Plain English with Derek Thompson - The American Math Crisis

Episode Date: November 21, 2025

The University of California San Diego is one of the best public colleges in America. So it was fairly shocking when the school released a report on the steep decline in academic preparedness of its freshman. The number of incoming students in need of remedial math has surged in the past few years. These students did not fail high school math. Many of them got straight A's. Other colleges have seen similar trends: declining mathematical ability from students who aced their high school tests. I think that there are several ways to frame the problem we’re looking at here. One is that American kids can’t do math: That’s the headline of a recent Atlantic article by Rose Horowitch. Another frame, as Kelsey Piper writes in the online magazine The Argument, is that grades have stopped meaning anything. I think that the full story is somewhere in between. The age of grade inflation is also the age of achievement deflation. We are giving more and more A's to students who are learning less and less. There is a lot of talk these days about America moving into a postliterate future. One piece of evidence for this is declining test scores for literacy among students and adults. Fewer people talk about a post-numerate future. The problem here is bigger than UC San Diego. National assessments in the U.S. and even throughout the developed world show that people are getting worse at math. But why? Today we have three guests to help us answer these questions. Rose Horowitch of The Atlantic, Kelsey Piper of The Argument, and Joshua Goodman, an associate professor of education and economics at Boston University. We talk about plummeting math scores for American students, why it’s happening, and why it matters at a moment when carbon-based humans seem to be getting dumber at the very moment that silicon-based machines are getting smarter. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [e-mail]. Host: Derek Thompson Guests: Rose Horowitch, Kelsey Piper and Joshua Goodman Producers: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Follow the town on Spotify or wherever you get your podcast. Today, math. The University of California, San Diego, is one of the best public colleges in America. So it was fairly shocking when the school released report recently on the steep decline in academic preparedness of its freshman. The number of incoming students in need of remedial math had surged in the last few years. What is remedial math, you might well ask? It's a question like this. 7 plus 2 equals 6 plus what?

7 plus 2 equals 6 plus what? If you know that 7 plus 2 equals 9 and you know that 6 plus 3 is 9, then you have now answered a question that one quarter of remedial math students at the University of California, San Diego, got wrong. Or consider this question. Round the number 374,518 to the nearest 100. Maybe I should do that more slowly. Round the number, 374,518 to the nearest 100.

18 is closer to 500 than 600, so you round down to five. Most students in UCSD's exploding remedial math class got that one wrong. And now here's the kicker. These students did not fail high school math. Many of them got straight A's. I think there's several ways to frame the problem we're looking at here. One is that American kids can't do math anymore. That's the headline of a recent Atlantic article by Rose Horowitz.

Another frame, as Kelsey Piper writes in the online magazine The Argument, is that grades have stopped meaning anything. I think the full story that we're looking at is somewhere in between these two headlines. The age of grade inflation is also the age of achievement deflation. We are giving more and more A's to students who are learning less and less. There's a lot of talk these days about America moving into a post-literate future. that is a future after people can read good. One piece of evidence for this is declining test scores for literacy among students and adults. Fewer people talk about a post-numerate future, a future in which people can't do math very well.

But in fact, math scores are declining as much or in some cases more than reading scores. The problem here is bigger than UC San Diego. National assessments in the U.S. and even throughout the entire developed world show that people are getting worse at math, at the same time that we're inventing machines that are getting better at it every six months. Today, we have three guests to help us answer these questions. Rose Horowitz of the Atlantic, Kelsey Piper of the Argument, and Joshua Goodman, a professor of education and economics at Boston University. We talk about plummeting math scores for American students, why it's happening, why we seem to be moving into a future that is not only post-literate,

also postnumerate, and why it matters at the moment that carbon-based humans seem to be getting dumber at the very moment that silicon-based machines are getting smarter and smarter at solving the most important problems in math. I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English. Well, we've got a crowded show today. Kelsey Piper, welcome to the show. Hey, Derek, good to see you. Rose Horowitz. Welcome. Thanks for having me. Joshua Goodman. Hello and welcome. It's great to be here. Kelsey, I want to get started with you. Tell me about this UC San Diego bombshell.

What did the report say? And what details particularly stuck with you in your reporting on it? Yeah. So there have been a lot of stories recently sort of breaking about education, not looking good, sometimes in the aftermath of the pandemic, something's about phones and schools. And then this UCSD report came out. there was about a 30-fold rise in the sheriff's students who need remedial education.

It's not quite about COVID. It's not quite about phones, but it is catastrophic. It was really surprising to me to read through because they basically describe, you know, they used to have like 30 kids in an introductory class of like thousands that needed remedial math. And suddenly it is more than a thousand kids needing remedial math. And they're not needing remedial high school math. These are kids who need remedial elementary and middle school classes. So something went catastrophically wrong.

