Thursday, October 16, 2025

Part I

The Great Education Regression: 49 Out of 50 States Report Increased Gap Between Top 10% and Bottom 10% of Students

“America is Sliding Towards Illiteracy.” That’s the headline and a very important essay published yesterday at The Atlantic. It’s by Idrees Kahloon, and it talks about declining standards and low expectations, which according to this report, are destroying American education. Now, panic over education is not new. Panic over education was true of the ancient Greeks. It was true of the ancient Romans. It’s true of the Victorians. It’s true certainly of the last half of the 20th century, but in most cases, it’s also justified. And one of the things we just need to pause and say right from the get-go is that as Christians, we understand that education is, first of all, one of the most important responsibilities of a society, one of the most important responsibilities for Christian parents, one of the most important priorities for an entire civilization. And by the way, whatever the education is, that’s what the civilization will soon be.

It’s also important to understand that we have really messed up education in this country for a matter of successive generations. And thus, the educational panic that emerged in the 1940s and ’50s has given way to the educational panic that we know now. And by the way, there are two very different panics. The big concern at the end of World War II in educational panic is that American kids are getting behind Soviet kids in terms of education. Now, a part of that was just propaganda, but at the same time, the United States had some very big wake-up calls after World War II and in the midst of the Cold War. The most famous of those wake-up calls was named Sputnik. There in the late 1950s, a wake-up call to the United States that it wasn’t just propaganda, the Soviet Union was ahead of the US in the space race.

Now, almost immediately, that led to the huge question, how are our kids being prepared for a world in which we need spacecraft and orbiting satellites and missiles and all the rest? And thus, you had a massive turn towards science and applied science in the late 1950s and the early 1960s. You had other panics that came later. But as we’re going to see, you also had the ideological corruption of public education in the United States parallel to the ideological corruption of most higher education, most sectors of university and college life in the United States during the same period. Those are tied together.

Let’s look at what is actually being reported here first. Kahloon writes, “The past decade may rank as one of the worst in the history of American education. It marks a stark reversal from what was once a hopeful story. At the start of this century, American students registered steady improvement in math and reading. Around 2013, this progress began to stall out and then to backslide dramatically. What exactly went wrong? The decline began well before the pandemic so COVID era disruptions alone cannot explain it. Smartphones and social media probably account for some of the drop, but there’s another explanation, albeit one that progressives in particular seem reluctant to countenance, a pervasive refusal to hold children to high standards.”

It’s an amazing opening paragraph, and to the credit of The Atlantic, and The Atlantic is not a conservative journal of opinion, but it has over the course of the last decade or so, run some of the most important articles about the state of our culture. And one of the things it has done, it doesn’t do it uniformly, but one of the things it has done is to question liberal shibboleths and liberal ideology, and in this case even liberal education.

We pay particular attention to this report in The Atlantic. And as Kahloon writes, “We are now seeing what the lost decade in American education has wrought. By some measures, American students have regressed to a level not seen in 25 years or more. Test scores from NAEP, short for the National Assessment of Educational Progress, released this year show that 33% of eighth graders are reading at a level that is below basic, meaning that they struggle to follow the order of events in a passage or even to summarize a main idea. That is the highest share of students,” says the report, “unable to meaningfully read since 1992. Among fourth graders, 40% are below basic in reading, the highest share since 2000. In 2024, the average score on the ACT, a popular college admissions standardized test that is graded on a scale of one to 36, was 19.4, the worst average performance since the test was redesigned in 1990.”

Now, by now, my guess is that this has your attention and parents should be at the front of the line in terms of those paying attention to this, so should all Christian leaders and so should all Christians, regardless of whether or not you have children in the home, and frankly all Americans should be concerned about this. But one of the things we need to recognize is that not all Americans will be concerned about this in the same way.

All right, so we’re not even to the controversial stuff yet. What would be controversial in this particular Atlantic report? It is, for example, just set this up, by 2024 gains that had been experienced among fourth graders have been erased. Listen to this: in 49 out of 50 states, all but Mississippi, the gap between the top 10th and the bottom 10th grew. A spokesman for the American Enterprise Institute pointed out, “That this surging inequality has grown faster in America than in other developed countries. The upshot is grim. The bottom 10th of thirteen-year-olds, according to the NAEP’s long data trend, are hitting lows in reading and math scores not seen since those tests began in 1971 and 1978 respectively.

