That said, some experts note that one powerful use of NAEP is to offer an independent barometer to compare with results on state tests, especially when it comes to reading and mathematics. In other words, if state test results show 90 percent of students are proficient in a given subject but NAEP says it’s 25 percent, that may be a red flag that the state’s bar for “proficient” is not set very high. (The NAEP exam for history, civics, and geography does not report out state-by-state results, however.)

In any case, there are some interesting long-term trends across multiple NAEP subject areas. Peggy Carr, the acting commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics (which oversees NAEP) noted during Tuesday’s press call that U.S. students have continually made gains on the reading assessment, particularly among those in the lowest-performing quartile. She theorized that those gains in literacy might have helped them when it came time to take the latest history and civics test.

If students are more confident readers, the history and civics questions might be less daunting “and they might be able to access these materials better than they were in past years,” Carr said. (The education historian Diane Ravitch made a similar argument when the high school NAEP history results—also lackluster—were released in 2011, saying it gains by lower achievers potentially reflected improved literacy rather than a deeper grasp of the content.)

And simply adding more class hours would not solve the problem. As Carr told me: “There’s no association between how much time is spent on a subject in a given year and how well students perform.”

Given that NAEP scores on history, civics, and geography have been sluggish since 1998, today’s report is no surprise. A 2011 story by NPR contended that American students have always been weak in the subject, providing a laundry list of banner headlines lamenting poor history scores all the way back to 1955. And despite that, the United States continues to lead the world in key areas, Ravitch said in the NPR interview.

“We have to temper our alarm,”Diane Ravitch told All Things Considered host Laura Sullivan in the 2011 interview. “And realize we’re not a very historically minded country.”

To be sure, ensuring an engaged and informed citizenry was one of the original arguments made by the Founding Fathers who advocated for free public schools. There’s been a groundswell in recent years to make civics education a national priority, with several states increasing the curriculum requirements for K-12 students (The Wall Street Journal put together a handy chart). Robert Pondiscio, now with the conservative-leaning Thomas B. Fordham Institute, argued in 2013 that passing the U.S. citizenship test should be a requirement for high-school graduation. In January, Arizona became the first state to take that step.