And the thing that stood out to me about the report is that they were getting good grades in high school math. So high schools were awarding these kids top scores while, in fact, they did not have even elementary school math down. And that's just something has gone terribly wrong at that point. Rose, the problems at UCSD are extreme. But you wrote in the Atlantic that they're not unique, have a lot. other schools seen rising numbers of incoming students who are just, as Kelsey described, catastrophically unprepared for college math? Yes.

So I didn't find any school that was similarly selective that was seeing students struggling with middle school math. But with that being said, I reached out to a lot of math professors at a lot of colleges and universities. And basically almost all of them said that there were students were arriving with less math math preparation than they used to have. So a lot of them were seeing students with specific skills gaps, possibly from when they went remote during the pandemic. Several reported that their students were really struggling with conceptual thinking and kind of focusing for extended periods of time.

And others were saying that their students just seemed really unmotivated to learn math. So this is something that, you know, is not as extreme as what we're seeing at UCSD, but, you know, probably most colleges and universities are already seeing it, are already responding to it, and if they haven't already, they will likely be in the near future. Yeah, you reported that George Mason University in Virginia, just a few miles from me, revamped its remedial math summer program in 2023 because students arriving in their calculus courses couldn't do basic algebra. That's according to their math department share.

Josh, I want you to turn these statistics into a story. If you go back to the 1990s, early 2000s, math scores are rising happily. This is not a sad story in America. It's a story of tremendous success. And then something happens between 2010 and 2015. We go from having the highest scores in reading and math ever recorded in modern American history to the beginning of a long decline that now stretches over the better part of, or larger than a decade. what happened and when did this downward trend in the data really start?

Yeah, so I think it's great to take the focus back a couple of decades. And just to reiterate, you're absolutely right from the late 1990s to about 2013 test scores, math skills, as measured by test scores in the U.S. We're rising very steadily, very rapidly. This coincided with an era of federal education policy that was really focused on school accountability, where there was in 2001 a bipartisan consensus that led to, to the No Child Left Behind Act that emphasized for states the need for schools to use standardized tests as a metric of success. And if those metrics were not being met, there were serious penalties associated with those

failures. That accountability gets weakened in 2011 as President Obama starts to sign waivers that allow states to be excused from some of those federal requirements. And then that gets codified in the Every Student Successes Act in 2015. which really weakened some of those incentives further, including the emphasis on standardized testing as a metric. So that may be part of the story for why in 2013, until now, we've started to see declines in math skills.

But there are other things going on as well, as you've talked about on this show before, like the rise of mobile phones and social media. So I don't want to put all the blame at the feet of school accountability changes, but that's certainly one of the stories that matches the trend, both in the 2000s and then in the last decade of decline. We're going to spend the next bulk of the podcast talking about why math scores seem to be declining, not just according to the nationalized tests, but also according to the reporting that Rose,

Kelsey, other people are doing. But Josh, take us back to 2010, 2013, right? Under Obama, as you described, there's this legal and philosophical shift in education policy that you think goes a long way toward explaining why math scores were slipping even before their declining accelerated after the pandemic. What was this philosophical shift? Like being generous toward it, like what were education reformers trying to do a decade or so ago, even if what they were trying to do ultimately failed and helped to lead us to the situation we're in right now? That's right. So I can absolutely give a generous spin to this because I believe part of the generous spin, which is the No Child Left Behind Act itself emphasized standardized testing,

but the specific ways in which it did that. It said that 100% of students eventually had to be proficient in a given subject in order for a school to be making adequate yearly progress. That is a completely unrealistic standard to hold. So at some point, someone was going to have to change the law. Whether the particular way in which it was changed was the right way, I think, is a big open question. And I think probably the law should have been changed to focus more on evidence that students were making progress on standardized exams, growth models, as opposed to 100% of students having achieved a

certain level. But I think that was the general philosophy that there was something very unrealistic about the way the original law was written, combined with a set of folks who in general were frustrated by both federal interference in what was seen as a state and local issue of education, as well as people who just generally objected to standardized testing being used at all to evaluate schools. Rose, 2012, 2013 is notable for another reason. That's when smartphone penetration in the U.S. passed 50%. And so we have to put screens on the table here. You spoke to Doug Stager, a professor at Dartmouth, who told you that he thinks that decline in numeracy and literacy scores are significantly a story about our screens. What's the strongest case that he's right?

