For the past several years, America has been using its youth as laboratory rats in an extensive, if not exactly well-thought-out, education experiment. Schools across the country are lowering standards and removing penalties for failure. The results are coming into focus.
Five years ago, about 30 incoming freshmen at UC San Diego arrived with math skills below high-school level. Now, according to a recent report from UC San Diego faculty and administrators, that number is more than 900 — and most of those students don’t get the full amount. Middle-School Mathematics Standards. Many students struggle with fractions and simple algebra problems. Last year, the university, which admits less than 30 percent of undergraduate applicants, launched a remedial-math curriculum that focuses entirely on concepts taught in elementary and middle school. (According to reports, more than 60 percent of students who took a previous version of the course could not divide a fraction by two.) One teacher of the course noted that students faced more problems with “logical thinking” than with math facts. They didn’t know how to start solving word problems.
The university’s problems are immense, but they are not unique. Over the past five years, at all other University of California campuses, including UC Berkeley and UCLA, the number of first-year students unprepared for precalculus has doubled or tripled. Maria Emelianenko, chair of the mathematics department, tells me that George Mason University in Virginia is relaunching its remedial-math summer program in 2023, when students unable to do algebra will begin taking calculus courses.
“We call it quantitative literacy, just knowing which fraction is bigger or smaller, that the slope is positive if it’s going up,” Janine Wilson, chair of the graduate economics program at UC Davis, told me. “Things like this are ingrained in our bones as we get ready for college. We’re seeing many people without that ability.”
Part of what’s happening here is that as more students choose STEM majors, more of them are being introduced to introductory math courses during their freshman year. But the national trend is quite clear: America’s students are getting worse at math. The decline began nearly a decade ago and accelerated during the coronavirus pandemic. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the gold standard for tracking academic achievement, the average eighth grader’s math skills, which rose steadily from 1990 to 2013, are now a year behind their full school year in 2013. Students in the bottom tenth percentile are left even further behind. Only the top 10 percent have recovered to 2013 levels.
On the one hand, this means that math scores are close to where they were in the 1970s – hardly the Dark Ages. On the other hand, losing 50 years of math-education progress is a clear disaster. How did this happen? One theory is that the distracting effects of phones and social media are to blame. The decline in math scores coincides with the widespread adoption of smartphones; As of 2015, about three-quarters of high-school aged children had access to it. A related possibility is that technology is making students complacent. Emelianenko told me that students “are no longer engaged in mathematics classes”; They believe that they don’t need to learn math, because they can use AI instead.
Or maybe students have stopped achieving in math because schools have stopped demanding it of them. During the George W. Bush administration, federal policy emphasized accountability for public schools. Schools that performed poorly on standardized tests initially received increased funding, but if scores still did not improve, their funding was withdrawn. Research shows that it helped improve math results, especially for poor black students. However, after 2015, the federal government retreated from its accountability measures, which faced bipartisan criticism. (Some teachers unions and progressive parents wanted less emphasis on standardized tests, and some conservative politicians wanted the federal government to remove itself from education policy.) Many schools across the country have shifted toward making math attractive to students at the expense of evidence-based teaching practices. And due to lack of funding or misguided efforts to improve equity, many students are barred from taking the most difficult math courses.
The pandemic supercharged the decline. In districts that spent most of the 2020-21 school year mandating remote learning, students fell more than half a grade behind in math; Districts that reopened first saw more modest declines. These difficulties prompted teachers to further relax their standards. “Everyone was exhausted and challenged by the circumstances surrounding the pandemic,” Joshua Goodman, a professor of economics and education at Boston University, told me. “And I think one of the reactions of everyone involved was to say: ‘Let’s lower our expectations. Let’s make sure we’re not failing students when they’re not doing their work, because the world is challenging right now.'” Many districts adopted a “no zero” policy, forcing teachers to pass students who had little grasp of the material. A study of public-school students across Washington state found that almost none received an F in spring 2020, while the share of students receiving A’s skyrocketed. Math grades have remained high in the years since.
Together, these changes meant that even though students’ math preparation was stagnating, their grades were rising. UC San Diego reports that more than a quarter of students enrolled in elementary and middle-school level remedial courses last year earned straight A’s in their high-school math classes. Almost all of them had taken advanced mathematics courses in high school.
At the same time, the UC system eliminated its best tool for assessing students’ academic preparedness. In 2020, system leaders voted to include phased standardized-test scores in admissions decisions. He argued that the tests worsened racial divisions and unfairly privileged wealthy students. But the report found that SAT and ACT scores are the most reliable predictors of a student’s math ability. Morgan Polikoff, an education professor at the University of Southern California, told me, “Again, it’s not really surprising that you’re going to admit more students who are not prepared for math, because you removed a piece of the data that told you that.” That same year, the UC system dramatically increased the number of students enrolled from under-resourced high schools. These students are more likely to engage in Mathematics 2, a remedial course at the elementary and middle-school level.
The new report calls on the UC system to consider reinstating the use of standardized-test scores in admissions and to bring UC San Diego’s enrollment of students from under-resourced schools back in line with other selective UC colleges. “Admitting large numbers of students who are grossly underprepared risks harming the very students we hope to support, setting them up for failure,” the report said.
Bringing back standardized-test scores might help specific institutions get out of the remedial-math business, but it won’t solve the underlying problem of widespread underdiagnosis. “Regardless of what a university is doing with its admissions process, American students have been getting worse in terms of their math skills over the past decade,” Goodman told me. Already, researchers predict massive economic costs from declining quantitative skills.
Dan Goldhaber, director of the Center for Education Data and Research at the University of Washington, told me he doesn’t know anyone who denies that young people are much worse at math than previously thought. Instead, most of the arguments for optimism rest on the idea that students will no longer need basic math skills because they can use AI instead – an idea they find absurd.
Other academics I spoke to seemed to agree. “Who would trust someone with a degree in airline engineering who doesn’t know how to think about a problem without being told the answer by a computer?” Stanford mathematics professor Brian Conrad told me. “The premise that fundamental ideas no longer need to be learned is a recipe for folly.”