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I imagine he pretty much thinks that everyday now.

I agree with his complaint about NCLB, but for different reasons.  NCLB isn’t the reason people have low levels of political knowledge.  People have lives is why they don’t pay attention closely to politics.  The kind of angst created by every study showing low levels of political knowledge is silly.  Since the advent of modern polling in the 1950s Political Scientists have understood that voters are incredibly ignorant.  The thing is, the system works despite that.  In the short run, we often elect boobs, but then when they goof up to much we find someone else.  Illinois is just having a particularly rough go of it with GRyan and Blagojevich back to back.
Let’s also point out very simply, the students affected by NCLB are mostly not voters or are new voters.  On top of that young voter participation has been increasing in recent years so the argument about NCLB doesn’t work.

Finally, we shouldn’t be teaching civics.  We should be teaching social science and history so that people have the ability to reason about their government. Civics is often code for supporting the system when the real measure should be can citizens critically engage their community which studying history and social sciences does.