Our Students Deserve Deeper Learning and Higher Standards

By Mitch Siegler, Founder

Today’s students have unprecedented access to information and tools that can produce answers instantly, even as many schools struggle to teach the knowledge and skills needed to evaluate those answers. Generative AI can summarize a book, write an essay, or solve an equation. That fact makes it more, not less, important for students to understand how an answer was reached, whether it is supported by evidence, and where errors or missing context may be hiding. Otherwise, we are in for a woeful era of misinformation, incomprehension, confusion, and worse: imagine if the next generation is unable to distinguish truth from propaganda.

Such a critical examination of the responses generated by AI requires deep learning across academic subjects. Students need to learn how to read closely, write clearly, reason logically, interpret historical evidence, and understand mathematics and the scientific process. They also need the patience to work through uncertainty, reconsider assumptions, and explain their conclusions. Without those foundations, technology will become a substitute for understanding – and a primary cause of misunderstanding. In this case, the AI future could make our current polarized society look like the warm-up act.

Recent national evaluations clearly show that these important skills demand renewed attention. In the 2025 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) long-term-trend assessment, nine-year-olds improved in both reading and mathematics compared with 2022. However, their mathematics performance remained below 2020 levels. Among 13-year-olds, neither reading nor mathematics scores improved significantly from 2023, and both remained below pre-pandemic levels. Both were barely better than scores registered in 1971 and 1973, respectively. The 2024 grade-level assessment found that 39% of eighth graders performed below NAEP Basic in mathematics, further deterioration from 2019, when 31% weren’t making the grade.

These results arrive as educational institutions lower expectations and coddle students. Beginning with the class of 2028, New York students will no longer be required to pass the state’s Regents exams to graduate. At the college level (but indicative of where so much thinking in education is these days), incoming freshmen at the University of Michigan’s College of Literature, Science, and the Arts will not have letter grades for their first semester recorded on their external transcript or reflected in their GPAs: “We believe that covering grades will help students start strong and curb the mental health crisis unfolding among college-aged individuals,” the school explains on its website. Sounds like the college equivalent of the “participation trophy” in middle school athletics.

Journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of The 1619 Project and author of its Pulitzer Prize-winning lead essay, recently published an eye-opening essay in The New York Times Magazine about the shoddy education her daughter, Najya, received in New York City public schools.

At Najya’s elementary school, P.S. 307 Daniel Hale Williams in Brooklyn, 27% of students scored at or above proficient in mathematics and 17% did so in reading. Hannah-Jones knowingly, and purposefully, enrolled Najya in the low-performing school out of ideological conviction, effectively treating her daughter’s education as a sociology experiment to advance her own ideology, which can be discerned clearly in the title of the essay: “In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?”

“[Hannah-Jones’ husband] Faraji and I felt an obligation to make educational decisions based on the collective good and not just our individual advantage,” she writes. “Faraji and I decided that our role in this struggle [against supposed segregation in NYC schools] meant upending the status quo and sending our child not to a wealthy white school but to a poor Black one.”

Her essay paints a picture of a chaotic environment characterized by neglect and unresponsive administrators and teachers. Najya’s math assignments weren’t graded, leaving her with the impression that she was doing well in math, her favorite subject: “But now I understood she thought she was correctly solving all her problems because her teacher was not checking her work. Similarly, Najya’s writing assignments were rife with uncorrected punctuation, capitalization and grammar errors.”

When Najya moved to middle school, she excelled, but – as was the case at P.S. 307 – she was not assigned homework. Teachers expended much of their attention and effort on unruly students, taking precious time away from children who wanted to learn.

Najya later chose to attend a prestigious public high school – much to her mother’s chagrin. There, the “first semester for Najya felt like drowning. She had homework for the first time… Najya had never been taught the skills of independent study, and suddenly the child whose identity had been the nerdy honors student was working harder than she ever had and barely keeping up.”

Real learning requires students to work through questions, make mistakes, and learn from feedback. Najya was denied an education when her work went ungraded and her errors uncorrected, creating an illusion of mastery. AI exacerbates that illusion: students can submit polished work they neither worked through nor understand. Without a grounding in civics or practice testing claims against evidence, students are less prepared to navigate misinformation spread through social media and AI. Ideological instruction in K-12 classrooms further weakens independent judgment when it supplies scripted conclusions instead of teaching students to reason toward them. Together, these forces risk leaving young people bereft of the knowledge and skills they need to succeed and more vulnerable to polarization.

Funding, while necessary, is not sufficient: As Coleman Hughes points out in The Free Press, P.S. 307 spends more than $50,000 per student, “far above the national average, and even New York City’s average.”

Schools need to prioritize old-fashioned reading, writing, and ‘rithmetic. That simple formula is behind the so-called “Mississippi Miracle”, that state’s remarkable surge in academic performance. “Even as schools elsewhere have focused on issues like school funding, social justice and mental health in recent years, Mississippi schools like Hazlehurst [Elementary School] have made academics their North Star,” The New York Times reported.

Hazlehurst Elementary School spends $11,486 per pupil, less than one-quarter the per student spending of Najya’s elementary school in Brooklyn.

Students need attentive parents, teachers, and administrators who take their education seriously. Schools must prioritize subjects that will serve students throughout their lives rather than luxury subjects like liberated ethnic studies. Students, in turn, should be expected to explain their reasoning instead of submitting answers generated by ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini. With guidance from their teachers and a grounding in the subject matter, they can learn to discuss difficult questions intelligently, respectfully, and candidly with their classmates.

Those principles guide THINC Foundation’s constructive high school ethnic studies curriculum, The American Story: Many Streams, One River. Through primary sources, multiple perspectives, historical analysis, and dialogue across differences, the curriculum encourages students to examine complex questions and form conclusions grounded in evidence.

Parents seeking greater insight into what their children are learning should review their children’s assignments, help them with their work, carefully review curricula, reach out to schools, districts, and local policymakers, and ask how their schools define and uphold high academic standards. Clear and rigorous standards are the least parents should expect.