Student test scores lower than whale poop

Well, folks, the Nation's Report Card just flunked America’s kids yet again. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the academic yardstick we've been using for decades to measure how our students stack up, dropped its latest bombshell Tuesday, and it's a doozy. 

Math and reading scores for 12th-graders have hit rock bottom, plumbing new depths of educational despair. And no, this isn’t some post-COVID hangover; the slide started years before the WuFlu turned classrooms into Zoom nightmares.

"Scores for 12th-graders in math and reading continued their years-long slide, reaching new lows on national tests, new data released Tuesday shows." 

Yes, the numbers are uglier than a public school lunch menu. The decline was already in motion pre-pandemic, but policymakers were crossing their fingers for a 2024 rebound. Spoiler alert: they got a face full of failure instead. "Average scores fell to their lowest levels since the current versions of these tests were first administered in both math and reading, as did scores for the lowest-performing students."

The NAEP sorts kids into three buckets: proficient, basic, and below basic. Guess which one's getting crowded? "The number of students scoring below basic has increased," and it isn't just a blip. In reading, the 2024 average score was the lowest since the test kicked off in 1992. A whopping "32 percent of high school seniors scored below 'basic,'" which means they can't even pick out details in a text to figure out what it's saying. 

Math was even worse. The average score is the lowest since 2005, with "45% of high school seniors" flunking the "basic" mark, highest percentage in two decades. Only 33% are ready for college-level math, down from 37% in 2019. But I bet students understand terms about what a gender-fluid, two-spirited, non-binary person is.

Here’s the kicker: the bright kids at the top? Untouched. "Students at the very top have not seen their scores decline at all but students near the bottom have seen their scores collapse." For a decade, the floor's been caving in on low performers, while the 90th-percentile kids keep sipping their intellectual lattes, unfazed. Lesley Muldoon, NAEP's head honcho, put it bluntly: "The test scores show more students are not reaching what would be considered ‘basic’ achievement across subject areas." She insists "proficient" isn't an impossible bar, but when nearly half your seniors can't hit "basic" in math, maybe it's time to rethink what's "reasonable."

By the way, it isn't just high schoolers. Eighth-grade science scores tanked too, with "38 percent of students scoring below the basic level, compared with 33 percent in 2019." At this rate, we'll be lucky if these kids can spell "science" by graduation.

So, what's the culprit? Remote learning during the pandemic sure didn't help, especially for the kids already scraping the bottom. But this nosedive started five or six years before COVID. Enter the usual suspect: screens. 

D. Graham Burnett, a Princeton science historian, nailed it: "With the ubiquity of screens, it seems inevitable that in the future, fewer people will engage with lengthy texts." He's hopeful the "cultural inheritance" of books can survive through speech or memorization, but good luck convincing a TikTok-addled teen to memorize anything longer than a 15-second dance routine.

The comments section on this story is a goldmine of real talk. A high school teacher with 25 years in the trenches laid it bare: "This is not entirely pandemic related. Educators have been witnessing a massive academic decay over the past 10-15 years. This slide in academic and emotional maturity correlates to the gaining impacts and interactions with cell phone technologies and streaming tv services." Kids aren't curious anymore, he says. They don't read, don't see adults reading (actual books, not screens), and are "widely ill-informed" unless a TikTok influencer spoon-feeds them. They can't sit still, crave constant validation, and "crumble or walk away at the slightest hint of friction or difficulties." He said, "The focus required to allow an author to unfold a narrative is an endangered quality."

A recent high school grad chimed in, echoing the same grim truth: "We are so susceptible to whatever is said on TikTok. For some reason, people will believe anything said with enough conviction." 

Motivation is in the gutter too. Why bother when college grads are slinging burgers under a mountain of debt? Add in "lack of focus" (blame the screen-fried brains and questionable ADHD diagnoses) and a system that passes kids who do zilch. "I remember in my geometry class a boy never did a single assignment," the grad wrote. "He only took the tests and routinely did poorly. However, his parents caused a fuss and he was given a high enough grade to move onto the next class." 

Look, screens and social media aren't the devil for everyone; top students seem to handle them fine. But for the kids at the bottom, swapping math homework for hours of TikTok doom-scrolling is a one-way ticket to academic oblivion. Maybe it's time we admit that "scrolling" isn't a subject, and "basic" shouldn't be a pipe dream.

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Trump administration starts anti-Semitism investigations into 55 universities

Linda McMahon, US Education Secretary

The United States Department of Education (DOE) has unleashed a fusillade against the festering sore of campus anti-Semitism, adding dozens of colleges and universities to its list of institutions facing investigation for civil rights violations. 