So I think the best case that it is phones that are leading to this decline, you know, would be how widespread the drops are. They're occurring across countries and across age groups. And we see this really clearly in data from the PISA test, which is done by the OECD every three years. And that assesses 15-year-olds on math, on reading, on science. And, you know, that shows that achievement has been declining across these. high-income countries for about the last decade and a half. So it's not specific to U.S. education policy. And then we also see, you know, similar declines looking at, you know, adult tests of literacy and numeracy, you know, which shows that this is, you know, not specific to young people today. So just given how broadly these changes are occurring, you know, that would suggest that, you know, it could be the phones. I agree. I think the fact that this is an

international phenomenon, it immediately rules in the possibility that while the change over from No Child Left Behind to ESA might have been significant and even detrimental, it can't possibly explain everything if the entire OECD is seeing similar results. Kelsey, throughout this period that we're discussing, policy changes, screens, you also have this culture in the background of grade inflation that's seeping into U.S. education. I mean, in your reporting, you followed up with teachers, high school teachers, who said they were awarding A grades to AP calculus students who, quote, would get the lowest possible score on the AP calculus exam if they took it, end quote. So I wonder, with grade inflation, which seems to me like maybe a little bit of an old story,

even if it's a significant and important story, how do you think grade inflation at the middle and high school level has contributed to the phenomenon we're discussing today, which is declining math achievement. So I think all of these things sort of combined. Grade inflation is a long-standing trend. There's just a lot of incentive to grade generously, and there's not much incentive in the other direction. So almost every institution sort of gradually shifts in the direction of grade inflation. But this became more of a problem as, yeah, achievement is declining, and so grades are improving. So the gap between a grade and the actual level of achievement it represents is growing. And then around COVID, a lot of schools went test optional. And often they did this on the basis of the research,

right? They said the predictive value of the SAT or ACT on top of grades is relatively small, and, you know, the SAT is a test that students who are from a higher income background do better on, so maybe we can sacrifice a little bit of prediction, you know, for justice. But the thing that that misses is that in a world with the SAT, yes, grades may be reasonably predictive of college performance. Once there is no test, once there is no way that you will ever be called on giving an A to a student who has not mastered the material in any sense of the word, then the relationship between grades and readiness just breaks down entirely. Like, some of that was already happening, but it got very much worse, very, very quickly. And the thing I heard

actually from multiple high school teachers is that they were so frustrated. They felt like they were in a bind between a number of well-intentioned policies that were just making their job impossible. One of them is, and I have sympathies with the pro-accountability side here, but one of them is No Child Left Behind Era rules

that you have to teach at grade level in high school. You're not allowed to be teaching way below grade level, but that means that you're not allowed to teach fractions, even if the thing that your kids in fact don't know is fractions. And that is probably worth, the kids and for their long-term achievement than if you were able to start where they actually are. And then the other thing is, yeah, the administration is not going to be okay with you failing all the

kids, even if all the kids failed. You've dismantled the external tests that, or dismantled or just downweighted, like California still does standardized testing. These schools are failing on those standardized tests, and people just didn't feel strongly motivated by that. It wasn't an emergency. It didn't provoke strong reactions or whatever, especially not if the kids are still, getting into college. So you have some rules about what they're allowed to do, an enormous pressure to be awarding A's, and then kids that, you know, I think they sympathize with. This kid is working really hard, turning in all their homework. That's itself rare, you know, in a high school classroom these days. The only thing wrong is that this kid hasn't gotten an adequate math education in eight years and

has no idea what's going on. Do you want to be a jerk and fail that kid and ruin their prospects of college? No one wants to be a jerk. But then you have kids going to college. who are not remotely at the level they need to be at. I think there's another way that the decline of standardized testing might have led to grade inflation, Kelsey, which is that you take away the SAT, and that you alluded to this, that makes grades much more important.

And if grades are more important, then it becomes something for students or parents to become more desperate to negotiate over, which makes grade inflation more attractive to all sides. So this is not to overrule anything that you said, it's to emphasize that there's this relationship between the decline of the SAT and the rise of or re-rise of great inflation, which really has been rising over the last like 50 years. If you look at the longitudinal data.

Oh, yeah. Josh, I'd love you to put some to meat on these bones because, you know, where did this turn against the SAT and the ACT and AP scores? Where do you think it came from? Because you've talked about one sort of paradigm shift in the last decade, from the accountability era of No Child Left Behind, to the new post-Obama era of ESA. But there's this parallel track along which we've had this debate about whether the SAT is the greatest possible test to predict or codify student achievement or this instrument that. that helps to illuminate and drive inequality and racism, right? This is a debate that I think really, really kicked off about five, ten years ago.

Where do this turn against the SAT come from, and what do you think has been the effect in math scores? Yeah, it's a great question. I think some of the turn has come from the very uncomfortable fact that when you look at standardized tests, you see large gaps by income, by race and ethnicity in this country. And as those gaps and the unfairness and injustice of those gaps became more salient over the last decade, given the wider social context and set of events been happening in the country, I think it just drew extra attention to these exams as yet another thing that makes people see the unfairness in our social systems and educational systems. You know, my take, particularly given this conversation, is that I think it's a shame that people then said the exams are the cause of the problem as opposed to the fact that they are measuring something real that we should be working toward fixing. But the reaction, obviously, by a lot of educational systems was to say, let's, you know, if you have a fever, the way to solve it is to get rid of the thermometer. And that doesn't seem to be the way that I would want a medical practice to operate much less an educational system.

