American Kids Can't Do Math Anymore (theatlantic.com)
- Reference: 0180155305
- News link: https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/11/20/163208/american-kids-cant-do-math-anymore
- Source link: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/11/math-decline-ucsd/684973/
> For the past several years, America has been using its young people as lab rats in a sweeping, if not exactly thought-out, education experiment. Schools across the country have been lowering standards and removing penalties for failure. The results are coming into focus.
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> Five years ago, about 30 incoming freshmen at UC San Diego arrived with math skills below high-school level. Now, according to a recent report from UC San Diego faculty and administrators, that number is more than 900 -- and [2]most of those students don't fully meet middle-school math standards . Many students struggle with fractions and simple algebra problems. Last year, the university, which admits fewer than 30 percent of undergraduate applicants, launched a remedial-math course that focuses entirely on concepts taught in elementary and middle school. (According to the report, more than 60 percent of students who took the previous version of the course couldn't divide a fraction by two.) One of the course's tutors noted that students faced more issues with "logical thinking" than with math facts per se. They didn't know how to begin solving word problems.
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> The university's problems are extreme, but they are not unique. Over the past five years, all of the other University of California campuses, including UC Berkeley and UCLA, have seen the number of first-years who are unprepared for precalculus double or triple. George Mason University, in Virginia, revamped its remedial-math summer program in 2023 after students began arriving at their calculus course unable to do algebra, the math-department chair, Maria Emelianenko, told me.
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> "We call it quantitative literacy, just knowing which fraction is larger or smaller, that the slope is positive when it is going up," Janine Wilson, the chair of the undergraduate economics program at UC Davis, told me. "Things like that are just kind of in our bones when we are college ready. We are just seeing many folks without that capability."
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> Part of what's happening here is that as more students choose STEM majors, more of them are being funneled into introductory math courses during their freshman year. But the national trend is very clear: America's students are getting much worse at math. The decline started about a decade ago and sharply accelerated during the coronavirus pandemic. The average eighth grader's math skills, which rose steadily from 1990 to 2013, are now a full school year behind where they were in 2013, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the gold standard for tracking academic achievement. Students in the bottom tenth percentile have fallen even further behind. Only the top 10 percent have recovered to 2013 levels.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/11/math-decline-ucsd/684973/
[2] https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/11/12/1834253/uc-san-diego-reports-steep-decline-in-student-academic-preparation
Re: (Score:3)
I can guarantee you that Escobar knew how much product you could stick in a plane and how much money he was expecting in return on that
I would even go so far as to speculate he had adequate understanding of application of loan rates to debt owed and how to instantly calculate the amount of money or product needed to buy a person's cooperation
I am not sure where you are going with this, but Escobar was a business man, a brutal businessman, but one all the same
Re: (Score:2)
To American kids the ability to do math is completely irrelevant, they'll be able to ask the AI and get an answer right away.
It's over. (Score:5, Insightful)
Boomer here. I was just young enough to avoid Nam (born in '53) and young enough to see America peak. Unfortunately, I am also young enough to have seen my successful education and employment eventually get shipped off to China before I was ready to retire. I still had a mortgage and 2 kids to send to college. I've made it through. I'm glad to have lived through our golden age. We're past the age of rationality and basically in rot mode now. No better evidence than more than half of the US voted for the orange one. I feel bad for the youngins.
Re: (Score:3)
> in rot mode now. No better evidence than more than half of the US voted for the orange one.
This 'splains it:
TFA: "One of the course's tutors noted that students faced more issues with "logical thinking" than with math facts per se. They didn't know how to begin solving word problems."
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Late-boomer, early gen-xer here
I was lucky enough to have a family of Engineers living next to me, and my early life was spent watching/participating with them identifying goals, solving problems, and using booth logic and mathematics throughout
The sons were 5 and 7 years older than me, so I was between 8 and 10 years old, watching them do algebra homework, and learning by example, so that I was already exposed to this stuff by the time our school system got around to it
Unfortunately, when my own kids got
Re:It's over. (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh yeah, the math thing. That's almost entirely because all the curricula is being decided by people who don't do math. My wife, who is probably in the top 1% of math talents, tutors on occasion. She spends more time trying to figure out what they're trying to teach, than actually working the math. Usually, after some work, she figures it out and explains the old timey way. The response is almost always "Oh, is that what they're trying to say?".
