to be accounted for by poor polling techniques or playing with the figures. He believes the survey released by OCPA was the result of outright fraud -- a complete fabrication.

I totally agree with him. American students are not stupid and American teachers are doing a good job (sometimes against terrible odds). Could our schools be doing a better job? Yes. But they are not doing anywhere near as bad a job as OCPA would have us think.

Thanks to Nate at fivethirtyeight.com and Rep. Ed Cannaday, this cruel hoax has been exposed.