Bad education is a terrible way to fight inequality
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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No Child Left Behind Act
12 min read
The article references George W. Bush's education reform movement that 'collapsed in the mid-2010s' - this was the No Child Left Behind Act, the landmark legislation that shaped American education policy for over a decade before its replacement
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Grade inflation
13 min read
The article's central concern is schools giving passing grades to students who haven't learned the material - understanding the history and academic research on grade inflation provides essential context for this phenomenon
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National Assessment of Educational Progress
12 min read
The article cites NAEP data showing eighth graders are 'a full school year behind where they were in 2013' - understanding how this 'Nation's Report Card' works and its history helps readers evaluate these claims
Two weeks ago, the world of education was rocked by a bombshell report from the University of California San Diego. It revealed that the number of UCSD students who lack basic reading and math skills has absolutely exploded since 2020. The percentage of students needing a remedial class on basic junior-high-school level math jumped from 0.5% to over 12%. Some were even unable to do basic elementary school math. More than a fifth of entering students now fail to meet basic writing requirements.
According to the report, pandemic learning loss is one reason there are so many incapable students showing up at UCSD, but most of the problem is due to falling admissions standards. The UC system eliminated standardized test requirements in 2020, and since then it has been admitting rising numbers of kids from bad schools that inflate grades by ridiculous amounts.
Lots of people have written very good articles about this report since then, so I’ll quote from a few of them. The Argument’s Kelsey Piper talks about how the problem isn’t that UCSD students haven’t completed the required K-12 math courses — it’s often that they did complete the courses but were given passing grades without actually learning math:
Only 39% of the students in the remedial class knew how to “round the number 374518 to the nearest hundred.”
Reviewing test results like these, you would expect transcripts full of Cs, Ds, or even failing grades. But alarmingly, these students’ transcripts…said they had taken advanced math courses and performed well.
“Of those who demonstrated math skills not meeting middle school levels,” the report found, 42% reported completing calculus or precalculus…The students were broadly receiving good grades, too: More than a quarter of the students needing remedial math had a 4.0 grade point average in math. The average was 3.7…A number of high schools are awarding A grades to AP Calculus students who do not have any calculus skills and who would get the lowest possible score on the AP Calculus exam if they took it…
“I have taught AP Calc in circumstances that produced this kind of result,” one public school high school math teacher told me. “No one can do fractions.”…[A]lmost all of them fail the AP Calculus exam at the end of the year.
And The Atlantic’s Rose Horowitch finds that while the problem is especially severe at
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