Once again, I would love you to sort of steal man the case, even though you seem to be arguing against it. Like, from my perspective, it's funny that you said it's like trying to cure a fever by taking away the thermometers. The idea in my head was like it's, the SAT was the mechanism by which we were observing the inequality that we wanted to eliminate. But it's a little bit like saying we want to eliminate a certain bacteria, so we're going to ban microscopes because they help us to see the bacteria. Well, obviously, if you burn all the microscopes, you're not doing anything about the underlying bacteria. What was, like, the case for reducing the salience of SAT-A-C-T? And again, I would just like you to be specific about how the elimination of those tests might be affecting, like, math scores throughout the country.

Because it's not necessarily obvious that you take away the SAT for UCSD and then suddenly, you know, 10th graders are doing worse at algebra. Okay, so I think the case for getting rid of those exams is that they are not particularly aligned with any individual set of courses students are doing in high school. Each state has its own curriculum or even local school districts have their own curricula. And so they're sort of funny tests. They're not quite like AP exams where there's a clear set of material you're supposed to have mastered in a course and this is an end of course exam that tests those. So I think that combined with the fact that there are absolutely barriers to taking these exams at all, to studying for them, to having the resources to know that you should actually retake the exam almost certainly because colleges will only care about the highest score you ever get. I think all of those are arguments to be made that actually there are other aspects of people's college applications that might be powerful predictors of how they will do in college and where they belong. But I think it turns out that we lose something.

And one of the things we lose when we de-emphasize these standardized exams is, as Kelsey is alluded to, you just sort of lose the anchor between things like grades that end up making a big part of college applications and these sort of objective, comprehensible measures of student achievement. And that's the place where I think the college policies may work backwards and feed backwards into the high school results, where you just lose that incentive to teach the things you know a student will be held accountable for in a very, very clear way nationwide. So I think another thing here is that people were very bothered by inequities in who did well on the SAT and ACT. And there's sort of two things that could be going on there. One is we are not doing a good job of teaching students from disadvantaged backgrounds.

They know less, and their lower SAT and ACT scores reflect them having gotten a worse education. The other is they do know enough. They are ready for college and the SAT and ACT because they didn't get SAT and ACT specific tutoring or they didn't get to take it a bunch of times. That's why their scores are lower. Now, if it were the second, of course you abolish that test. That test is like a distraction from which kids can actually do well. But I think what we have realized is, and I very much think that these inequities, we can address these. But you have to address these by offering a good education.

You have to address these by offering tutoring. Rich kids are getting tutoring outside school if they're behind. Poor kids, like, they're not getting those kinds of supports. So if the reason you have different scores on the test is because you have different ability to do math, then that's going to carry forward into college. You can't solve anything by getting rid of the test. But I think a lot of people thought that those test disparities didn't capture something real, that they weren't actually capturing kids being less ready for college.

And of course, if that were what was going on, then get rid of that test because it's just hurting kids who are already behind. That's not fair. So, in review my understanding so far, we have both anecdotal and national evidence that math scores are declining, not just in ways that make for good headlines at UCSD, but in more concerning ways that go back 10 or 12 years. There's several reasons for this decline. They range from federal policy shifts to the rise of screens, which,

create distraction, to the acceleration of grade inflation, which means that grades can go up in the absence of achievement going up, to the fact that admissions policies, like making admissions test optional, reducing the value of the SAT, feeds backward through the education system, and it makes it harder for achievement to rise. Rose, the huge theme that we keep circling over and over again here is that grades are going up and achievements going down. The UC San Diego report notes that this is incredible. More than a quarter of the students who placed into elementary and middle school remedial courses last year earned straight A's in their high school math classes.

These are straight A students getting into a selective public college who can't do middle school math. But it's bigger than just that. You've also reported in another essay for The Atlantic that at Harvard, 20 years ago, 25% of all grades were A. now 60% of all grades are A's. And you spoke to the Harvard psychologist Stephen Pinker, who said that in the time that he's felt pressured to increase the frequency of A's given out in his classes, attendance has declined,

and student performance has gone down. So it's like whether we're talking about elementary schools, middle schools, high schools, public colleges, or frigging Harvard, the story is the same everywhere, grades going up in the absence of achievement going up And often, as Pinker is described, as UCSD is described, in a case where achievements going down. Like, what is the big story here as you see it?

