Just-released civics results on the Nation's Report Card show that the American public education system fails the common good by failing to teach core principles of a free society.

In recent months, several high-profile reports have criticized the declining quality of American public school education as measured by student achievement, including “Rising Above the Gathering Storm,” “America’s Perfect Storm: Three Forces Changing Our Nation’s Future,” and “Tough Choices or Tough Times: The Report of the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce.

Status-quo apologists like the Center for Education Policy, however, insist that public schools are still essential to promote citizenship and democracy. Yet even they admit that “the realities of public education have sometimes failed to live up to those ideals.” Now is one of those times.

Today results for civics achievement on the Nation’s Report Card were released. The assessment gauges how well American students are being prepared for citizenship. Here are just some of the results. Achievement among American fourth-, eighth-, and twelfth-graders in 2006 is essentially flat lined at 1998 levels, with around seven out of 10 students scoring below grade-level proficiency by the time they’re ready to graduate high school. 

Even among high school seniors scoring proficient in civics, almost one quarter could not correctly answer, “What are civic life, politics, and government?” About half of seniors scoring at basic levels couldn’t answer that question. High school seniors did even worse on specific questions. When asked, “How does the government established by the Constitution embody the purposes, values, and principles of American democracy,” only five percent of students overall could provide a complete answer. Fewer than half of all advanced students could do so.

High school seniors scoring below grade-level proficiency in civics can’t explain fundamental principles like federalism. They can’t explain the President’s responsibility to enforce the law or the checks on the executive’s power.

Defenders of the current system think it’s unfair to judge schools solely by how well they prepare students for the workforce alone—that is, by the private benefits of education that accrue to the individual measured in terms of achievement scores and future annual earnings. Fair enough.

But when the American public education system can’t even live up to apologists’ fuzzier “common good” standard, it’s time to reconsider what’s so public about the system these days—besides massive public subsidies that amount to about four percent of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP).