As the nation’s testing scores and grades plummet across the country, the entire educational policies of the United States are being called into question.
The National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) revealed that fourth and eighth graders’ scores in math declined during the pandemic. Fourth graders saw a five point drop since 2019, and eighth graders’ math scores went down eight points. ACT college admissions scores also went down this year, but that drop has been happening for five years in a row.
Nicholas Giordano, a professor of Political Science at Suffolk Community College in New York and a Higher Education Fellow with the Leadership Institute’s Campus Reform, told The Daily Wire that education has been failing students.
“The education system has collapsed, and it’s been that way for a long time. I think that the bigger story is that even as scores have been falling for five years in a row, the standards at the same time have been dropping as well,” he said, adding that tests are easier today than they used to be, but students are getting worse grades on them.
“The education system is not really based on education anymore. It’s based on the idea of indoctrination and activism. And we see these failures. The proficiency ratings within the United States continue to decline as standards are dropping at the same time,” he said.
Giordano pointed out that the downward trend was happening before the pandemic, but the pandemic made it worse.
“Harvard did a study showing that students, if they returned to school for the 2020-2021 school year, they were still 20% behind where they should be. If they still did remote learning throughout the 2020-2021 school year, they were 50% behind where they should be,” he said.
“We’ve created a system where we’re just cycling students through. It’s like a mill, where they just get promoted to the next grade, even though they can’t read or write or do mathematics at the grade level that they’re in,” he added.
“One of the scariest things to know is that 12th grade textbooks and 11th grade textbooks are based on 7th grade reading level. So when we bring up something like ACT and we’re seeing the scores drop, well, perhaps it’s because we’re using 7th grade reading levels for the juniors that would be taking the ACT test,” he said.
He said education is one of the main issues in the 2022 midterms “because parents have become aware that the schools have failed the students.”
He said there are a lot of parents with bitterness and resentment who aren’t being noticed, and he believes they will show up to vote. “I think the Democrats have underestimated education as an issue, thinking that it won’t really affect them in the elections,” he said.
Giordano pointed out that the topic of education should be discussed more often “considering that no country survives when their education system is nonexistent.”
“And as the United States, we fell in worldwide rankings when it comes to K-12, and we’re now seeing the university rankings fall as well for the last five years in the top 100 universities. So we’re seeing a failure across the board in academia,” he added.