All right, so what would government do in response to this? What government does, which is hand out lots of money. And so, in the midst of COVID and in the so-called stimulus packages under the Biden administration, even more billions of dollars was thrown to the educational establishment. As The Atlantic says, Congress appropriated a gargantuan sum of money, $190 billion to ameliorate learning loss. Most of it is part of the Biden administration’s American Rescue Plan. Listen to this, “For scale, this is roughly the sum recently given to the Trump administration to fund border wall and immigration enforcement agenda.” In other words, it was a lot of money and it was thrown to educational establishments. Now, there was something buried in the comment that I read earlier in that part of the report, about 49 out of 50 states, just hold on. That’s going to be really interesting.

Jonathan Haidt, for example, author of the bestselling book, The Anxious Generation, he’s been beating that drum for quite a long time. And honestly, there’ve been those before him, like Jean Twenge, who’ve been making the same kind of argument. The cell phone is at the heart of the problem. And let’s face it, the smartphone is a central part of the problem, and that is made very clear when you look at data over time. But as The Atlantic report acknowledges, that doesn’t account for what happened before most teenagers and children had smartphones. It was already in a catastrophic downtrend. It also doesn’t explain why there’s such a significant downtrend right now among younger elementary school students who by and large don’t have smartphones. And so, the smartphones are not irrelevant, and as a matter of fact, we know they are a huge, huge problem.

And I can say as a teacher, if you allow the distraction of a cell phone in your classroom, you’re losing control of the classroom. You don’t have their minds. A screen is going to have their mind. If they have a screen in front of their face, it has their full attention, not you, and that’s a huge problem. And that’s even before we talk about what’s on the screen, and all the other social pressures and social ills that come with the use of the smartphone. But the smartphone is a big part of this. But one of the things that we have to watch is that everyone wants a simple explanation in order to say that’s the problem, but the problem started before smartphones. It’s showing up where smartphones don’t show up. Undoubtedly, that’s a part of it, it’s not all of it.

Part II

The “Mississippi Miracle”: The Left Attacks Mississippi’s Successful Education Model, Including Its Lack of Teacher Unions

And I want to go back to the 49 out of 50. 49 out of 50 states, in this particular statistic, showed regression. They were going back declining reading skills, declining math skills. In particular when it comes to reading, one state was the exception. What was that state? It was the state of Mississippi. Now wait just a minute. The state of Mississippi. The state of Mississippi, at least according to the cultured elites, is not where you would look for a model for education, but it’s really interesting. Guess what? Mississippi went back to a pretty fundamental way of learning reading. And guess what? Children are reading. Mississippi went back to treating children as learners. And in particular, Mississippi has held pretty strict requirements for progression grade by grade because they actually want to see proof that a child is learning. Well, all right, that’s a very interesting thing. But as The Atlantic reports here, there are a lot of progressives who just aren’t about to follow the example of Mississippi in this, and why? And that’s because, and I’m going beyond the Atlantic article here. I want to set the stage.

What is a school supposed to do? How do you define education? What are you looking for? I think most Americans don’t recognize how little agreement there is on that fundamental question. On the Left, when it comes to the purpose of the schools that has, for decades, been primarily sociological rather than educational. It has been largely political rather than educational, and all kinds of things that come into this. And so, certainly you have DEI and other initiatives, but quite honestly, even before anyone knew, I started to say how to spell DEI – before anyone knew how to recognize that acronym, frankly, the same ideologies were there. And so, I’m going to be a little bit more autobiographical than I would normally be.

I went to elementary school. Now, I know it was a long time ago. It was in the 1960s, but I went to elementary school back when school was school. And so, I mean that was pretty much what it was, reading and writing and arithmetic. Teacher and authority in the classroom. Classrooms were orderly. I think we all knew what school was. And by the way, I loved school and couldn’t wait to get there and loved learning. And the requirements were real clear and the testing was real clear, and teachers taught and the teacher was the authority in the classroom. And so, that’s the way I thought the world would stay. It didn’t stay that way. Because my family was required to move to another part of the state of Florida in the early 1970s when I was advancing from the seventh grade to the eighth grade, I was in the seventh grade in a world I recognized, like I say, pretty classic model of education, but I landed in the eighth grade in the middle of a progressivist experiment, very early 1970s liberal experiment.

