Dumbing Down American Children

We all want jobs to return to America. We want companies to build factories and even industries within our borders. And we are happy to see the government develop policies to encourage the move.

And yet, these noble sentiments ignore an obvious fact. Our educational system is not producing workers who can do the jobs. Thanks to the covid lockdowns and woke learning, America’s schoolchildren have been dumbed down, to the point of being incapable of doing tomorrow’s high tech jobs. And not ust high tech jobs.

Worse yet, while children from more affluent neighborhoods are now catching up, children from poor neighborhoods are still falling behind.

Newsmax has the story:

Given every two years to a sample of America's children, the National Assessment of Educational Progress is considered one of the best gauges of the academic progress of the U.S. school system. The most recent exam was administered in early 2024 in every state, testing fourth- and eighth-grade students on math and reading.

"The news is not good," said Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which oversees the assessment. "We are not seeing the progress we need to regain the ground our students lost during the pandemic."

More specifically,

The average math score for eighth grade students was unchanged from 2022, while reading scores fell 2 points at both grade levels. One-third of eighth grade students scored below "basic" in reading, more than ever in the history of the assessment.

Pupils who are below basic level barely know how to read and write:

Students are considered below basic if they are missing fundamental skills. For example, eighth grade students who scored below basic in reading were typically unable to make a simple inference about a character's motivation after reading a short story, and some were unable to identify that the word "industrious" means "to be hard working."

The failures were mostly occurring at the lower end of the income spectrum:

Especially alarming to officials was the divide between higher- and lower-performing students, which has grown wider than ever. Students with the highest scores outperformed their peers from two years ago, making up some ground lost during the pandemic. But the lowest performers are scoring even lower, falling further behind.

It was most pronounced in eighth grade math: While the top 10% of students saw their scores increased by 3 points, the lowest 10% decreased by 6 points.

The obvious point needs to be restated, When the teachers’ unions force schools to shut down, affluent parents figured out ways to continue to educate their children. Poor parents, less so. 

Thus, an increasing wide gap in performance between rich and poor, engineered by people who rail against inequality.

The New York Post reports on the disparity:

The gap between high and lower performing students also showed signs of trouble by widening across most subjects in 2024 – with the best students doing better than those from 2022, and the worst scoring lower than those from 2022.

That gap was most starkly shown in eighth-grade math scores – where the top 10% of students saw a three-point increase, and the lowest ten saw a six-point decline.

We are going to arrive at a point where the only way to provide the human capital for the new factories and industries will be to import it from overseas. You do not think that it is an accident or an anomaly that the tech staffs of Silicon Valley high tech firms largely comes from China. 

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