It's 2024. Why are we still having such trouble with young adults lacking the basic math skills needed for college or a job? Where have we been failing in the schools, and is it improving yet?

Still? Improving?

Things have gotten dramatically worse.

Some of it is the pandemic. We couldn’t stop promoting students and we couldn’t guarantee that students learned, and it wasn’t anyone’s fault.

But we saw the decline well before that. In the US, that change owes a lot to Bush’s signature No Child Left Behind legislation. Constant testing regimes have negative outcomes. We know that. We know why. We still do it. Sadly, Obama continued it with Every Student Succeeds, which attempted some fixes but didn’t resolve the fundamental issue: constant testing regimes have negative outcomes.

And it’s not just mathematics, although it’s pretty easy to see and measure in mathematics. It’s also quite visible in writing skills.

So… why? Because we literally paid to make it happen. We have paid billions of dollars in the hope that, despite what we know, this constant testing regime will improve outcomes. News flash: it didn’t and it won’t and it can’t be fixed, because the problem is that it’s an inherently unworkable model. It has little to do with implementation choices.

EDIT: I should add that it’s not just testing. Testing sets up a problematic system, but we also decided that it’s important to make everyone feel good and get A’s.