Students Can’t Reason — and Are Being Taught What to Think Instead of How
By Mitch Siegler, Founder

Amid debates over banned books and politicized curricula, American students’ test scores in core areas like reading and mathematics continue to decline.

The latest National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) report card showed that average math and reading scores “dropped to their lowest levels in more than two decades among high school seniors.”

The report card indicated in 2024 that 32% of high school seniors were below NAEP Basic in reading, 33% were at NAEP Basic, and only 35% were at or above NAEP Proficient levels. In 1992, the first year of the assessment, those numbers were 20%, 39%, and 40%, respectively. The average score in 2024 was 10 points lower than it was in 1992.

Twelfth-grade performance in mathematics has also worsened: 45% scored below NAEP Basic, compared to 39% in 2005, 38% in 2015, and 40% in 2019. Yikes!

“Scores for our lowest-performing students are at historic lows – continued declines that began more than a decade ago,” said Matthew Soldner, acting director of the Institute of Education Sciences (IES).

Robert Pondiscio of the American Enterprise Institute explains that, when students are at or below NAEP’s Basic level, “They can’t reconcile conflicts, judge evidence, or detect bias. They may read the words, but they can’t test the arguments…Their skepticism leads to cynicism or blind faith. They must either trust or reject the messenger wholesale…[T]heir capacity to evaluate evidence is outsourced entirely to others.”

This sad state of affairs describes a whopping two-thirds of American high school seniors.

It is profoundly disturbing that students’ inability to deal with nuance and complexity is occurring at the exact same time they are being fed dogmatic rubbish in the form of “liberated” ethnic studies, a “discipline” that disdains the very idea of nuance. It spoon-feeds the “answers,” telling students what to think and how to feel, but skips the hard work of teaching flexible or critical thinking, reasoned debate, compromise, or disagreeing in an agreeable manner.

This ideological approach wages war against the very concept of meritocracy, scorning it as “racist.” It’s no wonder that performance against measurable standards – like those NAEP has had in place for decades – is plummeting virtually in lock-step with the growth in ideology at the expense of nuanced thinking and reasoned debate.

The opportunity cost of liberated curricula for students and society is staggering.

David Steiner, Executive Director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy and a professor of education at Johns Hopkins University, writes that students are learning skills without knowledge, which is sort of like attempting to build a house without first leveling and grading the site. “[K]nowledge acquisition,” he writes, “is the essential foundation for complex thought, including thinking critically about a topic.”

The systematic devaluing of knowledge in favor of trendy and empty radicalism means that students simply cannot put two and two together because they don’t know what they don’t know.

The priority of education should be education, not activism.

We must emphasize common sense civics, reading, writing, and arithmetic. We need to return to teaching American history, warts and all. We must teach children to strive for excellence. We must teach critical thinking, but as Professor Steiner aptly points out, we must provide the foundational basis – knowledge – first.

Otherwise, the proficiency scores will continue to decline – and we will have failed our children and America.