I think the big story, I mean, I wrote in that story that you're referencing that the road to great inflation hell was paved with good intentions. So I think the big story is that, you know, people thought that making it easier, you know, would help students and kind of lowering standards, you know, would, was a kind thing to do that students. were, you know, struggling during the pandemic and that they should, you know, care about their well-being. And even if the changes weren't so intentional, you know, as Kelsey has described, there are just a lot of pressures on teachers to raise grades and lower standards. So I think the big story now is just that this approach has been shown to be misguided and, you know, at best and actually harmful at worst. And the question is, like, how do you go up? about reversing it. You know, if we know that we are raising grades and lowering standards,

you know, we know that that's bad and something that we should fix, but it's actually a lot harder, as Harvard is finding, to really go about, you know, reversing and addressing this trend. It also seems to suggest to me, Rose, that, like, there's something about this that's related to policy, and there's also something about this that's, like, related to culture, right? There's, like, almost like a cultural expectation among parents, among students, among professors, among administration officials, like this cultural expectation that like it's harmless to demand higher grades. Like it's basically harmless for us all to simply say, grades should go up because that makes parents feel better and it makes students feel better.

And it reduces stress. And it's just easier for everybody if we just let grades rise and rise. I think Kelsey pointed this out earlier, like, there's no countervailing pressure to say, no, like, that person got an 81 in the test. That's a B minus, and their grade should be V minus. Like, how do you, like, reflect on the idea that this is, that this, this, this permeates, this, this extends beyond mere policy. It's something that exists almost the level of, like, modern 21st century culture. This, this, like, this, just almost like disease of rising expectations. Yes, this came up all the time in my reporting. You know, professors would say that students would come to office hours and they would be like crying because they just expected an A.

It was what they had always gotten. And so they just didn't understand. Like they would say, you know, I'm an A student. I don't understand how I would not be getting an A now. So I think it's just like, you know, as you're saying, it's a cultural shift. And then once it takes off, it's, you know, really difficult to stop because nobody wants to be the, you know, mean, greater. the harsh grader. And so, yeah, it's just something that now everybody expects that they will just get an A

as long as they try it all or really do anything. Right. It almost seems like you're anti-equity if you call for grades being lower and you're just pro-good stuff if you're calling for grades to be higher. Kelsey, on the flip side of all these negative stories that were talking about in education policy, you've reported on a famous or in some cases controversial education success story that goes by the name of the Mississippi miracle. What is the Mississippi miracle? So Mississippi has been one of the few states that has seen sustained gains, especially post-pandemic,

in fourth-grade reading. And I don't want to oversell it. It's only in fourth-grade reading. They're not seeing, at least not yet, huge gains down the line or anything. But they have had a huge increase in the share of fourth graders who can pass the national NAP. It's given across states. So it's one of our few points of comparison when different states have very different policies. It's a pretty good test. It like doing well on it, I think, reflects real reading ability. And Mississippi went from 49th to ninth in student performance on this test. And the like very short takeaway a lot of people have is do phonics. That is not going to be sufficient. Lots of states have like implemented phonics reforms of some kind. The thing that Mississippi did that I

think all of these planks were necessary was they had phonics. they had particular curricula that were very strong and had a good track record. They trained teachers in how to get the most out of that curricula. Most professional development is useless, but training teachers specifically on how to use a new curriculum you're giving them seems to be helpful. And they said children will not go from third grade to fourth grade if they fail a basic reading test that covers like being able to read at all. Now, they don't actually hold back that many kids. A lot of people we're like, oh, that's the whole miracle. That's not the whole miracle. Very few kids are actually failing that test. But the fact of that test, it is the countervailing pressure that we were just

talking about how it doesn't exist. The teachers don't feel nice for giving kids nice grades because it's all worthless if they don't pass that end of year. Can you read test? The teachers don't have the option of being nice. They can't waive that test. The mean old state is saying, you have to pass that test or you can't go to fourth grade. And what you hear is that teachers and parents and students, none of them want the kid to be held back. And so they're all able to sort of go the extra mile when they see an actual consequence. And that means the kids learn to read. And that's a huge deal. And Mississippi is a very poor, very disadvantaged state, but its reading scores are now ahead of many states that are spending twice as much per student that have more student populations

coming from more educated families, all these advantages, they turn out not to be worth as much as doing a really good job and having high expectations and having a line where you're like, we won't let kids go to fourth grade if they can't read. This also, like for fourth grade teachers, your life is a lot easier if everybody in your classroom can read, right? Like, it's a big problem for fourth grade teachers if you have a bunch of kids in your class you can't read it all. Because by fourth grade, you're sort of supposed to be able to assume that they can read

instructions on a worksheet, that they can read a passage of text and learn something from it. So Mississippi did this. Huge success. Louisiana has copied and seen some of the same results. I think if more states copy, they will see the same results. they've got to copy the whole thing. You can't just say, oh, we're doing phonics, so that's basically like Mississippi.

