If you’ve been following the catastrophe of American education since the end of the COVID-19 pandemic, you know that there is something terribly wrong with America’s education.
I’m not blaming the kids. The schools were shuttered for far longer than they should have been, largely because the teachers’ union head, Randi Weingarten, wanted tens of billions of dollars before she would agree that the schools were “safe” to reopen.
However, the catastrophe in education is widespread and profound. It crosses income and class boundaries. It largely ignores racial identity. It has created a ready-made underclass who could be dependent on the government for most of their lives.
As it turns out, millions of children cannot read, write, or understand the simplest mathematical equations.
“Sarah had 9 pennies and 9 dimes. How many coins did she have in all?”
That was one of the equations asked of students entering the University of California, San Diego. They were also asked to solve this equation.
Solve (10 − 2)(4 − 6x) = 0
California educators expect students to know the answer to the addition question by the end of the second grade and the answer to the second question by the end of eighth grade.
UC San Diego is one of America’s highest-ranked public universities. However, “the number of entering first-year students whose math skills fall below middle-school level ‘increased nearly thirtyfold’ from 2020 to 2025—to roughly one out of every eight new students,” according to Tanner Nau writing at The Free Press.
Students who are not ready for UC San Diego’s regular math classes are placed in a remedial class that was created in 2016 and meant to serve about 1 percent of the incoming class. This fall, about 8.5 percent of incoming students wound up in the remedial math class, which focuses on elementary- and middle-school math subjects, according to the report. Another 3.3 percent of the incoming students were placed in a class that covers high-school math topics such as algebra and geometry.
UC San Diego isn’t the only major university that is scrambling to help more students catch up. Last fall, Harvard University began offering Mathematics MA5 to review “foundational skills in algebra, geometry, and quantitative reasoning.” President Donald Trump saw the class as fodder to criticize Harvard for admitting foreign students who he claimed could not do basic addition. Harvard said that the class was “college-level.”
“Given the perfect storm of the Covid-19 pandemic, accelerated learning loss, chronic absenteeism, and optional test scores for admission, this shouldn’t be at all surprising,” said Robert Pondiscio, a former New York City public school teacher and researcher of K–12 education at the American Enterprise Institute.
“We are graduating kids who simply are less proficient at math and reading than they were a generation ago,” he said.
“Officials at UC San Diego also blamed grade inflation and the expansion of admissions from ‘under-resourced high schools,’ writes Nau. Schools are terrified of failing anyone. Not only is it expensive to pay for a student to repeat a grade, but the school opens itself up to legal action from an angry parent. Letting the child slide to the next grade is so much easier.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), often referred to as “The Nation’s Report Card,” found in 2025 that just 22% of students were proficient in math and 35% were proficient in reading. “The percentage of eighth graders who have ‘below basic’ reading skills according to NAEP was the largest it has been in the exam’s three-decade history — 33 percent,” reported the New York Times.
How well will these young people do in a college like UC San Diego? Those math lessons were taught in the first years of schooling when a child’s mind soaks up knowledge like a sponge and can navigate relatively complex abstractions. It’s much harder for an 18-year-old to retrain their mind to understand basic math problems. I suspect that most of these young people may skate by, just because academic rigor is absent from most colleges today.
What will they do once they get out in the world? They will do what other uneducated, unmotivated kids do.
They’ll either live with their parents or find menial employment that will allow them to squeak by. What their lives might have been without the stupidities imposed on children during the pandemic, we can only guess.
The Schumer Shutdown is here. Rather than put the American people first, Chuck Schumer and the radical Democrats forced a government shutdown for healthcare for illegals. They own this.
Help us continue to report the truth about the Schumer Shutdown. Use promo code POTUS47 to get 74% off your VIP membership.
