Critics of Bush’s No Child Left Behind act have seized on a new survey by Common Core, a nonprofit education-advocacy group. The survey indicts the president’s education system for shortchanging students in the liberal arts. Slate has summarized it as a “depressing survey of what high-schoolers don’t know.”

A Common Core spokesperson told The New York Times that the findings demonstrate that American students are “stunningly ignorant” and pegs NCLB as the culprit, saying it has “impoverished public school curriculums by holding schools accountable for student scores on annual tests in reading and mathematics, but in no other subjects.” A USA Today article likewise reported that NCLB’s “focus on improving basic reading and math skills in elementary school might only make matters worse, giving short shrift to the humanities.”

The study updated one conducted 25 years ago, surveying 1,200 17-year-olds’ grasp of literary and historical topics through 30 questions lifted from the Department of Education’s 1986 National Assessment of Educational Progress exam. That it reveals some learning shortcomings isn’t really contested. The study’s critics contend that results don’t paint a total NCLB mea culpa. Instead, they say, the curriculum and the educational environments themselves may have shifted leftward—to the detriment of a well-rounded education. (Though this claim, too, may be as flimsy as Common Core’s.)

For example: Walt Whitman. A shocking 72 percent of 17-year-olds surveyed knew that Whitman wrote the line “I celebrate myself, and sing myself” in his Leaves of Grass. Most agree this is a large number. Yet asked who Job from the Bible was, critics complain, half of students didn’t know. Likewise, 20 percent more students identified Whitman’s Leaves of Grass line than knew the plot of George Orwell’s 1984. While a question on the plotline of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man hit rock bottom, two of the three top-scoring literary questions dealt with racism (Uncle Tom’s Cabin) or slavery (To Kill a Mockingbird). After the bottom-rung Invisible Man question were ones on The Canterbury Tales, Orwell’s dystopia, Job and Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. (This was also a multiple-choice test. On the Whitman question, if the three options besides Whitman had included notable contemporaries like William Wordsworth or Ralph Waldo Emerson, rather than less known, less relevant poets like Robert Lowell, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Archibald MacLeish, correct responses would probably have dropped.)

Of the historical topics, 97 percent of students identified Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Fewer than 70 percent could pinpoint the purpose of the Federalist Papers, the time period of the Civil War or the fact that the Bill of Rights guarantees freedom of speech and religion. Topics like Brown v. Board of Education presented less trouble, and more students knew the ramifications of Watergate than the preamble to the Declaration of Independence. (Although students did do well on questions about the founding fathers.)

This bleak picture—of students unaware of 1984 and what half-century the Civil War took place in—tracks with another recent USA Today survey that asked students to list “the most famous Americans,” not counting presidents or first ladies. Their responses ran, from the top down: MLK, Harriet Tubman, Susan B. Anthony, Ben Franklin, Amelia Earhart, Oprah, Marilyn Monroe, Thomas Edison and Albert Einstein. The list set off a conservative firestorm of commentary about “history as therapy.”