No, it's not. If you don't have the accountability, it's not like Mississippi, because the accountability is part of the story. Josh, so it sounds like Mississippi and Louisiana are turning back the clock a little bit. They're going back to the accountability paradigm. And it's interesting to juxtapose economically disadvantaged fourth graders in Mississippi and Louisiana, who are scoring better now on this national assessment than their counterparts in New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts.

If you frame it like that, if you frame it the way I'm now framing it, there is a political interpretation available to us. And that political interpretation is that the left, the political left, has diminished expectations for kids and gutted accountability structures in education systems, often under the banner of equity. and the results have brought us to a point where achievement is declining in reading and math for fourth graders and eighth graders and 12th graders

and that the exceptions to those rules are often red states and Republican areas where accountability is being ladled back into the mix. How fair is that interpretation? I'll give you a story that has really worried me. Last year, there was a referendum here in Massachusetts where voters eventually voted to get rid of the one statewide high school graduation requirement that Massachusetts has, which is to pass the 10th grade MCAS exam, the state standardized test.

That requirement is no longer in place. Students still have to take the exam because of federal law, but it does not and cannot count for high school graduation purposes. I viewed that as a major failure of policy because we do not now have any. meaningful statewide accountability for making sure that students know what they're supposed to know by the time they get through high school. And I do see that as a major concern. I really like the way Kelsey described the Mississippi and Louisiana efforts because it was a combination of accountability with real teeth, in part because of the standardized testing and the consequences of failing those standardized tests. But it was coupled with support for teachers to become good at the

things they need to be good at in order for students to succeed at those tasks they're being given. So I think the challenge we have here is that standardized testing and accountability has gotten a sort of an image of being a sort of purely bad thing. It's mean. It's mean to hold people accountable. And the question is how do you partner that accountability with the kind of supports that teachers and students need to meet those high expectations you want to have? And unfortunately, it feels to me like at least in my geographic part of the world, we're moving in the wrong direction. Rose, all of this is happening at the same time that artificial intelligence is getting so much better at math, maybe than any human is or ever will be at math.

And you talk to several people, including Dan Goldhaber at the Center for Education Data and Research at the University of Washington, Brian Conrad, a Stanford math professor, about, you know, what do we make of the fact that math achievement among carbon-based life forms is, is going down at the same time that math capabilities among silicon-based intelligence is surging. What do Dan and Brian say about the next few years? So they say, I mean, it's an interesting dichotomy that you're pointing out. You know, on one hand, we're sort of on the precipice of more math discoveries, you know,

potentially than ever before. But at the same time, you know, they say that no one would argue that because calculators can do addition, humans don't need to be able to sum two numbers. You know, Brian Conrad, a Stanford math professor, he said, you know, who is going to trust somebody who has a degree in airline engineering, but he doesn't know how to think through a problem without a computer telling them the answer. So there clearly is, you know, a baseline math level, you know, that we kind of expect people to have, hope people would have. And there's a real risk to us, you know, relying on the technology

and choosing, you know, to de-skill ourselves, to not acquire skills or to voluntarily give them up, you know, because we rely so much on, you know, AI to do it instead. Unfortunately, it seems like, you know, from what I'm hearing from professors, that, you know, some of their students are kind of thinking that they, you know, AI can just replace them

and they don't need to learn math. Kelsey, so you've written a lot of education. And you're out there in those education debate fields, having these fights with other folks about what does the Mississippi miracle actually mean, what are the actual consequences of math scores declining? I'd love you to gut check us with what you've heard as the most compelling objection to the way that we've talked about these numbers, right? Because to a certain extent, we're all on the same page, the four of us.

We all think that math scores are declining. We all think that it's some combination of U.S. specific policy and global technological changes that Rose described. We also think that there's something about the decline of accountability and great inflation that is somewhat intrinsically bad for students and bad for achievement. But education is like a violently disagreeing field. What's the smartest objection to the general paradigm that we've been using that you've heard in the last few days? So I will say one thing.

We have all been pretty pro-accountability. I am pretty pro-accountability. But I do want to say that one way that no child left behind, which Josh mentioned was unfair, was like extremely high standards. And another one was standards that were very absolute and made little reference to where kids actually were. I think it is reasonable to expect a school to, in a year, give a child a certain amount of instruction and help them master a bunch of stuff they didn't know at the start of the year. But if they're coming in way behind, then if you do a fantastic job with them, at the end of the year,

they will be slightly less behind. They came in four years behind. The end of the year, they're two years behind. They're great. Almost every accountability regime that has ever existed has not cared about this. Teachers will say to you, it doesn't matter if I got them from four years behind to two years behind. That's nuts.