Most math education is being concocted by education majors experimenting on our children.
Re: (Score:3)
It would be great to say you're wrong, but you're not. Worse yet, the younger generation's answer to this is to blame it on you. Republicans have done this, very deliberately. And destruction of education is part of it.
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You do realize the young people aren't choosing their own education, right? Its the previous generations making those changes.
It's our generations fault (Score:4, Interesting)
Our generation accepted the entitlements in return for votes. We got bribed first with our own money and then, through massive borrowing, or market manipulations, with the money of our children. 75% of the population will likely never in their future lives be net contributors to the government coffers. You can't turn that around. No party can run on being fiscally responsible. The current US budget has a deficit of about 34% over revenue and the opposition party was arguing for even more spending. It is so bad with the younger generation that they don't even understand what an entitlement is. (It is when someone else pays for something you get). Older generations you can have a discussion about whether you are entitled to something, whether society as a whole should subsidize or pay for something. I can't even get younger people to understand that rent control or medical insurance that ignores pre existing conditions or getting a house where the value will go up faster than inflation is an entitlement.
Get this political shit off slashdot (Score:1)
Here's the reality. UC San Diego removed the SAT and ACT requirement for incoming freshman. This is not a commentary on the changing of math standards in elementary, middle, and high school.
This is a commentary about what happens when you let any-fucking-one that wants to attend in.
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How is math performance "political shit"? I'd say if we were to get rid of political shit, we should start by removing accounts like yours.
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> This is a commentary about what happens when you let any-fucking-one that wants to attend in.
It did say they admit fewer than 30% of applicants. I don't care what your applicant pool is, if people in the 70th percentile and above can't halve a fucking number, you're in trouble.
So How Does It All Work? (Score:2)
> the university, which admits fewer than 30 percent of undergraduate applicants
Sounds exclusive! So, how does such an exclusive school admission process wind up admitting 900 applicants that can't do middle school math? Additionally, if their math skills are so poor, how do their reading and comprehension skills measure up?
The plan is working perfectly (Score:1)
Ignorance is strength...
The talented ones can (Score:4, Insightful)
Talent is real. It takes a special kind of mind to be good at math, engineering, science, programming, etc.
For years a myth has been promoted that the key to riches is a STEM degree, and that anybody can do it.
Some believed that the only thing that mattered was the degree, not the talent or hard work required to get it. So they slouched through college, putting in minimum effort, socializing, binge drinking and cheating on exams, with predictable results.
Talented people set their own standards, so to them, the concept of lowered standards is meaningless.
Meanwhile, in China, millions of very talented people are working hard.
Re: (Score:2)
There is a process in brain development that occurs during the Adolescent years call 'synaptic pruning' where the body eliminates brain pathways that are not being used in order to reinforce those that are
IF we do not start deep training in math and logic before that occurs, it will be nearly impossible to retrain their brains later in life
Introducing advanced math in the early grade school years is an effective method to ensure adults are able to understand these things, and we are simply FAILING to do tha
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Talent, as one talented person put it once, is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.
Nature versus nurture (Score:1)
We have hard evidence for the improvements to grades you get when you have free school lunch and breakfast. But we can't do that because the Christians won't let us. Specifically the evangelicals.
We could give parents actual support in raising their kids but every time anyone suggests that it gets shut down. Always by the think of the children crowd too.
Doesn't matter if you have the potential to be a useful genius if your parents are both working three jobs leaving you with a television set and no
This seems evil - accepting tuition from them (Score:3)
You are accepting students and taking their money even though they won't pass. Or if they do pass it means you have watered down your own standards to the point that the degree isn't worth as much. Either way this seems wrong. Most parents think of high school as prep for university. So if their kids are being accepted then the high school must be doing well
Re: This seems evil - accepting tuition from them (Score:2)
College is generally preditory these days. The tuition is the purpose.
Learning with fun and enjoyment doesn't work (Score:2)
To learn maths properly, you have to enjoy it, love it even.
You need to be stimulated by the curiosity of the unknown,
and the challenge of problem solving. You need to know
the hit your brain gets when you manage something.
