Most U.S. middle-school kids don’t know how government works
By Laura Colby, BloombergBusiness
More than half of U.S. eighth-graders say Americans believe the U.S. government should guarantee them a job when they grow up.
That’s one of the findings of a federal test of children’s knowledge of history, civics and geography. Only 32 percent correctly answered the question about a belief shared by most people in the U.S. The right response: the government should be a democracy. Eleven percent said citizens favored a single political party and 6 percent, an official religion.
The results of the 2014 test, called the National Assessment of Educational Progress, were released Wednesday as Congress considers replacing the federal testing law known as No Child Left Behind, which President Barack Obama and others blame for promoting too tight a focus on math and reading at the expense of other subjects.