This is no mere bureaucratic shuffle, but a reckoning for those elite bastions of learning that have allowed the poison of Jew-hatred to seep into their not so hallowed halls.

“The department is deeply disappointed that Jewish students studying on elite US campuses continue to fear for their safety amid the relentless anti-Semitic eruptions that have severely disrupted campus life for more than a year,” declared Education Secretary Linda McMahon on Monday, her words cutting through the fog of moral equivocation like a blade. “US colleges and universities benefit from enormous public investments funded by US taxpayers. That support is a privilege, and it is contingent on scrupulous adherence to federal anti-discrimination laws.” 

One can almost hear the echoes of a bygone era when such plain speaking was the norm, not the exception.

McMahon named 55 institutions—public and private—in this latest salvo, a roster that includes the likes of Harvard University, Swarthmore College, Drexel University, and Princeton University. These are not new names to those who have tracked the rising tide of anti-Semitic filth lapping at the shores of American academia. 

At Harvard, the rot runs deep. 

Since Hamas’s barbaric invasion of Israel on October 7, 2023, the university has become a grotesque carnival of anti-Semitic excess. Its law school student government issued a resolution falsely accusing Israel of genocide—a libel as old as it is vicious. Students quoted terrorists during an “Apartheid Week” event in April, while dozens of students and faculty joined an illegal pro-Hamas encampment, rubbing shoulders with a group that peddled an anti-Semitic cartoon straight out of Der Stürmer’s playbook. Many openly cheered Hamas’s atrocities—sexual assault, child abduction, the full medieval panoply—while a mob, led by the president of the Harvard Law Review no less, hounded a Jewish student, shrieking “Shame! Shame! Shame!” into his ears. 

Harvard fought like a cornered rat to discredit lawsuits alleging its complicity in this discriminatory cesspit, eventually settling some out of court. But Shabbos Kestenbaum, a graduate of the Harvard Divinity and with a backbone of steel, refused to let the university slink away from accountability. 

Swarthmore College offers its own tableau of disgrace. There, Students for Justice in Palestine stormed Parrish Hall garbed as Hamas fighters, their faces swathed in keffiyehs like latter-day bandits. They bellowed slogans through bullhorns, battered locked doors, and tried to breach offices barricaded against their fury. Their comrades smuggled food past security’s lockdown, while others sparked a physical clash with guards, hurling expletives like shrapnel. The administration finally barred SJP from campus, but only after the damage was done—a belated gesture that reeks of cowardice.

Drexel University in Philadelphia saw its own “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” in May, a spectacle so overrun with outsiders that the campus had to be locked down. Weeks earlier, the Raymond G. Perelman Center for Jewish Life was defaced by cowardly masked vandals who tore away letters spelling out Perelman’s name—an act of petty spite amid a broader surge of antisemitic hate crimes across the nation.

Then there’s Princeton, where the Department of Near Eastern Studies peddles a book accusing the Israel Defense Forces of “maiming” Palestinians and harvesting their organs. This is not scholarship; it is blood libel dressed up as academic inquiry, a sinister echo of medieval anti-Semitic tropes. The International Legal Forum rightly called it out for what it is: a conspiratorial smear designed to inflame hatred.

The Trump administration, since taking office in January, has moved with a speed and decisiveness that shames its predecessors. On Friday, it yanked $400 million in funding from Columbia University, a sharp rebuke to a school accused of sheltering antisemitic faculty, students, and staff. Before that, President Trump issued an executive order that promises to wield “all appropriate legal tools to prosecute, remove, or otherwise … hold to account perpetrators of unlawful antisemitic harassment and violence.” 

One provision targets “alien” student extremists for deportation—those who have lent intellectual and material succor to groups like Hamas, fueling the campus chaos. A federal judge in Manhattan has stalled this in one case, involving a Columbia alumnus nabbed by ICE for orchestrating the Hamilton Hall takeover last spring. 

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Trump, unbowed, took to Truth Social: “This is the first of many to come. We know there are more students at Columbia and other universities across the country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, antisemitism, anti-American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it. Many are not students, they are paid agitators. We will find, apprehend, and deport these terrorist sympathizers from our country—never to return again.”

Here is a government that grasps what the chattering classes refuse to see: that this is not a matter of hurt feelings or academic squabbles, but a civilizational struggle against those who would cheer the slaughter of innocents and call it justice. The universities, bloated with taxpayer largesse, have had their day of reckoning deferred too long. Let it come now, and let it be thorough.

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