Tag: dumbing down

One in FIVE students entering UC San Diego can’t write properly, new data reveals

Roughly one in five Americans entering UC San Diego cannot write at an entry level standard, a new report revealed. 

About 20 percent of incoming students to the California university had to be placed in analytical writing courses after failing to meet the requirements of a writing placement exam, which forced them into specialized courses called ‘AWP’.

The report published by a UC San Diego admissions committee added that writing skills and literacy are in decline across the entire US. 

According to the university’s faculty, freshmen students’ vocabulary was ‘increasingly’ limiting their ability to engage with longer and harder texts. 

As a whole, the school had seen a ‘steep decline in the academic preparation’ of its domestic freshmen students.

The November 6 report read: ‘Admitting large numbers of students who are profoundly underprepared risks harming the very students we hope to support, by setting them up for failure.’

One possible solution offered was ‘moving beyond GPA and course titles’ in high school to evaluate how ready students actually are for writing at a college level.

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Alaska Schools’ Social Studies Standards Omit Washington, Lincoln, And Christianity 

Alaska’s new social studies standards don’t mention the Nome Gold Rush. They don’t mention the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System. They don’t mention William Egan, the state of Alaska’s first governor, and they don’t mention Sarah Palin, who ran for Vice President of the United States. There’s a lot more that’s missing in the Alaska social studies standards, but you can tell right away that something is wrong when Alaska’s social studies standards leave Alaska’s children ignorant of the headlines of Alaska’s history and the most famous Alaskans.

Education departments in every state are on radical autopilot when they make social studies standards. Americans expect blue states to use their state social studies standards to impose identity politics ideology and action civics (vocational training in progressive activism) on schools and students, strip out factual content, and ignore or slander the history of Western civilization and America, and call it “social studies instruction” — that’s what you get in states such as Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Minnesota. But radical activists embedded in state education departments do the same thing in red states whenever policymakers and citizens aren’t looking. That’s what just happened in Alaska.

The Alaska Social Studies Standards (2024), produced by Alaska’s Department of Education and Early Development, avoided the worst of the blue-state social studies standards’ extreme politicization, unprofessional vocabulary, and ideologically extreme content. That’s because there’s hardly any historical content. The standards’ absences include basic facts of American history, much of how our government works, and our foundational documents of liberty. The standards also introduced substantial new amounts of politicized material.

How did Alaska’s Department get its curriculum so badly wrong?

The department outsourced much of the standards to the radical activists who have captured the national social studies establishment. Alaska’s standards take their structure and emphases from the National Council for the Social Studies’ (NCSS) ideologically extreme definition of social studies, as well as from its College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework for Social Studies State Standards. The C3 Framework replaces content knowledge with insubstantial and opaque “inquiry”; lards social studies with identity politics ideologies such as Critical Race Theory; and inserts ideologically extreme activism pedagogies such as Action Civics.

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Big Tech is paying millions to train teachers on AI, in a push to bring chatbots into classrooms

On a scorching hot Saturday in San Antonio, dozens of teachers traded a day off for a glimpse of the future. The topic of the day’s workshop: enhancing instruction with artificial intelligence.

After marveling as AI graded classwork instantly and turned lesson plans into podcasts or online storybooks, one high school English teacher raised a concern that was on the minds of many: “Are we going to be replaced with AI?”

That remains to be seen. But for the nation’s 4 million teachers to stay relevant and help students use the technology wisely, teachers unions have forged an unlikely partnership with the world’s largest technology companies. The two groups don’t always see eye to eye but say they share a common goal: training the future workforce of America.

Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic are providing millions of dollars for AI training to the American Federation of Teachers, the country’s second-largest teachers union. In exchange, the tech companies have an opportunity to make inroads into schools and win over students in the race for AI dominance.

AFT President Randi Weingarten said skepticism guided her negotiations, but the tech industry has something schools lack: deep pockets.

“There is no one else who is helping us with this. That’s why we felt we needed to work with the largest corporations in the world,” Weingarten said. “We went to them — they didn’t come to us.”

Weingarten first met with Microsoft CEO Brad Smith in 2023 to discuss a partnership. She later reached out to OpenAI to pursue an “agnostic” approach that means any company’s AI tools could be used in a training session.

