Last week, New York Times correspondent Nikole Hannah-Jones published a piece that ignited a firestorm on social media. In it, she recounted her shock when her eighth-grade daughter, Najya, who had been earning A's in honors math, failed the state algebra exam.
That exam is the same one the New York Board of Regents is phasing out as a graduation requirement. The test made officials uncomfortable because it exposed significant gaps between grades and actual knowledge, as well as disparities across race and income. So, in the name of equity, the Regents is discarding it.
To her credit, Hannah-Jones admitted she hadn't focused enough on her daughter's math mastery. But if she was truly surprised by the disconnect between grades and subject knowledge, she hasn't been paying attention to education news. Across the country, bureaucrats are burying evidence of an inconvenient truth: public high schools are graduating students who are barely literate and nearly innumerate.
New York is just the latest state to eliminate exams to hide the evidence. Massachusetts no longer requires passing the MCAS to graduate. Oregon has suspended its requirement that students demonstrate essential skills in reading, writing, and math. Oregon officials tout an 83 percent graduation rate for the Class of 2025, but the prior year, only 45 percent of that class met the state's English language arts standard, and a mere 20.3 percent met the math benchmark.
The result is that diploma-holding freshmen arrive on college campuses woefully unprepared for college-level work. More than 3,000 professors in the University of California system recently petitioned their Board of Regents to reinstate standardized testing, which was dropped from admissions in 2020. Since then, the share of first-year students unqualified for entry-level precalculus has skyrocketed. At UC San Diego, that number increased 24-fold, with 70 percent of those students' math skills falling below middle school levels.
Professors have had to stop lectures to teach fractions and basic algebra while well-prepared students wait. An English professor at Berkeley reported, "After the SAT was dropped, I got students who could not write a sentence." These policies have real consequences. The ACT and SAT were used because they are highly predictive of college success, especially at elite universities. Eliminating them not only lets underprepared students into competitive lecture halls, it's intellectually dishonest. As one Berkeley tutor put it, "If we're really looking for equity in classrooms, we need to … understand who's falling behind in high school and help them fix that before they apply to university."
The state algebra exam did exactly that for Najya, revealing what Hannah-Jones called "huge gaps in the building blocks of math." Fortunately, with tutors and extra study, she has caught up. But a child whose parents can't afford tutors needs that warning even more, and earlier.
Discarding standardized tests doesn't help struggling kids any more than throwing out my scale helps me get in shape. Yet it's happening wherever education bureaucrats can get away with it. They don't want their failures measured, even though our children's success demands it.
These cynical bar-lowering maneuvers don't make for thrilling headlines, but they represent a disturbing trend weakening the next generation of Americans. We must pay attention.
Paul Ollinger is a writer and comedian in New York City. He hosts the 'Reasonably Happy' podcast and serves on the boards of two independent schools.
