URL: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/10/education-decline-low-expectations/684526/
This article is really informative, but it feels like it has some pretty MASSIVE gaps.
Outside of the No Child Left Behind Act has been a massive defunding and de-emphasis of the Arts. Reading is a crucial skill, but the point of reading is the thing that's not longer taught.
Why should one read? How is curiosity cultivated? Not just the desire to satiate it through one's own explorations, but to then build on it and CREATE for ones' self.
Why create?
Why write when I can film?
Why read when I can listen?
Why spend time deep inside the thoughts and words from another human, their creations traveling through time while they may not longer be living on this planet anymore?
It's the overinvestment of STEM—Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.
Each of those specialities developed through years of compounding creativity, research, and following threads of curiosity to figure something out.
So, yes. There's been a lot of the shit that's happened in this article...but there's so much else that's a pet of the story that's woefully missed out.
Then, there's the declination of Third Places like libraries or institutions where you can go find things out, be, and pollinate brains through community participation.
Feels like this needs to build out into an article.
The past decade may rank as one of the worst in the history of American education. It marks a stark reversal from what was once a hopeful story. At the start of the century, American students registered steady improvement in math and reading. Around 2013, this progress began to stall out, and then to backslide dramatically. What exactly went wrong? The decline began well before the pandemic, so COVID-era disruptions alone cannot explain it. Smartphones and social media probably account for some of the drop. But there’s another explanation, albeit one that progressives in particular seem reluctant to countenance: a pervasive refusal to hold children to high standards.
We are now seeing what the lost decade in American education has wrought. By some measures, American students have regressed to a level not seen in 25 years or more. Test scores from NAEP, short for the National Assessment of Educational Progress, released this year show that 33 percent of eighth graders are reading at a level that is “below basic”—meaning that they struggle to follow the order of events in a passage or to even summarize its main idea. That is the highest share of students unable to meaningfully read since 1992. Among fourth graders, 40 percent are below basic in reading, the highest share since 2000. In 2024, the average score on the ACT, a popular college-admissions standardized test that is graded on a scale of 1 to 36, was 19.4—the worst average performance since the test was redesigned in 1990.