It is like this with music: if you want to learn an instrument
over the years to a high degree of skill, you need to love
the instrument and enjoy the many hours of practice it takes.
Remove that positive reward-driven learning, and replace
it by fear-of-failure-driven learning, and as soon as
College is not middle school (Score:4, Interesting)
1. Colleges should screen applicants. If they aren't ready, don't take them.
2. Colleges should fail anyone who can't pass their courses. Fail too many courses, and you are done.
It isn't the college's job to teach anything other than college level courses.
People shouldn't get a high school degree (Score:1)
until they pass the basics. If they have to take remedial courses, so be it. Graduate at 21 if necessary.
Americans are stupid. (Score:1, Insightful)
They proved it in their last Presidential election.
Common Core Results (Score:2)
Common Core debuted in 2009, and started to spread around the country in 2010. Dubbed "new math", they were trying to get everyone to think about math problems in a prescribed way that was different before. The decline in US math capabilities is a direct result of that.
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New math isn't the problem -- new math was never the problem. Standards are the problem.
"a full school year behind " (Score:2)
If we're graduating Seniors with Junior level math skills that's hardly "Can't do Math."
I suspect even that claim is wrong and we're also teaching the wrong math for an informed electorate. In undergrad we need people sharp in probability and statistics more than matrix algebra. So they can be numerate against politicians' bullshit. I guess we should ask politicians to work on that.
"education experiment" (Score:3)
And who was it that initiated this "education experiment"? Was it the teachers themselves. No. It was the PHDs and administration of course. You know, those who know more than the teachers teaching the subject. I left teaching after 18 years because in that time I went from having the ability to create the curriculum that actually taught the students skills, to being told which objectives must be taught to pass the state mandated tests to ensure the sweet, sweet funding the administration so desperately wanted. Toward the end it was memorize, memorize, memorize ... now take this test. Ok great, forget all that. Now memorize, memorize, memorize for this next test. Good, that's out of the way. People learn very little through rote memorization that is to be regurgitated and then forgotten in favor of the next state test.
Oh for fucks sake (Score:1)
This is some absolute drivel of an article.
The problem isn't that we aren't penalizing children enough. Anyone making that claim is just using cruelty for cruelty sake.
When my kid was in high school they had 45 kids in their class and 10 of them had to stand in the back.
We know exactly why kids are struggling. We are actively sabotaging public education in the hopes of privatizing it for profit and so they handful of religious extremists can indoctrinate children in private schools and a handfu
Anecdotally (Score:2)
Just an anecdote, but my 10-year-old daughter knows her times tables far better than I did at her age. That's entirely from her public schooling, not something I was even aware of until I saw her homework. And she's fairly middle of the curve in her class, so it's not like she's some exception to the rule or anything.
Then again, my boomer mother even in her declining age has always been extremely swift at mental arithmetic, in a way I've never been. It was more required of them at a time when pocket calcula
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Well, they won't be able to calculate how much the USA is giving up to other countries. Then again, given the current administration and hallucinating AI, they can just make stuff up?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
While the U.S. government was shut down and citizens weren't receiving the services they paid for, Israel continued to receive $63 million every day.
Re:won't be able to count genders (Score:2)
One's gender shouldn't be the govt's fucking business at school. Tell the Talibanjelicals to keep their religion to their OWN asses, I don't believe in your Fox Jesus.
Re: (Score:2)
SEX is (moderately) simple science, at least until you get into the weeds with DNA and the mutation of sex chromosomes (XXY, XYY)
Beyond that base programming, conditions in the womb, like an abundance or lack of testosterone, can result in the development of primary sexual characteristics that do not match their genetic 'sex'
GENDER is a term based on the resulting IDENTITY that the person takes based on the above conditions, and the environment they are exposed to while growing to adulthood
The SIMPLE fact,
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You're likely falling into the logical thinking word problem portion of those students.
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You jest, but it truly is terrible. Take this bit (if true): "(According to the report, more than 60 percent of students who took the previous version of the course couldn't divide a fraction by two." My immediate reaction to that was "WTF!?" You just need to double the denominator and simplify if possible and it's all integers no matter what, but, even if you don't simplify, 2/6 and 1/3 both answer the question "what is half of 2/3?".
That's not just a failure in maths skills, it's a failure in basic
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2+3i