Nation's report card: Incomplete.

• Author: Cepeda, Esther J.
• Position: Editorials

Byline: ESTHER J. CEPEDA

As I approached the results of the latest Nation's Report Card on social studies education, I prepared myself for an inevitable drop in scores.

To my surprise, though many ''old school'' history teachers have lately chosen retirement over delivering the watered down, devoid-of-hard-facts, PowerPoint-driven lectures that are the hallmarks of what some educators call ''socialist studies departments,'' U.S. student performance has stayed the same.

Or should I say: Scores have stayed every bit as bad as the last time the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) took the pulse of history, civics and geography in public and private schools. Nationally, eighth-graders' average scores on these subjects showed no statistically significant change in 2014 compared to 2010, the last assessment year.

In history, there were no significant changes in the racial/ethnic score gaps for eighth-graders since 2010. But the score difference between male and female students widened since 1994, with male students scoring 4 points higher than female students in 2014.

There were also no significant changes in overall scores, or in the racial/ethnic gaps since 2010, in geography or civics. One small bright spot: Hispanics scored 4 points higher in history and geography than in 2010, but neither black nor Asian/Pacific Islander students improved at all.

But the bottom line: Only 17 percent of all eighth-graders assessed were proficient in U.S. history -- meaning that they demonstrated competency of subject-matter knowledge, application of such knowledge to real-world situations, and related analytical skills. Only 22 percent exhibited proficiency in civics, and 24 percent in geography.

These are pitifully low scores that we should be ashamed of and worried about. But there are even more interesting bits of information to mine.

For instance, the NAEP reports that though one common complaint about the poor performance of students in social studies is that they don't get enough exposure to the content matter in deference to math and reading -- and it's true that students perform better in these areas -- it turns out that the amount of instructional time isn't the major issue.

In a news teleconference, Peggy G. Carr, the acting commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, said that though teachers reported spending anywhere from one to seven hours a week on social studies content, ''there is no association between how...