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Spoiler Alert: we can’t blame the following on Covid, at least not yet.
The dumbing down of academic standards endangers our children’s future 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 one of the ACT average benchmarks for 2023 was below where a student would need to be to succeed in college.
THE BAR IS SUPPOSED TO GO UP
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 mob by abolishing standardized test requirements because tests are supposedly discriminatory. They are setting students up for failure — for a future of student loan debt without a degree.
Several extensive studies (although not all) indicate that the ACT, perhaps in combination with high school GPA, accurately predicts college success.
Parents need to understand what a massive problem they face when their children’s academic standards are lowered. In the university setting, educational deficiencies can only be fixed if they are addressed by the end of high school.
Most college introductory math and science courses have hundreds of students. No teacher can write an evaluation or track Johnny’s progress, keeping his parents abreast. So students will fail and drop out, period.
VANDALIZING THE SCHOOL DAY
Even so, universities are just a tiny part of the problem. The chief culprits are the people sabotaging K-12 education.
For instance, the Oregon State Board of Education 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.
IN REVERSE
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 integral to the American economy’s necessary growth. The inability to do algebra or even meet a minimum math standard to graduate high school will ultimately damage much more than 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 critical jobs in our economy. The reason is easy to discern: we are failing our kids in high school and earlier. The lowering of standards can only make the problem worse.
THE REAL REASON?
But perhaps we should look for connections to another 21st-century megatrend — namely, the decline in mental health among young people. Could these phenomena have a common cause?
An obvious candidate is the influence of smartphones (my column last issue, 11/20 titled – “Smart Kids or Smartphones?”) and social media. After all, these technologies have altered the medium in which we immerse our minds daily. The impact of tech doesn’t have to be all bad — for instance, computer games might explain the improvement in shape rotation skills — but if cognitive ability and mental well-being have declined over the same period that we’ve become addicted to our glowing rectangles, then, at the very least, we should acknowledge a correlation.
WHEN HELICOPTER PARENTING CRASHES
We should also look hard at over-attentive parenting styles and the ongoing safe-space mentality in the education system. I doubt that robbing children of the chance to work things out for themselves contributes much to their mental resilience or cognitive development.
One thing is sure. Over the 21st century, how we form young minds has changed due to profound technological and cultural shifts.
SPOILER ALERT 2:
Once the Covid learning backslide is figured in, it will mean tough choices for administrators and elected officials who should be mobilizing the country against the further threat of dumb.
This column is by Ritchie Lucas, Founder/CEO of the non-profit The Student Success Project. He can be reached by email at ritchie@studentsuccessproject.org and on Facebook as The Student Success Project.
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