What can you expect if you call it "Invisible Man"?

Yet is is often said and sometimes documented that the students score and fair better than their teachers score on the very same tests. My brother maintains that the public school system makes it impossible for parents to teach their own children anything. I believe we need un-restricted choice for all children and a system to help the special children needing public schools. That will also mean black inner-city parochial schools must be enabled and yet that need is denied by those very "professionals" that profess to "love our children."

The facts have always been in on this subject: Parents and teachers are at odds with each other. In Wayne County Michigan it is said that the public school teachers account for over 30% of the riddelin drug use requests for young male children. They really love the kids? or just want higher pay and retirement benefits like all the other government employee unions?

I would be interested to see how the students fared in math and science.

It is interesting to note that the students fared very well on certain types of questions. Most students knew the answers to questions regarding the civil rights movement.

The report's assertion that science education is suffering is not supported by the data. The questions were all about history, literature, and liberal arts. Where were the questions about science?

Finally, the way they analyzed the data leaves much to be desired. Normally, the analysis would include a distribution of student scores -- how many questions a student got right. I did not see that here. Are there some low performers dragging down the group, or are they pretty poor across the board?

I'd like to see the actual test. At my age (62) I have seen and often deplored changes in K-12 education even when I was in those grades*, but -

"Invisible Man"? I know Ellison's name, but not this title. OTOH, I do remember "Black Like Me' but would have to do a search to find the author.

Just how was the Hitler question worded? If multiple choice, I would have picked Reichskanzler, but just "what was Hitler's job/title" might give me trouble (does "Fuehrer" ring a bell?).

And I still chuckle over an Australian report a couple of years ago that over 25% of their seventh-graders could not point to their nation on an unlabelled map, with responses ranging from New Zealand to Greenland.

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* For example, in grade 12 my physics instructor had a Master's in chemistry while my chemistry teacher had a PhD in physics. But the preceeding summer the former had taken (ie, been pushed into) a six-week course offered by the publisher of a new chem text, while the latter took the corresponding physics-text course, so their years of education/educating were ignored...

By luck or chance I knew the trivia question on Ralph Ellison, but really is that how we measure education? And I would have known that Hitler's title was Chancellor only by elimination - that has nothing to do with the fact that I know he was responsible for the leadership of a country which went to war and murdered millions of Jews in WWII.

This survey and its result reminds me of another trivia quote: "Lies, damn lies, and statistics." Knowledge is something much more. I can get facts from libraries (including google), whether I can use those facts toward synthesis and reason is the true objective.

I always wonder how they account for the smart teenagers giving absurd answers because the survey doesn't actually count for anything.

I wish they'd give a random group of adults (train station, mall) the same test and post the results along with the kids' results. I'm guessing the adult scores wouldn't be too different.

"The Invisible Man?" Why would such an obscure title be expected to be known? I'm not a teenager and I'm very well educated. I'd never even heard of it. What a poor choice for such a survey.

I believe the choice of Invisible Man was, ironically, a matter teaching to the test, but in reverse. It is now enshrined as part of the American high school literary canon; it was not so highlighted when I (or most of the other commentors) was in school.

I can only agree that comparative results for other groups would tell us much more -- as well as results across subjects and time. But this test was fairly clearly targeted at promoting the teaching of history and literature in American public schools, so take it for what it's worth.