And I have a lot of sympathy for the anti-accountability stuff in as much as a lot of it was saying, look, the thing we most want this teacher to do, which is spend this time getting this kid from four years behind to two years behind, not only are they not rewarded for it, they're probably penalized for it because the only thing we look at is where are the kids at the end of the year. So yes, we need accountability, but there were some things that were just horrendously wrong with the way we have been doing accountability. And I think you need more of a individual student mindset. For each kid, they should be taught at the level they are at, whatever level that is, and they should gain as much knowledge in a year as they can, whether or not that

brings them to grade level. And in fact, like, by trying to treat all 10-year-olds should be doing these 10-year-old things, like, that may actually just be a kind of bad model of how to think about education and what educators' role should be. So that's my big, like, pushback to the accountability stuff is that I do think a lot of it is kind of poorly premised, if you think from the perspective of what does each child need from school. On the bigger, is all falling apart thing, he I'm not saying something I believe. I think it's good to ask what is the other perspective, but I don't really buy this. You could also say it's fine if nobody can do mental arithmetic.

We have calculators for that now. It's fine if no one can do long division. I think the thing that is most crucial in the era of AI is something like a deep sensibility about what numbers make any sense so that you can catch an error or see if the thing somebody's saying is clearly wrong. And I don't know a way of achieving that without a, doing lots of math. But in theory, sure, something that we could see declining scores in something that genuinely just doesn't matter very much anymore. And that wouldn't have to be catastrophic

because, like, being a full intellectually involved member of the 21st century is allowed to just look very different than being a full intellectually involved member of previous centuries. So that's the argument I give. But I don't really believe it. I think we're in pretty bad shape. Josh, let me tell you what I think a conservative listening to this show is going to tell me via email or via Twitter DM. You haven't used the acronym DEI and you haven't mentioned public unions. So here, Josh, I'm going to give you the incredibly fun job of having the opportunity to use the acronym DEI and discuss teacher unions. To what extent do you think it is fair to say? And this is an argument that we do hear from conservative critics of American education policy.

that it was DEI that gutted the SAT. It was DEI concerns that drove back accountability because it said any process by which we learn about student inequality might be a process that is exacerbating student inequality. And it was the teacher unions. Here I am continuing to represent the conservative opinion. It was the teacher unions that said, you know, there's no child left behind stuff

is just making our jobs impossible, give us more local control, and by the way, give us the ability to just give our students A's because that's going to make our lives easier. How much is it fair to say that two of the major drivers

of the trend that we're talking about here, which today on this show is the decline of math scores in America, is fundamentally about the rise of DEI and the power of teachers' unions in America? You know I'm employed by an education school, don't you? I do. I think equity concerns and teachers unions are certainly a big part of this story.

I just want to be clear that the equity concerns, I think, are serious ones. And I understand why people have been frustrated by standardized testing, both with respect to college admissions and in accountability schemes. That is, Kelsey has very eloquently described, were often poorly designed, even if, the broad impact of them was to broadly improve schools. I think people who design accountability schemes and push for standardized testing, which I put myself in that camp of, still need to make the affirmative case for designing those things well and designing the systems well.

I have been very frustrated by the role that teachers unions have played, again, at least in the local politics that I know with respect to the role of standardized testing and accountability. I understand this. I was a high school math teacher before I went to do my PhD. I know that I believed I knew how to teach

and I didn't need anything imposed on me from the external world like standardized testing. On the other hand, I also taught AP Calculus and I remember at the start of each year, the college board would provide us a document that would say,

normally you as the teacher are the bad guy because you're the one writing the tests and giving your kids the bad grades. In this case, We are the bad guys. We are going to give the test at the end of the year, and you are on the side of your students. You are going to help them beat us.

And I thought that dynamic was fantastic. I loved the idea of teachers as personal coaches, or sports coaches, where there is something we are aiming for. We need to win. And how am I as a teacher going to get you there? But someone has to define the task we are trying to win at. It can't be the teacher themselves. And so that's why I've been a little bit frustrated by the direction the conversation has gone in with respect to standardized testing and accountability. I agree with what Josh just said. I think the equity conversation needs to move forward. I think there was a focus on if we just find the right clever trick, we will close the gaps between the kids who are coming into kindergarten not without very many skills and the kids who are coming into kindergarten are reading chapter books. Nothing has done that. People have tried so many things. Nothing closes gaps. You can improve students.