Under the arrangement announced in July, Microsoft is contributing $12.5 million to AFT over five years. OpenAI is providing $8 million in funding and $2 million in technical resources, and Anthropic has offered $500,000.

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Why a Student With a 1590 SAT Score Was Rejected by 16 Colleges

Stanley Zhong did everything right. A 4.42 weighted GPA (3.98 unweighted). A 1590 SAT score (1600 is perfect). He’d even launched his own startup (RabbitSign).

Yet the 18-year-old Palo Alto-area graduate was stunned when he found himself rejected by 16 of the 18 schools he’d applied to, including multiple state schools.

“Some of the state schools, I really thought, you know, I had a good chance,” Zhong told ABC7 News. “I didn’t get in.”

Zhong’s story has begun to gather some media attention, which was the subject of discussion at a recent House Committee on Education and the Workforce hearing. Yet almost all of the stories failed to mention the likely reason Zhong was rejected: He’s Asian.

For years, colleges have been quietly discriminating against Asians in the admission process, admitting white, black, and Latino students with lower SAT scores and lower GPAs in the name of inclusivity. The problem for Asians is that, as a group, they tend to score really well.

This means there’s an abundance of highly qualified Asians applying to universities each year. This would not be a problem for Asian students if not for race-conscious universities, which, in recent years, have demonstrated a preference for social equity and racial balance over merit.

As a result, untold numbers of Asians have found themselves excluded from universities simply because of their race.

Harvard, which was sued in 2013 by Students for Fair Admissions for racial discrimination, is a high-profile example. Several years ago, the university released data showing that over an 18-year period (1995–2013), Asian American students outscored every other racial peer group, averaging an SAT section score of 767 (max 800). That is substantially higher than white people (745), Hispanic people (718), Native Americans (712), and black people (704).

In other words, Asian Americans had to outperform other racial peer groups to be admitted.

“[Asian Americans were] being held to a higher standard than [others], all else equal,” Duke economist Peter S. Arcidiacono wrote in a pretrial report.

The dirty secret was that Harvard, like most universities, was using racial discrimination to admit certain racial groups at the expense of others.

Many colleges and defenders of affirmative action, i.e., “positive discrimination,” refused to admit this was actually racial discrimination. Some supporters of the policy, however, had the intellectual honesty to do so.

“I can accept the trade-offs as the necessary cost of this policy,” Jonathan Chait wrote in a 2022 New York magazine article. “What I can’t accept is the refusal by Harvard and its defenders to admit what the policy is.”

Chait described their refusal as “gaslighting,” and the Supreme Court agreed. In a watershed 2023 decision, the court held that race-based admissions violated the Constitution’s equal protection clause.

The high court was right, but we should look beyond the legal problems of affirmative action.

America is built on the idea that all people should be treated equally, but today, we’re divided on the question of whether racial discrimination should be used so long as it results in preferred outcomes. The vast majority of people (73%) oppose race-based admissions, but it’s a policy supported by many liberals—indeed, demanded.

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Zohran Mamdani plans to phase out Gifted and Talented program in NYC elementary schools

Mayoral front-runner Zohran Mamdani wants to phase out New York City’s Gifted and Talented program — the democratic socialist’s latest move to revert to ex-Mayor Bill de Blasio’s era.

Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor, said Thursday he would eliminate the accelerated learning program at the kindergarten level, something that’s likely to anger parents, who have been passionately divided on the issue.

The gifted classes would remain active through the school year, but would no longer be available next fall, he said.

Critics have attacked the coveted learning model as racist due to the higher number of white and Asian students that gain entry through the exam.

But backers argue getting rid of the classes would eliminate opportunities for thousands of bright students from low-and-middle income families.

Mamdani’s proposal would be the first step in undoing the program across all elementary schools — a controversial change inside the Department of Education made by de Blasio on his way out the door in 2021, and reverted by Mayor Eric Adams when he took office.

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L.A. School District to Ban Fifth-Grade Plays About U.S. History: ‘Culturally Insensitive’

The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) is banning a celebrated series of fifth-grade musical plays about American history at a local charter school because, the district says, they are “culturally insensitive.”

For nearly three decades, the fifth-graders at Marquez Charter Elementary in Pacific Palisades have performed musicals about crucial periods in the formation of the United States.

