In November 2025, the University of California at San Diego – ranked sixth nationally by U.S. News & World Report – released a shocking report. It said, in part:
Over the past five years, UC San Diego has experienced a steep decline in the academic preparation of its entering first-year students – particularly in mathematics, but also in writing and language skills. Between 2020 and 2025, the number of students whose math skills fall below high school level increased nearly thirtyfold; moreover, 70 percent of those students fall below middle school levels, reaching roughly one in twelve members of the entering cohort.
This trend poses serious challenges both to student success and to the university’s instructional mission. Admitting large numbers of underprepared students risks harming those students and straining limited instructional resources.
This sounds bad enough, but the details are mindboggling. Since the skills of their incoming students were so dismal, USC was forced to add remedial classes for middle- and elementary-school math. You would think that the students in these new classes were among those in high school that never took advanced math, yes? Nope. Ninety-four percent (94%) of them had completed an advanced math class in high school (i.e., pre-calculus, calculus or statistics) and received an average of A- in the course.
USC found that, in 2023, students who had been in a remedial math class in high school basically had fifth grade-level abilities. Only 39 percent of them could correctly round the number 374,518 to the nearest hundred, which is a third-grade skill.
In 2019, right before the COVID crisis, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) – commonly referred to as The Nation’s Report Card – revealed that 40 percent of 4th graders and 34 percent of 8th graders performed at or above the Proficient level in Math, a level that represents “solid academic performance.” Only 8 percent of 4th graders and 10 percent of 8th graders performed at the Advanced level. In reading, 37 percent of 4th graders and 36 percent of 8th graders performed at or above the Proficient level. Only 9 percent of 4th graders and 4 percent of 8th graders performed at the Advanced level.
The Basic NAEP level means that the student demonstrated only “partial mastery of prerequisite knowledge and skills that are fundamental for proficient work at each grade.” Only 69 percent of 12th grade students achieved the Basic level in reading and 58 percent of them achieved the Basic level in mathematics. Only 43 percent of them achieved the Basic level in U.S. History.
These next set of numbers should terrify every single American who values our continued democracy. Only 26 percent of 4th graders, 23 percent of 8th graders, and 23 percent of 12th graders were Proficient in Civics, and 19 percent of 4th graders, 14 percent of 8th graders, and 11 percent of 12th graders were Proficient in U.S. History.
Breaking the numbers down by race is absolutely devastating. In 4th grade math, there was a 32-point score gap between white and black students (51 percent to 19 percent) and a 25-point score gap between white and Hispanic students (51 percent to 26 percent). In 8th grade math, there was a 31-point score gap between white and black students (44 percent to 13 percent) and a 24-point score gap between white and Hispanic students (44 percent to 20 percent).
In 4th grade reading, there was a 27-point score gap between white and black students (47 percent to 20 percent) and a 24-point score gap between white and Hispanic students (47 percent to 23 percent). In 8th grade reading, there was a 27-point score gap between white and black students (45 percent to 18 percent) and a 22-point score gap between white and Hispanic students (45 percent to 23 percent).
That was then. You just won’t believe what the numbers are post-pandemic.
In October 2022, the NAEP released its first results since COVID. Even though the federal government sent schools $190 billion in pandemic relief funds – to be used for interventions like increased tutoring, expanded summer school, and after-school programs – the math scores of 4th and 8th grade students showed the steepest decline in the history of the assessment.
In Math, just 26 percent of 8th graders performed at or above the Proficient level, a drop of eight percentage points, and only 36 percent of 4th graders performed at or above the Proficient level, a drop of five percentage points. In reading, only 33 percent of 4th graders and 31 percent of 8th graders performed at or above the Proficient level.
And the news just keeps getting worse. Even though the evidence was clear that school closures during the pandemic were disastrous for our children at the time, we now know that instead of catching up, our kids are continuing to fall farther behind.
In a depressing report released in July 2023, NWEA – a research and assessment methodology organization – called this phenomenon “education’s long COVID.” The report revealed that the average student would need “the equivalent of 4.1 additional months of schooling to catch up in reading and 4.5 months in math” and that “marginalized students remain the furthest from recovery.”
This last point should come as no surprise since minority children are always hit the hardest. In the case of the COVID disruption, any progress made in closing the educational gap over the past two decades was essentially wiped out. An economist at Stanford, Eric Hanushek, put it this way: “This cohort of students is going to be punished throughout their lifetime.”
Reporting from ProPublica reenforced all these assessments: “An analysis of data from about 80 percent of public schools in the country has found that, in districts that went remote for 90 percent or more of 2020-21, the decline in math scores represented the loss of two-thirds of a year, nearly double the drop in districts that were remote for less than 10 percent of the year. And these numbers don’t take into account the millions of students who have vanished from the rolls entirely since the extended hiatus during which the norm of attending school eroded.”
On January 29, 2025, the latest Nation’s Report Card assessing students in 4th and 8th grade math and reading was released – and the nightmare continues.
Although public schools had pretty much spent all the $190 billion in federal emergency funding they received during COVID, there was no improvement in 8th grade math (although 4th graders got a two-point rebound after dropping five points between 2019 and 2022) and reading scores took a beating across the board. The number of 8th graders reading below the base line is now the largest in the assessment’s history and the number of 4th graders reading below the base line is the highest it’s been in 20 years.
In September 2025, the results for 12th graders were released, revealing record lows in reading and math. A third of high-school seniors don’t have basic reading skills and almost half can’t do basic math. The average math score of 12th graders was the lowest since the current test began in 2005 and reading scores were roughly 10 points worse than when that exam was introduced in 1992.