performance. You can do a ton for students, but it's not going to make the students who are behind catch up to the students who are ahead. It's like if you put all the kids on roller skates, all of them will go faster. But the ones who are the most athletic are still going to be out in front. In some ways, you know, the more tools you give them, the more out in front those kids are. So I think we need to think about this as for every child in the United States, they are owed a good education that takes them where they are and teaches them the next material with a teacher who is like, knows the best strategies for improving where they are. And we measure that teacher by how much that child learned and also by, like, if that child is engaged, if that child is happy, if that child is

otherwise thriving. But we don't measure by whether at the end that child is a median 10-year-old. They may never be. Some kids are just not going to get there. And if we keep our fixation on having all 10-year-olds achieve the 10-year-old bar, then everything we do is going to fail. We have tried so many things. All of them have failed. We have to instigued. We have say every 10-year-old, the world is open to them because we have put in front of them material that they are ready to master and then proceeded to have them master it. And that is the conversation that I want to see us have because otherwise we can try another hundred things. I think they will go about as well as the last hundred things. This is just not, it would be

cool if we knew how to do this. We don't know how to do this. But we do know how to not turn a 10-year-old who's behind into an average 10-year-old, but turn them into the strongest version of themselves. I love that. Rose, I want to end by talking a little bit about culture because I think a lot of this is downstream of culture. I feel like one conclusion that I've reached in this conversation is that we want all of us to make students smarter. But raising achievement is hard and raising grades is easy. And so we've in many cases defaulted to the proxy. of how do we turn the grading knob when what we ultimately want

is to turn the achievement knob. We're in a culture right now of no mean grades allowed. In middle school, no mean grades allowed. High school, no mean grades allowed. College where Stephen Pinker is like basically barred from handing out a B. No mean grades allowed.

This isn't just a problem of Harvard. This isn't just a problem of UCSD. It's not just a problem of federal policy. this is parents, this is teachers, this is students, this is a co-created culture of people believing that it is their right to receive high grades and that we're all engaging in this project of turning the grading knob in the absence of understanding how to turn the achievement knob. You've talked to a lot of people, a lot of professors. Is this a cultural shift that you think can be made? Or do you think that we're sort of

sort of, we're sort of locked inside this world where we've all sort of collectively decided that achievement is hard and grades are easy. And so grades go up and achievement just won't. Well, I think it's important to remember that culture is really hard to change. There's no policy, magic wand. And, you know, when every student expects to get an A, when every parent expects that their child will get an A, it's actually really hard to shift toward a paradigm where that's not the case and where grades reflect true achievement and understanding. With that being said, Kelsey has talked a lot about the Mississippi miracle, and that's a sign that reform is possible and, you know, things can improve. But, you know, that focus on accountability requires really

broad buy-in across different populations. Teachers and parents and students and administrators all need to be, you know, dedicated to the idea that something has to change. So this is a really hard thing to do. You know, education reform and catching disadvantaged students up is challenging. There are a lot of different opinions on how to go about it, and it will likely require a lot of trial and error. So we probably need, you know, more of this culture of accountability combined with a culture of experimentation if we are going to change the culture around student achievement and grades.

Rose Horowitz, Josh Goodman, Kelsey Piper, thank you all very much. Thanks. Thank you, Derek. Many thanks to Rose and Kelsey and Josh for their thoughts in this episode. I just wanted to end with one closing thought, which is that in the middle of the episode, we talked a little bit about how the declines in numeracy scores and literacy scores are happening in the U.S. and they're happening around the world. And it's a point that we ticked off but didn't return to.

And in the minutes and hours after we finished recording, I was reflecting on the fact that I find myself a little bit torn on this issue, where on the one hand, I believe that there are domestic explanations for the declines in student achievement, whether it's, again, this handoff between No Child Left Behind and ESSA, declines in accountability, pullback in SAT, this culture around grade and flavor, that's disconnected from rising achievement. I believe all those stories, but they're all American-specific stories.

And the decline in reading scores and math scores is not American-specific. It's happening all over the world. And in some cases, there's even evidence that it's worse, the decline is worse, in other countries. It's just something that I want to continue to think about because I never want to be a, like a victim,

of this idea that everything is phones, that there's a smartphone theory of everything, and it's all just screens dragging down attention and driving up distraction around the world. But there's absolutely a way in which the most parsimonious, the most simple, the most straightforward explanation for why reading and math and other education scores are declining in the U.S. and around the developed world is,

it's just the phones. If it's happening around the world, then shouldn't we be looking for a global explanation rather than a domestic-specific one? It's just a nagging thought that I had after we finished recording this show. And while I think we absolutely did name phones, I mean, we teed it up and knocked it down

right in the middle of the show, it's something that I wanted to return to at the end because it's hard sometimes for me to shake the idea that was happening in America, sometimes even when it seems America, specific is when you pull back the camera, not specific to the U.S. at all, but rather a global trend. And any global trend requires that we look at global causes and global explanations. So thank you for listening, and we will talk to you next week.