Issue date: 2/29/08 Section: City

Most teenagers don't know the essentials of history and literature, according to an independent survey of 1,200 teens released Tuesday, but officials of Evanston Township High School District 202 said they hope their students are bucking the trend.

"We're very fortunate - this is a school that has always valued that broad education," said District 202 Superintendant Eric Witherspoon.

The study comes from an advocacy group called Common Core, which in January asked respondents multiple-choice questions from a 1986 federal government test. The results were grim: Fewer than half of the students knew when the Civil War was fought and about one in four could not identify Adolf Hitler as the chancellor of Germany during World War II.

Staff at Common Core blamed the detriment of a liberal arts education on the No Child Left Behind federal requirements that emphasize results in public schools.

Witherspoon did not deny that No Child Left Behind has changed the face of public education across the country since it became law in 2002.

"Some of the issues here probably really do turn up everywhere," he said. "You read some of this (data), you're thinking, 'How could that be?'"

Rachel Hayman, vice-president of the Evanston Township High School Board of Education, said she agreed that the federal requirements contribute to this problem.

"I do think that No Child Left Behind has created an environment all across the country where teachers are put in the painful position of teaching to the test," she said.

Hayman declined to say whether her school is immune to those kinds of problems, but said she has noticed a tendency to focus on tests in the past few years.

"At the end of the day, doing well on multiple-choice questions does not prepare you for the real world," she said. "My kids' education is a lot more test-based than mine was."

That emphasis on testing is what has hamstrung a lot of schools, said Antonia Cortese and Diane Ravitch, two trustees of Common Core, in their preface to the group's findings.

"Testing is important, of that we have no doubt," they wrote in the study. "But tests are not the be-all and end-all of education."

The high school is currently undergoing government-mandated restructuring because it failed No Child Left Behind standards five years in a row. Even with efforts to improve test scores, Witherspoon said that his school would not skimp on the liberal arts.

"I think we'll be OK as long as we instill that emphasis on truly educating," he said.

Witherspoon credited the school's long school days, extra support for struggling students and Evanston itself with helping giving students a broad education.

"A lot of it has to do with the community we serve," he said. "(Liberal arts) is very much part of the value system of the community."



megancrepeau2007@u.northwestern.edu

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