“As U.S. students keep falling behind, educators keep lowering standards”
What’s more, American students in the bottom 10th and 25th percentiles “are performing lower than they did in the early 1990s,” said Martin West, the dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a member of the National Assessment Governing Board. This disparity between the highest- and lowest-achieving students is known as the “achievement gap”—and the U.S. now appears to have one of the largest in the world, compared to other wealthy nations.
There are a number of theories as to why proficiency rates are declining. The pandemic lockdowns that started in 2020 and the omnipresence of cell phones in schools haven’t helped.
But instead of trying to solve the problem, a number of educators are actually covering it up—by lowering the educational standards in their states.
