"These youngsters ... aren't taught (about the Battle of Bunker Hill) in school anymore," Boston Mayor Thomas Menino has said of Boston public-school students "so we are losing part of that American history."

But American history isn't being lost at a remarkable school in Malden called the Mystic Valley Regional Charter School.

Its mission statement reads: "Central to Mystic Valley's academic environment is the incorporation of selected core virtues and the fundamental ideals of our American culture, which are embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution." I found that statement recently while preparing to deliver the school's commencement address.

Mystic Valley ranked 93rd on Newsweek's new list of America's top public high schools. Although less than 3 percent of the commonwealth's public-school students attend charter schools, the three Massachusetts schools that made the top 100 were all charters, ranking ahead of Weston High School (191) and even Boston Latin (165).

Embedded in the choice members of Mystic Valley's diverse student body make to enroll there is an education that underlies the unique view of citizenship that informed our founding as an independent nation; something that the school has emphasized as part of its mission.

Our country depends on an intellectual commitment from citizens to engender loyalty to its bedrock principles and institutions. American citizenship is not based on gender, age, a common religion or kinship ties; nor is it contingent on a common linguistic, ethnic or racial background. It is instead based on understanding and valuing the basic political principles on which this republic was founded; among them, an unswerving belief in the primacy of individual rights and responsibilities, the rule of law, promotion of the common good, and popular sovereignty.

To develop this intellectual commitment, Mystic Valley has made sure its students acquire a deep understanding of the documents that reflect or directly express these basic political principles. In essence, they acquire a common body of knowledge.

All schools should develop those core virtues and positive character traits that we now formally call "civic education." As the historian Paul Gagnon has noted, "The past repeatedly proves that no sort of diversity is safe, or has a chance at equality, except among people with common democratic ideas of politics."

Democracy's survival depends upon transmitting to each generation the political vision of liberty and equality that unites us as Americans, as well as on a deep loyalty to the political institutions our founders developed to fulfill that vision.

But we cannot take the survival or spread of democracy for granted. Surveys tell us that a majority of colleges no longer require a year's study of U.S. history. Student assessments also indicate knowledge of U.S. history has been declining among both college and high school students.

The state's history standards, on which MCAS testing is based, were designed to ensure that students learn what is needed to develop an informed, reasoned allegiance to the ideas of a free society. We need to emphasize these so American history isn't lost in our schools.

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Sandra Stotsky, a member of the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, serves on Pioneer Institute's Center for School Reform advisory board.