These include Miracle in Philadelphia, about the Constitutional Convention; Hello, Louisiana!, about the voyage of Lewis and Clark; and Water and Power, about the Industrial Revolution. (A fourth-grade play, Gold Dust or Bust, focuses on the history of California.)

The musicals, co-written by Jeff Lantos (with music composed by the late jazz pianist Bill Augustine), are so successful in conveying historical details that Marquez students consistently score off the charts in history assessments.

A 2004 academic study of the Marquez plays observed: “Students who attended Marquez Elementary School scored more than twice as many items correctly [on history tests] as did students from other schools.”

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Reading and Math Test Scores for American 12th Graders Hit 20 Year Low, Despite Massive Spending on Education

The reading and test scores for American 12th graders have hit a 20 year low, new analysis has found.

This is despite the fact that the United States spends more on education than most countries. New York City is currently poised to spend up to $42,000 per student this school year.

The closure of schools during Covid can be blamed in part for this, but there has to be more to the story than that.

NBC News in Chicago reported:

Nationwide test scores show U.S. high school students falling behind in math and reading

A decade-long slide in high schoolers’ reading and math performance persisted during the COVID-19 pandemic, with 12th graders’ scores dropping to their lowest level in more than 20 years, according to results released Tuesday from an exam known as the nation’s report card.

Eighth-grade students also lost significant ground in science skills, according to the results from the National Assessment of Education Progress.

The assessments were the first since the pandemic for eighth graders in science and 12th graders in reading and math. They reflect a downward drift across grade levels and subject areas in previous releases from NAEP, which is considered one of the best gauges of the academic progress of U.S. schools.

“Scores for our lowest-performing students are at historic lows,” said Matthew Soldner, the acting commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics. “These results should galvanize all of us to take concerted and focused action to accelerate student learning.”

Trump’s Education Secretary Linda McMahon spoke about this recently and explained that this is one of the reasons why the Trump administration wants to return education authority to the states, so that parents and local communities can get more involved in fixing the problem.

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Teachers Unions Fund Leftist Causes While Students Fail Math, Reading

As union-controlled public schools in big cities continue failing to educate kids, a new report shows that the nation’s two largest teachers’ unions have contributed almost $50 million to far-left interest groups since 2022.

When kids headed back to school nationwide last week, the Defending Education website reported that the National Education Association (NEA) and American Teachers Federation (AFT) is more interested in promoting crazy causes than educating kids.

Meanwhile, during the same time, multiple reports showed that urban students are not proficient in basic subjects such as math and reading.

As urban kids languish in schools with barely literate teachers, AFT and NEA poured money into a who’s who of leftist kookery.

In the past three years, the two anti-Christian, anti-American unions “have given out a combined $43,524,123 in funding to leftwing and far-left groups,” Defending Education reported.

Some organizations receiving funds include MoveOn.org, PEN America, the Sixteen Thirty Fund, the Trevor Project, and a handful of state and federal leftwing Political Action Committees (PACs). For example, the two unions gave a combined $9,300,000 to For Our Future Action Fund, a leftwing political action committee. Additionally, the NEA gave the State Engagement Fund $9,500,000 over the same period.

AFT contributed $14,747,625 to organized leftism, while the NEA pumped in almost twice that much with $28,776,500.

AFT shoveled $100,000 each into the Color of Change PAC; National Action Network; the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation; and $200,000 into the Center for American Progress.

The Democratic Governors Association collected $600,000.

NEA delivered $106,146 to the Alliance for Justice; $500,000 to the Center for American Progress; and $75,000 to the Tides Center, a “progressive incubator” tightly linked to left-wing billionaire George Soros.

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Ken Paxton Calls For Putting Prayer And Bible Back In Texas Schools

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton urged schools to prepare for classroom prayer and Bible reading following the passage of a new state law.

“In Texas classrooms, we want the Word of God opened, the Ten Commandments displayed, and prayers lifted up,” Paxton said in a statement.

He recommended that students start with the Lord’s Prayer from Matthew 6:9-13.

He warned that the far left is actively working to strip schools of America’s spiritual foundation.

“Twisted, radical liberals want to erase Truth, dismantle the solid foundation that America’s success and strength were built upon, and erode the moral fabric of our society,” he said. “Our nation was founded on the rock of Biblical Truth, and I will not stand by while the far left attempts to push our country into the sinking sand.”

