They’re only off by one word—and 86 years.
A new poll by a higher education advocacy group found that 18% of American adults believe Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was behind the New Deal, the package of government interventions President Franklin Delano Roosevelt introduced in 1933.
The freshman congresswoman representing Queens and the Bronx is in fact the primary House sponsor of a resolution called the Green New Deal, named for the original Depression-era legislation. It lays out ways to slash carbon emissions and move the American economy off fossil fuels.
The American Council of Trustees and Alumni, which sponsored the study of 1,002 adults, blamed the lack of basic civic awareness on the education system.
“When American history and government courses are removed, you begin to see disheartening survey responses like these,” Michael Poliakoff, the group’s president, said in a release.
De Blasio’s Green New Deal to bar Hudson Yards–style buildings
The University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center, which conducted the research, found that college graduates were slightly better informed than the populace at large: 12% of those with a degree conflated the Ocasio-Cortez and Roosevelt agendas.
These were not the only disturbing results. More than a quarter of those surveyed believed that Brett Kavanaugh, President Donald Trump’s controversial Supreme Court appointee, holds the role of chief justice. That position in fact belongs to John Roberts. And almost two-thirds of Americans—and more than half of college graduates—did not know the term lengths of members of the House of Representatives (two years) and U.S. Senate (six).
Why do we teach U.S. history and government to students? The answer is simple: to prepare students for engaged and informed citizenry, the essential ingredient for preserving the American republic. Unfortunately, ACTA’s most recent What Will They Learn?® survey of the core curricula at over 1,100 colleges and universities found that only 18% of institutions require students […]
The Founders admonished that informed, engaged citizens would be the indispensable guardian of our liberty. ACTA’s surveys, however, administered over the past two decades, reveal that our schools—and especially our colleges and universities—have done a poor job of ensuring the civic literacy on which our nation depends. Too many institutions fail to require courses that […]
A new survey commissioned by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni sheds a bright light on our nation’s civic knowledge crisis. Colleges and universities significantly contribute to the problem by chipping away at their core requirements in essential areas of knowledge; students graduate unprepared for informed citizenship and the workforce. U.S. history is often […]
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