Schools are busy teaching their students things like “antiracism” (a code word for discrimination against whites) and “critical ethnic studies,” at the expense of math, science, and writing. That, and school closures in the pandemic, have left students less proficient in basic skills tested by standardized tests, such as English, math, reading, and science. As Hot Air notes,
The ACT test is designed to measure college readiness among high school students in four basic subject areas: English, math, reading and science. Every year students across the country take test and those scores are tallied individually and as an overall average. Scores for the class of 2022 were just released and the results were the lowest they’ve been since 1991.
The Associated Press reports:
The class of 2022′s average ACT composite score was 19.8 out of 36, marking the first time since 1991 that the average score was below 20. What’s more, an increasing number of high school students failed to meet any of the subject-area benchmarks set by the ACT — showing a decline in preparedness for college-level coursework.
The test scores, made public in a report Wednesday, show 42% of ACT-tested graduates in the class of 2022 met none of the subject benchmarks in English, reading, science and math, which are indicators of how well students are expected to perform in corresponding college courses.
In comparison, 38% of test takers in 2021 failed to meet any of the benchmarks…
ACT scores have declined steadily in recent years. Still, “the magnitude of the declines this year is particularly alarming,” ACT CEO Janet Godwin said in a statement. “We see rapidly growing numbers of seniors leaving high school without meeting college-readiness benchmarks in any of the subjects we measure.”
Scores were declining even before the pandemic (due to rising woke ideology in schools), but as John Sexton points out at Hot Air, there has been an even bigger decline this year:
Scores dropped among whites and blacks, but not among Asians. As Sexton observes, “Asian students managed to buck the downward trend. Their average scores went from 24.5 in 2018 to 24.7 in 2022. The scores of every other group dropped by about the same amount (0.9 points from 2018-2022).”
School closings due to the pandemic were the single biggest culprit for the recent decline. As Sexton notes, students “spent a lot of time out of classrooms and doing Zoom classes in 2020 and 2021,” which were not as effective as classroom instruction. “Previous national test scores have shown the decline isn’t just limited to high school seniors.”
In September, the New York Times reported that standardized test scores had dropped to levels not seen in 30 years.
National test results released on Thursday showed in stark terms the pandemic’s devastating effects on American schoolchildren, with the performance of 9-year-olds in math and reading dropping to the levels from two decades ago.
This year, for the first time since the National Assessment of Educational Progress tests began tracking student achievement in the 1970s, 9-year-olds lost ground in math, and scores in reading fell by the largest margin in more than 30 years.
The declines spanned almost all races and income levels and were markedly worse for the lowest-performing students. While top performers in the 90th percentile showed a modest drop — three points in math — students in the bottom 10th percentile dropped by 12 points in math, four times the impact.
School closings, which were demanded by the teachers unions, also harmed kids health. Many kids became fatter when schools closed to in-person learning during the coronavirus pandemic. Obesity rose at the fastest annual rate ever among kids. “Overweight or obesity increased among 5- through 11-year-olds from 36.2% to 45.7% during the pandemic, an absolute increase of 8.7% and relative increase of 23.8%,” reported the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Rising obesity made suffering from the pandemic much worse. “The evidence linking obesity to adverse COVID-19 outcomes is ‘overwhelmingly clear,’” say medical experts. Over three-quarters of all people hospitalized for the coronavirus are overweight or obese, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported in March.
Unlike the elderly, children almost never die of the coronavirus. But they can require costly hospitalization for it, if they are obese. Obese people are much more likely to require hospitalization when they contract COVID-19.
Supporters of school closings claimed they were needed to protect people’s health. But by driving up obesity rates, school closings harmed students’ health. Students learned much less during distance or online learning that they did when schools were open — especially black and Hispanic students, whose pass rates collapsed in states like Virginia.
Shutting schools actually increases COVID-19 deaths, according to researchers at the University of Edinburgh. “Schools do not, in fact, appear to be major spreaders of COVID-19,” said Brown University’s Emily Oster. Back in 2020, the federal Centers for Disease Control pointed out that there’s “little evidence that schools have contributed meaningfully to community transmission,” and that closing schools leads to “severe learning loss.”
Schools remained open in most European countries. But in the U.S., teachers unions and left-wing activists successfully pushed to keep schools closed, resulting in enormous learning loss. Some progressive localities even forced private schools to close, even when they satisfied federal health guidelines.
