Math scores on the WASL may have caused disappointment across Washington state, but you don’t hear any complaints about the social studies scores.

Oh, that’s right. There isn’t a Washington Assessment of Student Learning for social studies.

But that’s OK. The Legislature – the people who practice civics and make history – have other ways to emphasize the importance of citizenship and to support engagement by young people in the public life of their communities. Don’t they?

The state’s lawmakers know better than most how important it is to have free and spirited discussion of difficult issues that challenge society. That’s how understanding develops. That’s how compromises are shaped. That’s how consensus is reached. That’s how decisions are made and solutions achieved.

In Olympia, the Senate Judiciary Committee has a chance today to reinforce those beliefs when it takes up Substitute House Bill 1307, a measure that assures student journalists in the state’s public high schools, colleges and universities the same fundamental free-press rights that make self-government viable for all of us.

The House already has passed the measure 58-37, but it has been languishing since then in the Senate Judiciary Committee. Under cutoff deadlines for the session, it will die for this year if the committee doesn’t send it back to the full Senate today.

It’s a radical measure, to be sure, just as the American Revolution and the Bill of Rights were radical. It prohibits school officials from censoring school publications except within a narrowly defined band of legitimate concerns such as libel, invasion of privacy, obscenity for example.

Avoiding embarrassment, criticism or controversy, however, would not be allowable reasons for killing a story.

What a concept. Kids learning by doing, engaging vigorously in citizenship. Open competition among conflicting ideas is just what the Founding Fathers prescribed as a path to truth. That’s even better than the WASL.

But only if the members of the Judiciary Committee have mastered social studies well enough to understand what’s at stake.