Wednesday, January 22, 2014

State Worker Civics Test

So far I'm on the fence about this:
A measure that would require the state to develop an online civics curriculum for state workers is on the Thursday agenda for the Senate Appropriations Committee. The bill, authored by Sen. Leland Yee, D-San Francisco, would require that employees take the online course when they are hired, promoted or reclassified after July 1, 2015.

Yee, a candidate for California secretary of state, wrote the bill last year after learning that only a third of Americans can name the three branches of U.S. government.
Of course it would be nice if more people, especially those who work for our government, understood how government is supposed to work.  But in this case I worry about the potential for politically-motivated, heavily-biased curriculum.  I’m not sure this would be a good expenditure of state money.  I'm willing to be convinced otherwise, though.

2 comments:

maxutils said...


There will be no convincing from me. State workers already need to take a test to qualify for a job, and presumably have an interview ... if there are important things one must know to take a particular job, presumably those could come up in one or both of those places. Making it more costly to hire a state worker who is probably not needed by teaching them what they should have learned in their publicly funded high school is a horrible idea.

W.R. Chandler said...

Knowing the statist left-wing politics of Leland Yee, especially considering his draconian positions on gun control, I shudder to think about the questions and "correct" answers that would be on his pet civics test.