As the U.S. approaches its birthday next month, we might ponder the plight of Laurie Verge and, by extension, the fate of a common history in the U.S. Laurie, a former history teacher, runs the Surratt House museum in Clinton, Maryland, about 10 miles south of Washington. The house was a stopover for John Wilkes Booth as he fled southward after killing Abraham Lincoln in 1865. Nowadays it offers a small but wonderfully comprehensive museum devoted to the Civil War.

Since its opening in 1976, local schools have bussed in about 1,000 students annually for the museum’s programs. But over the last few years – coincidentally, since the passing of President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind education reform – Laurie has seen that number drop by half.

“We’re down to between four and five hundred kids a year now,” Laurie says. “The schools just don’t have room for history or social studies in their curriculums any more.”

But that’s just the beginning of the problem. It’s hard to imagine which is more depressing – what happens when the kids don’t show up, or what happens when they do.

“I’ve had entire sixth-grade classes come here and not one child knew who Abraham Lincoln was,” says Laurie. “Sometimes I’ll get so frustrated I’ll say, ‘Have you ever seen a penny, for goodness’ sakes?’

“Then a few of them will go, ‘Oh, yeah, he’s the dude on the penny.'”

Stories like Laurie’s have multiplied across the country as the consequences of the No Child law take root in the nation’s schools.

By allocating federal education funding according to local schools’ performance in national tests for reading and math, the law pushed teachers to drill their students in the tested fields often to the exclusion of other academic subjects. For teachers and principals, the stakes are too high to do otherwise.

The No Child Left Behind law has thus had the unintended effect of pushing civics, social studies and history from local curriculums.

Those frustrations have led Tennessee Republican Senator Lamar Alexander to write the American History Achievement Act, which last month passed the relevant committee and awaits action by the full Senate.

The measure would mandate a 10-state pilot program for history testing in schools, similar to the tests mandated for math and reading. Such a program, Alexander says, would collect enough data to know how many students are learning what about American history – and why some are learning, if they are, and why others aren’t.

The results of one national assessment, released in 2001 before the No Child law was passed, gave a glimpse of the bad news. In a multiple choice test, three-quarters of fourth-graders couldn’t identify the function of the U.S. Constitution. Among eighth-graders, 91 percent couldn’t list “two issues that were important in causing the Civil War.”

Since the No Child law’s passage in 2002, the ignorance in history and civics has almost certainly deepened. Half of the 50 states, Alexander points out, no longer require students to take a course in American government.

Alexander casts the argument for his legislation in nationalist terms, giving it a special urgency. He likes to cite the late Albert Shanker, the legendary president of the American Federation of Teachers, who once answered the question, “What’s the rationale for the public school?” like so: “The public school was created to teach immigrant children the three R’s and what it means to be an American.”

Shanker was stating an historical fact. He was also making a statement of values. The recent unsettling eruption of anti- immigration sentiment in the U.S. is motivated in part by the suspicion that today’s newcomers, unlike those from earlier decades, are no longer being “Americanized” – a once common word that shouldn’t sound as quaint to our ears as it does.

Alexander’s motive is undeniably admirable. But his solution – piling further federal regulation, in the form of more nationalized testing, on local schools – may not be. The particular pickle he finds himself in is one faced by all “big government conservatives” who hope to achieve conservative goals by the un-conservative means of enlarging federal power.

One cause of the accelerating historical ignorance, after all, is the disappearance of civics and history from the curriculum. And one reason such courses have disappeared is they were pushed out by the No Child law – a reform that stands as the premier example of big government conservatism.

Is more regulation the best way to solve a problem caused by government regulation? If so, then conservative Republicans will have to rethink many of their most cherished assumptions.

And yet, on the other hand – as conflicted, wishy-washy columnists say – those of us who prize the teaching of history and who would welcome a resurgence of “Americanization” in public schools may no longer have any other alternative. Local school curriculums have been nationalized, perhaps irreversibly, thanks to President Bush and No Child Left Behind.

If senators want to give the country a suitable present for its 230th birthday, they could do worse than pass Alexander’s bill. Laurie Verge and the lonely folks at the Surratt House would be grateful.

Mr. Ferguson is a columnist for Bloomberg News.