Teenagers are dumb, regardless of generation. I was dumb as a teenager. You were dumb as a teenager. Now that we’ve established that baseline of stupidity, the latest data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), nicknamed “the Nation’s Report Card,” shows that today’s American high school seniors are even less educated than we suspected. Their math and reading skills in 2024 have plunged to historic lows.
The NAEP, a federally run assessment that regularly quizzes America’s youth on their ability to do basic math and understand words, just released its first post-pandemic results. They’re bleak. If the children are our future, we’re f**ked.
12th graders scored the lowest in math since 2005 and the lowest in reading since the assessments began in 1992. That is a dramatic way of saying it’s the weakest performance since the assessments began.
Nearly half of all seniors performed below the “Basic” level in math, and almost a third couldn’t hit that low bar in reading. Meanwhile, eighth-graders are flailing in science, with their worst scores since 2009.
Are Americans Getting Dumber? These Test Scores Say Maybe.
So, what the f**k happened? You could point to the pandemic. Remote learning, while keeping the kids and their families alive and healthy, didn’t spark academic excellence.
Studies have shown it also torpedoed kids’ mental health and educational development. The growing use of generative AI probably isn’t helping, since it’s more than likely doing their homework and writing their papers for them rather than assisting them to learn how to do it themselves.
That’s a recipe for churning out a lot of poorly educated teenagers who are about to enter the real world without any of the tools necessary to survive in it.
But there’s a twist: the instinct to blame COVID and pandemic lockdowns solely doesn’t explain why those numbers were already on the downturn before the pandemic. According to Matthew Soldner, acting commissioner at the National Center for Education Statistics, the decline has been brewing for years, especially among the lowest-performing students. COVID just kicked the crumbling foundation out from under the whole system.
As the kids fail, the adults in charge of ensuring that we prep the future generations for success are failing even more miserably. The Department of Education is hemorrhaging staff and funding due to Trump-led efforts to dismantle the department entirely.
The Department of Education, currently being headed by Linda McMahon, the wife of WWE’s Vince McMahon (an alleged sex trafficker), gutted funding of the Institute of Education Sciences, a subunit of the Department of Education that monitors the state of US education and funds research to improve academic outcomes.
In other words, our children are going to get dumber. And for at least the next 3 ½-ish years, we aren’t going to be gathering enough data to figure out how to fix any of it. It’s all going to get much worse before it gets better.
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