The motto of the progressive educators was against the teacher being the authority. It was the no more sage on the stage, now just a guide on the side. And so, the teacher was like your big buddy, your friend. And at least in some classes the teacher wasn’t even called a teacher, but rather a learning facilitator. Let me just tell you what a learning facilitator does. Well, whatever that learning facilitator does, it’s not facilitating learning. It was a very bad experience for me, honestly. And so, for a while, I advanced because, and I don’t mean this meanly, but I was basically self-taught, and I was surrounded by other ways to learn because the school really wasn’t helping me. And let’s just say, discipline disappeared between the seventh and the eighth grades. I went to school in the seventh grade, I went to the zoo in the eighth grade in terms of behavior, and it was crazy in other ways.

Honestly, even the architecture of the school was a problem. They didn’t want walls dividing classrooms because walls divide people. And so, it was one giant room with partitions. And so, that meant whatever went on in the next classroom, well, it wasn’t a classroom, it was a class space, you heard in yours. Anyways, I hope I’m making the point. I had an early immersion progressivist understandings of education, pretty radical ideas from the ’60s that someone thought would be really cool to try out in the suburbs of America in the 1970s. And even as I talked to my parents about it, I don’t think they could understand because they thought they knew what school was and they were really faithful, engaged parents. Eventually, they figured it out. All they had to do was come to the parents day at school and well, welcome to the mayhem, and they pretty much got it.

But I was introduced to the fact right then as a thirteen-year-old, even though I didn’t know the word worldview, I would come to that just shortly thereafter when evangelicals started using that term because we had to. I really realized that there’s a very different understanding of education going on here, even though I didn’t perceive it at 13. It’s a different understanding of humanity. It’s a different understanding of really the totality of everything. Is education about imparting knowledge or is it about drawing something from inside the kid out? An awful lot of that progressivist education was about getting in touch with yourself. It’s the last thing you need to ask a group of eighth graders to do. Instead, they need to know, oh, I don’t know, algebra or geometry. I was actually thrilled to get in geometry class because all of a sudden, things made sense because the math was harder to mess up than English where everything was kind of liberationist.

But the point I want to make is that this has been going on for a long time, and I think most American parents have been underestimating the revolution that has taken place in education. And for one thing, when I learned reading, I learned it by phonics. Now, there’s nothing magical about phonics, but phonics deals with the reality of language and the reality of how words are constructed and how words are recognized. And it’s a proven method of learning reading, you all of a sudden just emphasize phonics, that doesn’t mean you automatically teach kids to read, but I will say I think it’s hard to teach kids to read without it.

The progressivist idea was whole word reading, but that has been a disaster by and large. And yet, when you look at Mississippi as the standout here, this article in The Atlantic acknowledges that progressives are going to have a very difficult time dealing with reality because the reality is that all of a sudden, something’s working in Mississippi and it’s failing in other states. How many other states? 49 other states. And the one thing that seems more important here is the fact that there are objective standards about learning. That’s really key too.

What does learning look like and how do you measure learning? If you measure learning by being in the room for a certain number of hours, well, that’s kind of ridiculous. If you measure learning by this person learned to socially negotiate a classroom or a school long enough to play the game to graduate to the next grade, you need to understand that the Left in this country has been adamantly against standardized testing when it comes to reading, mathematics and knowledge. Now, that’s not true by the time you get to the SAT, it’s not true by the time you get to the study, the test that’s mentioned here, the ACT. Those have been ideologically compromised to some degree as well. By the way, it’s one of the reasons why the ACT has been gaining ground over the SAT, at least in some circles. But the reality is that there’s been social advancement for students. And the accusation is that you’re racist, or you’re an elitist if you believe there should be special programs for schools and for kids that work.

