Highlights
The University of California San Diego (UCSD) is widely regarded as one of the leading public universities in America, ranked #6 nationwide by US News & World Report. But school leaders at UCSD recently acknowledged that many of their freshmen can’t do high school math. One in 12 UCSD freshmen can’t even do middle-school math, meaning that they struggle to solve basic problems such as “6 + 4 = 5 + __.” Former U.S. Senator Ben Sasse, reviewing the UCSD report, noted that the number of freshmen entering UCSD whose math skills fall below a high-school level has increased nearly 30-fold over just the past five years. And UCSD is not alone. Every other University of California campus, including the flagship schools UC Berkeley and UCLA, have seen the number of first-years who are unprepared for precalculus double or triple.
The decline is nationwide. As a lengthy investigation in The Atlantic found, “America’s students are getting much worse at math. . . math scores are [now] close to where they were in the 1970s. . .losing 50 years’ worth of math-education progress is a clear disaster.” The decline began around 2016—more about that below—and was accelerated by the pandemic. The article cites a study of public schools in Washington State that found almost no students received an F in spring 2020, while the share of students receiving A’s skyrocketed. Math grades have remained elevated since then. The same article notes that more than a quarter of those UCSD freshmen who had to be placed into elementary- and middle-school-level remedial math had earned straight A’s in their high-school math classes. Grade inflation seems to have ramped up to the point that it is now utterly detached from reality.
Something similar has occurred with reading. As another investigation in The Atlantic recently found:
Test scores from NAEP, short for the National Assessment of Educational Progress, released this year show that 33 percent of eighth graders are reading at a level that is ‘below basic’—meaning that they struggle to follow the order of events in a passage or to even summarize its main idea. That is the highest share of students unable to meaningfully read since 1992. . .The bottom tenth of 13-year-olds, according to NAEP’s long-term-trend data, are hitting lows in reading and math scores not seen since these tests began in 1971 and 1978, respectively.
Why Schools Are Failing
The proximate cause of the decline beginning around 2015 is not hard to pinpoint. From 2002 through 2015, public schools nationwide were bound by the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), which held schools to strict federal standards in reading, writing, and math. Schools that repeatedly failed to meet the standards were subjected to sanctions and required to restructure. If the school still failed to meet standards, the school could be forced to change leadership or even close. In 2015, NCLB was replaced by the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which eliminated all federal accountability, instead allowing states to set their own standards. Almost every state responded by lowering standards so that every student would, indeed, succeed, because it was impossible to fail. As The Atlantic’s investigation found, the years since passage of ESSA have
...marked a shift in concern among educators, toward equity and away from excellence. Roughly 40 percent of middle-school teachers [now] work in schools where there are no late penalties for coursework, no zeroes for missing coursework, and unlimited re-dos of tests.
Mississippi is the rare exception. In 2013, Mississippi enacted a law that required third graders to pass a literacy exam to be promoted to the next grade. Mississippi, unlike almost every other state, has retained real standards in reading and writing. While in 2013, Mississippi ranked at the bottom of the NAEP tables nationwide, it now ranks at or near the top, across the board: partly because Mississippi students have improved, but also because achievement in other states has plummeted. Low-income students in Mississippi now outperform low-income students in Massachusetts on average in reading, even though Massachusetts spends twice as much per pupil.
What Can Parents Do?
Other than wait for laws to change, what’s a parent to do, in view of the collapse of academic standards across most of the United States?
Around the same time that standards began to decline in American education, in the mid-2010s, a surge of interest in classical education began that shows no sign of tapering. Classical education, broadly defined, describes a traditional approach rooted in Greek and Roman classics (hence the name), as well as the Western canon from Shakespeare to Jane Austen to Ernest Hemingway, prioritizing the teaching of virtue and character.
Over the past 10 years, there has been a dramatic rise in the number of classical schools nationwide as well as in the enrollment at those schools. The great majority of classical schools have a religious affiliation, although the Heritage Foundation lists 156 secular classical schools in their online directory. I had the privilege of giving a keynote last June for the annual conference of the Association of Classical Christian Schools (ACCS), with over 500 member schools. I can tell you that the leaders of these schools are well aware of the decline in American education and are determined to fight it, by mindfully and intentionally teaching virtue and character to their students.
It is possible to find a great school for your kid. You just need to know where to look.
Almost all the member schools of ACCS have a Protestant religious affiliation. In 2008, Tom Bengtson and Dale Ahlquist founded the Chesterton Academy in a suburb of Minneapolis, to establish a classical school with a Catholic foundation. In 2013, they started a second school, and the Chesterton Network was formed. At this moment, their online directory shows 79 classical Catholic schools; most have been established in the past five years.
What if you want a classical school, but you don’t want a private school or a school with a religious affiliation? Hillsdale College has established a network of classical public charter schools with 23 member schools, 14 candidate schools, and another 69 schools that teach the Hillsdale College classical curriculum. These schools have no fees, no tuition, and no religious affiliation. I have visited 11 schools in the Hillsdale College network and have been very impressed by every one of them, not only by the administrators’ commitment to classical education, but also by the courtesy and respect of the students, even when no teachers were around.
What if you are sold on the idea of classical schools, but there is no classical school near you? Well, then, you may have to move. I am not asking you to do anything I didn’t do. In 2008, I sold the medical practice I started from scratch back in 1990, my wife and I sold our house, and we moved to Chester County, Pennsylvania, because we were unhappy with the choice of schools available to us in Maryland. Your child has to be your top priority. If you have to move, and are able to do so, move.
Find a School That Prioritizes Virtue
Suppose you are not sold on the idea of classical schools. Maybe you don’t believe in the Western canon. Maybe you are uncomfortable with the right-of-center political affiliation of many of these schools. Fine. It is still important to find a school that prioritizes the teaching of virtue and character. As I noted in my previous essay for IFS, a child’s Conscientiousness—meaning honesty and self-control—predicts health, wealth, and happiness in adulthood. Find a school that will teach your child to be conscientious.
No matter what kind of school you choose, public or private, you still need do your homework. Don’t be shy about asking school leaders, “How do you teach virtue and character at this school?” Insist on visiting a classroom. Are students courteous and respectful? If students are rude, it’s unlikely that the school is teaching virtue successfully, no matter what the administrator says.
American education is in decline. It’s our job as parents to make sure our kids get a good education. That requires finding a school that teaches virtue and character along with the content areas. Over the past 25 years, I have visited more than 500 schools. While I have seen many lousy schools, I have also seen some great ones. So take heart: It is possible to find a great school for your kid. You just need to know where to look.
Leonard Sax MD PhD is a family physician, PhD psychologist, and the author of four books for parents. More information is online at www.leonardsax.com.
Editor’s Note: After Dr. Sax submitted this article to IFS in January 2026, Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times published an opinion piece making many of the same points.
