Stephan: I am increasingly concerned that American students score very poorly on various education assessments. This has been going on for many years, but the Covid pandemic has greatly exacerbated this problem, as this article describes. Poorly educated children tend to drop out or, even if they graduate highschool they are less likely to go to college or, again, even if they do to graduate. We also know that the lower one's education level the more likely a person can be made fearful and be easily manipulated, which results in voting Republican. That is one of the reasons the MAGAt Republicans are trying to dismantle public education in the United States. This also leads to other failures and complications. China, for instance, now significantly surpasses the U.S. in technological innovation as measured by the number of patents each country obtains each year.
The declines in the national test scores spanned almost all races and income levels and were markedly worse for the lowest-performing students. Credit: Jim Wilson / The New York Times
National test results released on Thursday showed in stark terms the pandemic’s devastating effects on American schoolchildren, with the performance of 9-year-olds in math and reading dropping to the levels from two decades ago.
This year, for the first time since the National Assessment of Educational Progress tests began tracking student achievement in the 1970s, 9-year-oldslost ground in math, and scores in reading fell by the largest margin in more than 30 years.
The declines spanned almost all races and income levels and were markedly worse for the lowest-performing students. While top performers in the 90th percentile showed a modest drop — three points in math — students in the bottom 10th percentile dropped by 12 points in math, four times the impact.
“I was taken aback by the scope and the magnitude of the decline,” said Peggy G. Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, the federal agency […]
