If “public education is the bedrock of Colorado’s democracy,” as Democratic sponsors declare in the TABOR-busting Senate Bill 26-135, then why do lawmakers want to cut social-studies testing from two grades to one? Someone might conclude that not even the legislators believe the slop they’re slinging on behalf of the teachers’ unions.
A look at social-studies testing
Given how abysmally most Colorado students perform on the social studies portion of the Colorado Measures of Academic Success, maybe it’s no wonder that some legislators want to sweep the evidence of underperforming public schools under the rug.
If you look at CMAS results by year, you’ll find that the last publicly-released data for social studies are from 2019. Huh. You’d think that assessment of knowledge obviously relevant to a functional republic would be taken a little more seriously.
Regardless, you will find that 23.9% of fourth graders and 17.9% of seventh graders who took the test “met or exceeded expectations.” So try not to laugh hysterically or sob as you recall that “public education is the bedrock of Colorado’s democracy.”
So what happened to social studies testing? According to a Colorado Department of Education document prepared for a January 15 meeting of the State Board of Education, “Colorado began administering social studies assessments in 2014,” but the test was “not administered between 2020-2024.”
According to a spokesperson from CDE, testing was pulled in 2021 due to the pandemic, then further delayed because the state was revising social-studies standards. Finally, six years later, the test again was administered for 2025. As before, the social studies test was given only to a sampling of students, not all students in a given grade.
Although results were not publicly released, CDE suggests in its document for the Board that, based on the current version of the test, and depending on where they draw the cutoff for performance categories, around a quarter to a third of fourth and seventh graders met expectations.
At the national level, the National Assessment of Educational Progress for 2022 also indicates that students are struggling in civics, with only 22% of eighth graders showing proficient or advanced understanding and 31% falling “below basic” achievement.
Poor testing results are consistent with more-specific surveys of general knowledge, as Rachel Wolf recently pointed out for Fox. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni found a “dangerous level of civic illiteracy among college students,” while the U.S. Chamber of Commerce found “alarming lack of civic literacy among Americans.”
The effort to limit social studies testing
House Bill 26-1353 “eliminates the requirement for the department of education . . . to administer a state assessment in social studies to elementary school students and specifies that the department is only required to administer a state assessment in social studies to students enrolled in seventh grade in a public school,” per the summary.
“The bill also eliminates the requirement that the department administer a state assessment in social studies in a representative sample of public schools each year.” However, the actual language of the bill says the test must be given for “seventh grade in public schools throughout the state.” The fiscal interprets that to mean that the test will be given “to all seventh grade students.” So in that sense testing is actually expanding for seventh grade, even as it’s cut for fourth grade.
This effort to limit social-studies testing to a single grade is bipartisan. Although two of the sponsors, Sens. Jeff Bridges and Judy Amabile, also are sponsors of the TABOR-buster, the testing bill also lists Republican Sen. Barbara Kirkmeyer as a sponsor, presumably because the bill would save a few hundred thousand dollars.
Of course this bill to cut social-studies testing to a single grade includes the emergency “safety clause,” because I guess we can’t effectively teach kids about social studies unless legislators routinely remind us that they are prepared to lie to the public about something being “necessary for the immediate preservation of the public peace, health, or safety,” in order to evade a potential referendum challenge.
Maybe we should consider ourselves lucky that the legislature left in place any accountability at all for social studies education. As of Jason Gonzales’s March 14 article for Chalkbeat, the Joint Budget Committee was considering cutting the test entirely.
Gonzales adds, “The idea to cut the test has the support of the Colorado State Board of Education, which voted unanimously in August to eliminate the social studies assessment as part of budget reductions, according to a Colorado Department of Education spokesperson.”
Further: “Originally, the test was also given to high school students, but lawmakers officially ended a requirement for older students to take it in 2020. And a group of Democratic lawmakers filed legislation in 2023 to get rid of the social studies test requirements.” That was Senate Bill 23-061.
We need accountability
Colorado is not the only place looking to reduce accountability for teaching students social studies. Jaime Osborne, a teacher and education professor, notes that some Virginia officials pursued the same path.
Osborne writes, “If social studies is not included in accountability, history tells us exactly what will happen. Under No Child Left Behind, subjects that were not tested were systematically de-emphasized. Instructional time shrank, curricula thinned, and expectations fell. Accountability drives priorities, whether educators like it or not.”
I agree. Indeed, I think social-studies testing should again be expanded to all students in at least three grades, not contracted to one grade.
Does testing cost some money? Yes. But the cost of testing is a tiny fraction of funds devoted to public education. Because of the inherent incentives problems of tax confiscation to finance public schools, we should expect those schools, left to their own devices, to be minimally accountable for educational outcomes. Testing at least gives taxpayers and parents some measure of accountability. That’s the least we deserve.
Ari Armstrong writes regularly for Complete Colorado and is the author of books about Ayn Rand, Harry Potter, and classical liberalism. He can be reached at ari at ariarmstrong dot com.