And so, right now, this has been of controversy right here in Louisville, Kentucky, Jefferson County, Kentucky, where the accusation has been that charter schools and other things allow certain children privilege that others don’t have. And nationwide, this is a huge issue. And right now in New York City in the mayoral race, this is a massive issue. You have a democratic socialist, an Islamic mayoral candidate, Zohran Mamdani, who is expected to win. And he has said that he is against all of the selective charter schools and selective school system structures there in New York. So what that means, let’s be honest, is not that all the other children are going to be raised up. It is instead that all the children are going to be basically held to a much lower opportunity and lower standard.

Conservative Christians need to recognize that inequality in education is a moral concern. It’s a moral concern for us. It’s one of the reasons why so many churches have ministries trying to help in neighborhoods that need a lot of help. Christians can make a big difference in helping children to learn. But if you just redefine learning in terms of meeting a sociological explanation, you’re going to end up with schools that are anything but schools for learning. And there are all kinds of social needs that have been basically now assigned to the public school systems. In a lot of public school systems, an awful lot of the money, the massive amounts of spending actually doesn’t go towards anything in the curriculum. It’s an entire social services support system. And unfortunately, given the decline of marriage, and the decline of family, and how many children otherwise would just be abandoned during the day, that’s an issue all of us have to recognize. It’s a very sad phenomenon. But you know what? If the schools are supposed to be schools, and if we are funding schools to be schools, then they actually need to learn how to school or recover how to school.

I want to look to this at The Atlantic. I think it’s a very important article. There’s more here I would love to share with you. There’s an acknowledgement of the politics here. For instance about the “Mississippi Miracle”, that’s what some people are calling it. The author writes, “The Mississippi Miracle should force a reckoning in less successful states and ideally a good deal of imitation. But for Democrats who pride themselves on belonging to the party of education, these results may be awkward to process. Not only are the southern states that are registering the greatest improvements in learning run by Republicans, but also their teachers are among the least…” Okay, hold it, “Among the least unionized in the country.” One of the things we need to know is that one of the enemies I would say of American civilization, I will go that far, are the organized teacher unions in the United States of America.

When you look at the radical takeover, those teacher unions, and this is acknowledged in this article, it also tends to run with statistical parallels to the lack of performance in those same school systems. Not only that, you look at Randi Weingarten and others who are the leaders of these teacher unions, they’re not only on the left, they are far on the left. And by the way, they always demand more money. And you can look at some of the school systems that they would point to. They just demand more money and they produce less with more spending. And quite frankly, it’s all about the teacher’s unions and their power.

Remember, this is a very important part of the Christian worldview. When you look at something like that, this is not just about policy differences, there’s a basic worldview chasm between where I think most parents are, I think I can pretty confidently say that and where the teacher’s unions are. And so, there are all kinds of things to learn from this. But it is really interesting, I think, to raise the issue of whether or not meaningful reform is possible at the federal level.

I want to go back to the states. Here’s something to remember. Education, given our system of federalism and the importance of states, has largely been assigned and respected as a state function. The Department of Education at the federal level didn’t exist until Jimmy Carter basically paid off the teacher’s unions by creating a cabinet department, and thus we have all kinds of ridiculous things where you have money being sent by taxpayers from Texas that goes to Washington and a certain portion comes back to Texas with federal restrictions. I think that has been a disaster in and of itself, and that’s one of the reasons why President Trump has pretty self-evidently sought to minimize the influence and reach of the US Department of Education.

But as you look at this state by state, you have real differences. At least a large part of that acknowledged right here is whether or not the teachers in that state are unionized. And here you have a direct statement that in Mississippi, which is mostly if not wholly non-unionized, that’s where you have changes that were made that the unions are going to resist.

Part III

Americans are Skeptical of Higher Education: Is Higher Ed Headed in the Wrong Direction?

Next, I want to point to a related issue. It’s a major report out from the Pew Research Center. That research center is one of the most interesting in the United States. It’s incredibly well-funded, and they put out a lot of research and a lot of it gets headlines. This headline, “Growing Share of Americans Say the US higher Education System is Headed in the Wrong Direction.” Now of course, that’s kind of a weather vane question, which way is the wind blowing? And that in itself is not all that interesting, but I want to tell you what is interesting. Listen to this. Seven in 10 Americans now say the higher education system in the United States is generally going in the wrong direction. That’s up from 56% who said this in 2020. Listen to this. In the new survey, majorities across all major demographic groups shared the view that the US higher education system is going in the wrong direction. In this new survey, majorities across all major demographic groups share the view that the US higher education system is going in the wrong direction, but some groups are more likely than others to say this.

