Your Opinion: Right intention; wrong solution on civics testing

Dear Editor:

Some Missouri legislators are promoting legislation (SB271) to force all students to pass the USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Service) test before graduating. This is a wrong idea for several reasons.

Students are already required to pass a Missouri and United States Constitution test(s) and take one-half unit of credit in government before graduating as stated in: http://www.moga.mo.gov/mostatutes/stathtml/17000000111.html .

The constitution test(s) are locally constructed with the assistance of the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. These local tests would be eliminated and replaced with a test from a federal agency. The USCIS test is poorly constructed and would eliminate any questions about Missouri state government. The Legislature would be abandoning local control and erase accountability for knowledge of Missouri's Constitution. Also many of open-ended questions have incomplete scoring guides and many are awkwardly constructed: .e.g. The House of Representatives has how many voting members? This is a declarative sentence structured as a question.

All public high school students are required to take the Missouri state End of Course Government test. The questions for this test were written primarily by government teachers using Missouri's Course-Level Expectations. The questions were field tested for reliability and validity and put into test forms of equal difficulty. The results are used for school district accountability.

There is no proof that taking the USCIS test would make students any more knowledgeable about their citizenship. A study conducted in 2008 found that the test questions were neither valid nor reliable. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15434303.2011.614031#tabModule "Results demonstrated the items vary widely in difficulty and do not all reliably measure civics knowledge. Most items do not function differently for citizens and non-citizens. The cutoff is not as accurate as applied in the operational test." An applicant for citizenship must answer six out of 10 questions correctly to pass the civics portion of the naturalization test.

The proposed test for Missouri would include 100 questions with the passing grade set at 60 correct. Some teachers may drill their students on these questions (teaching the test) all year because of fear of failure by some of their students and themselves.