The announcement follows Senate Bill 11, approved during the 89th Legislature. The law requires school boards to vote within six months of Sept. 1, 2025, on whether to adopt policies permitting voluntary prayer and Bible reading.

The measure also directs the Attorney General’s Office to defend districts or charter schools that adopt such policies.

Supporters quickly praised the move.

“God bless you, General Paxton, for having the courage to begin the legal process of putting prayer and reading of Scripture in Texas classrooms,” Melissa Katz wrote on X.

“Amen! Thank you, sir!” added Alexander Duncan, a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate.

Critics online pushed back.

“His actions are unconstitutional. I attend mass every week. Public school should be for all, not just Christians. Note, I am a Christian/Catholic and still feel this way,” wrote Vincomputerman.

“So now students have to take time out from academics so that there can be a prayer hour? Since when can’t people pray on their own time?” asked X user Johnson@F1979J.

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She Couldn’t Read Her Own Diploma: Why Public Schools Pass Students but Fail Society

A nineteen-year-old college student is suing her former high school for negligence because she graduated despite being unable to read or write.

The student, Aleysha Ortiz, graduated from Hartford Public Schools in the spring of 2024 with honors.

She earned a scholarship to attend the University of Connecticut, where she’s studying public policy. But while she was in high school, she had to use speech-to-text apps to help her read and write essays, and despite years of advocating for support for her literacy struggles, her school never addressed them.

Her story is shocking, but unfortunately, it isn’t isolated. At 24 Illinois public schools, not a single student can read at grade level. Nationwide, 54 percent of the American adult population reads at or below a sixth grade level. Put a different way: only 46 percent of American adults gained even a middle-school level mastery of literacy—let alone high school or collegiate levels.

In a first-world country where we spend nearly $16,000 per student per year to educate our children, that’s a horrifying statistic.

Literacy is supposed to be the bedrock of a free and liberally educated society. As the Washington Post’s motto so aptly reminds us, “democracy dies in darkness.”

Illiteracy is a form of darkness, and an illiterate populace is not one equipped to handle the demands of a world filled with forms and papers and words, let alone be the voting citizens of a democratic society.

What Do Literacy Stats Actually Mean?

Officially, the United States reports a basic literacy rate of 99 percent (which should perhaps be called into question, if students like Aleysha Ortiz can graduate with honors and still be illiterate).

But “basic literacy” is a bit of a sales pitch. It sounds impressive, but in practice, “basic literacy skills” means a K-3 grade level of reading—things like Hop on Pop and Amelia Bedelia.

“Functional literacy” is what actually matters: the ability to read and understand things like forms, instructions, job applications, and other forms of text you’ll encounter in your day-to-day life. It measures both technical reading skill and comprehension—your ability to decipher the words, and your ability to discern their meaning.

An estimated 21 percent of American adults (~43 million Americans) are functionally illiterate, meaning they have difficulty reading and comprehending instructions and filling out forms. A functionally illiterate American adult is unable to complete tasks like reading job descriptions or filling out paperwork for Social Security and Medicaid.

Perhaps worse still is the statistic that 54 percent of the American adult population reads at or below a sixth-grade level. Most of us don’t think about reading in terms of grade level, so this statistic feels intuitively bad but practically meaningless. What is a sixth-grade level?

Books written at the sixth-grade level are intended (in both literacy and comprehension skills) for eleven- and twelve-year-olds. Think of books like A Wrinkle in Time, Percy Jackson and The Olympians, and The Giver.

They’re good stories, but they don’t require the same vocabulary and mental acuity as making sense of a tax form. This is an excerpt from The Giver:

Garbriel’s breathing was even and deep. Jonas liked having him there, though he felt guilty about the secret. Each night he gave memories to Gabriel: memories of boat rides and picnics in the sun; memories of soft rainfall against windowpanes; memories of dancing barefoot on a damp lawn.

More complex than Dick and Jane or Hop on Pop, obviously. But this isn’t an adult level of comprehension. If your reading abilities cap out here, you’re going to encounter a lot of text in your day-to-day life that’s difficult to decipher—often things that are important for you to be able to comprehend, like the terms of a lease agreement or the instructions on a medication.

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