I don’t think what follows is what you might expect. Listen, the report states, “For example, adults who have a four-year college degree are somewhat more likely than those without a college degree to express this view.” Did you hear that? People who went to college actually to a greater degree than those who didn’t go to college, think college and university life is headed in the wrong direction. They’re in a position to know. And there are several things that are raised in this research, ideological polarization. Yes. When it says going in the wrong direction, in this kind of survey, it is interesting to just put that kind of broad question out there because this could be because people say it’s going in the wrong direction financially, tuition’s going up too fast. It’s going in the wrong direction because you have changes in the curriculum that people like and don’t like. We’re not keeping up with artificial intelligence, or whatever they’re going to come up with. The point is that if you ask people, is the country headed in the right direction? You get answers that are really about political confidence in the current moment and in the current presidential administration or in a state, the current governor. In other words, a lot of people respond to that without any specific reason. It’s the weather vane question. I don’t think it’s headed it in the right direction.

If you ask Americans, regardless of their demographic profile, do you think higher education is going in the wrong direction? I’m going to guess about most of American history, a significant proportion of Americans would say yes because it sounds more interesting to say yes. But when you have college graduates more likely than non-graduates, well, they’re the people with the experience, and I do think the larger issue here is ideological. The universities and colleges turned into leftist ideological indoctrination camps in so many ways, and that’s just growing very stale. Not only is it wrong, but it also, it becomes very stale.

But it’s not just that, there are related issues such as the curriculum. I heard something astounding the other day, and I checked it out, and it’s true. I’m not going to state the university right now, but a major state university, one of the most respected, I had a professor in that institution tell me that in the entire English department, there isn’t a single course on William Shakespeare. In other words, it has become so ideological, you can take feminist literary theory, looking at France in the 19th century. You can’t take William Shakespeare, which in terms of education has been considered a part of the classical canon, the central canon of Western learning. And so, this tells me something about what’s going on here.

And the money is also a big factor. Higher education costs more and more and more and more and produces less and less and less. And at least a lot of Americans have awakened to that fact. And let’s just say we need to talk about that at every opportunity, but we also need to talk about education as a responsibility. To whom is that primarily given as a responsibility? I believe in creation order, it is most importantly given to parents. In the Old Testament, parents are specifically addressed. Look at a text like Deuteronomy 6. In the New Testament, parents are directly addressed. And of course, we are to raise our children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. That means the parents have to be the primary teachers.

It also means something else, and this is hard to say, but it’s essential to say, if you violate creation order, if you subvert creation order, for instance, as I mentioned recently on The Briefing, if you have two parents in the house, the child is going to hear far more than twice as many words in the day than if there’s just one parent in the home. If you have a mom and a dad in the home, then that child, almost by definition statistically, is in a far greater likelihood of success in life, yes, and also of success in learning. Now, again, I don’t want to speak to single-parent homes and say, “Abandon all hope.” That is not the point at all. But I do want to acknowledge, as I think most single parents would acknowledge, it’s a tougher challenge. It’s a bigger role. 

And that’s one of the reasons why, the next thing I want to say is that of course it’s a parental responsibility, a family responsibility, but Christian congregations need to understand that even as families are such an important part of our churches, and frankly the honoring of creation order is such an important issue for our congregations, a part of what it means to be Christians is within the body of Christ to try to reach out to those who need and provide what otherwise might be lacking. Let’s put it this way. You should find much more wholeness, you should find better test scores, when you have children and families, regardless of their structure at the time that are engaged in church, that are engaged in church activities, that are coming to church for the preaching of the Word of God and are upheld by congregational love and support. We ought to see a difference there. And honestly, I think that’s already pretty evident, but need to talk out loud about this responsibility and own it.

At the same time, this also means that Christian parents and others need to be very much aware of what’s going on, say, in higher education. And I assume a vast number of Christians would answer the question similarly to this study, that higher education in America is going in the wrong direction. And I just want to end on this. If you say that and you know that, then I want to ask some Christian parents, why do you make educational decisions at the college and university level that conflict with what you just said you believe about the direction of those institutions?

Enough for today.