Plummeting test scores? An America getting dumber might be the least of our problems – The Hill

The dumbing down of academic standards is endangering the future of our children and the entire American workforce. And the people that this, in concert with COVID policies, is harming most — at roughly two to three times the average — are non-white and socioeconomically disadvantaged students. Supporters of “equity” in education purport to be aiding and protecting non-white students first. But the results of their policies are devastating those very communities.

Scores on the ACT have decreased markedly over the last six years, sinking to a 30-year low. Every single one of the ACT average benchmarks for 2023 was below where a student would need to be to succeed in college. 

Even as this occurs, state school administrators and panels continue to lower standards for high school graduation, citing supposed discrimination against minority students that they somehow deem to be inherent in higher standards.

Universities are, unfortunately, making this problem worse. They play right into the hands of the woke mob by abolishing standardized test requirements on the grounds that tests are supposedly discriminatory. They are setting students up for failure — for a future of student loan debt without a degree. Several large studies (although not all studies) indicate that the ACT, perhaps in combination with high school GPA, is an accurate predictor of success in college.

Parents need to understand what a massive problem they are in for when academic standards for their children are lowered. We in the university setting cannot fix your child’s educational deficiencies if they remain unaddressed by the end of high school. Most introductory math and science courses in college have hundreds of students in them. There is no teacher to write an evaluation or track Johnny’s progress, keeping his parents abreast of how he is doing. Your son or daughter will just fail and drop out, period.

Even so, universities are just a small part of the problem. The chief culprits are the people sabotaging K-12 education.

The Oregon State Board of Education, for instance, recently made news by extending through 2028 its suspension of the state’s essential skills requirement for graduating high school. The original justification for this suspension was COVID. So it is now the Beaver State’s education policy to deal with learning loss by…well, by locking it in for an extra five years, long after COVID has ceased to be a daily concern.

Oregon is not alone. Over the summer, California famously adopted a new math framework for its schools. Although it is not binding, it is widely believed that the promulgation of this document will result in fewer students learning advanced math, again in the name of “equity.”

At best, these and similar state- and district-level decisions will result in tens of thousands of college-bound students taking multiple remedial classes in college, which can add as many as four extra semesters to a college career. But it is far more likely that this will cause the students affected to drop out of college altogether.

Scores are plummeting even more in subjects that are integral to the necessary growth of the American economy. Your inability to do algebra, or even to meet a minimum math standard to graduate high school, will ultimately damage much more than just your own personal career opportunities. A lack of graduates who can do trigonometry or calculus affects us all, as crucial as math and other STEM fields are to the daily functioning of human society.

We have doctor and nurse shortages, shortages in nearly every type of engineering, and shortages of people qualified for many other incredibly important jobs in our economy. The reason is not hard to discern: it is because we are failing our kids in high school and earlier. The lowering of standards can only make the problem worse.

Liberty Vittert is a professor of data science at Washington University in St. Louis and the resident on-air statistician for NewsNation, a sister company of The Hill.