NAEP check scores for America’s most weak college students have collapsed — and the timeline tells the story mainstream media received’t: the “Nice Awokening” is failing the very children it claimed it was making an attempt to assist.
A latest New York Instances article unintentionally admits what conservative schooling reformers and annoyed mother and father have lengthy warned: educational requirements in America are collapsing — and it’s the poor, working-class, and deprived children who’re being harm essentially the most.
In a chunk titled “The Pandemic Is Not the Only Reason U.S. Students Are Losing Ground”, the Instances lastly acknowledges that the nation’s lowest-performing college students started falling behind years earlier than COVID — proper round 2013. That timeline is essential, as a result of it coincides not solely with the decline of the Bush-era No Baby Left Behind laws but additionally the rise of radical progressive dogma in public schooling — a cultural shift critics have referred to as the “Nice Awokening.”
NAEP, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, information present that from 2003 to 2013, even the underside 10% of check takers — the children most in want of academic help — had been slowly gaining floor. However beginning round 2013, that pattern reversed. Since then, the bottom scorers on math and studying checks in each 4th and eighth grade have steadily declined, with the drop accelerating after 2020.
“At this time, the nation’s lowest-scoring college students are in free fall,” the Instances concedes.
The American Enterprise Institute says this data represents a “five alarm fire” about America’s academic progress.
Leftists are dismissing the info as reflecting nothing more than racial differences and cheating on the NAEP tests and aren’t price worrying about.
This isn’t about children within the prime percentile doing marginally worse. It’s the underside quartile — disproportionately made up of scholars with disabilities, English-language learners, and kids from low-income households — who’re bearing the brunt of the academic collapse. In accordance with the info, at the same time as higher-achieving college students started to stabilize post-pandemic, these college students continued to lose floor.
The highest-scorers are treading water throughout the woke period’s education, however the bottom-scorers are watching their scores fall off a cliff.
“Fairness” in Observe: Woke Coverage, Declining Educational Efficiency
Whereas the New York Instances scrambles in charge elements just like the Nice Recession, smartphone use, and the expiration of Bush-era college accountability legal guidelines, it refuses to confront the elephant within the classroom: the sweeping transformation of public schooling right into a laboratory for progressive social experiments.
Since 2013, public colleges have been quickly reengineered to prioritize fairness over excellence, activism over lecturers, and “lived expertise” over logic and literacy. Standardized testing, self-discipline, gifted applications, and even math instruction have been attacked as “racist.” Phonics and factual historical past have been changed by emotions, narratives, and DEI coaching classes.
As creator and author Steve Sailer famous in his Substack commentary on the identical NAEP developments, the decline isn’t random: “White collar children do okay going to highschool on Zoom, however blue collar children profit from going to highschool in particular person and being talked at by center class grown-ups.”
That’s two years after 2013 — simply when colleges started absolutely embracing identification politics, anti-merit ideology, and cultural radicalism below the guise of “inclusive schooling.”
The shift from instructing core topics to indoctrinating college students with gender idea, racial resentment, and anti-American narratives didn’t simply waste classroom time — it has eroded the construction and authority that weak college students depend on to succeed.
Collapse by Design?
Below No Baby Left Behind, colleges needed to present outcomes. Academics had been pressured to supply positive factors in studying and math, and check scores had been scrutinized by mother and father and directors alike. That mannequin might have been irritating and controversial — however based on the standardized scores it labored, notably for teenagers who lacked educational assets and different help buildings at house.
When that system collapsed — first below Obama-era waivers and later by bipartisan neglect — colleges had been lower unfastened from accountability simply because the “fairness” motion took over. The brand new focus? Group identification, social justice, “anti-racism,” and imprecise “trauma-informed” instructing. And what adopted?
A measurable, decade-long collapse in efficiency — felt most acutely by the very kids the Left claims to champion.
The underside 10% didn’t simply lose floor. They had been left behind by design, as public schooling stopped being about equal alternative and began being about ideological conformity.
The present collapse in educational efficiency amongst low-income college students additionally eerily echoes the Cloward-Piven technique, a radical political idea developed within the Sixties by sociologists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven. Their thought was to overwhelm and destabilize public methods — like welfare — by intentionally growing dependency and pushing these methods to a breaking level, thereby making a disaster that could possibly be used to justify sweeping federal intervention and structural transformation. In immediately’s schooling system, an identical sample has emerged: self-discipline is dismantled, educational requirements are eroded, and advantage is decried as oppressive — all below the guise of “fairness.” Because of this, colleges fail the very college students they’re meant to uplift, fueling a bigger political agenda of centralization, dependency, and everlasting grievance. Whether or not intentional or not, the web impact resembles Cloward and Piven’s authentic imaginative and prescient: a failed system that paves the best way for radical change below disaster situations.
Mainstream Media Catches On — However Nonetheless Misses the Level – And Shield the Left-Wing Agenda at Work
The Instances article, to its credit score, paperwork the pattern. However like so many left-wing company media shops, refuses to say the quiet half out loud. As an alternative, it tiptoes across the decline and tosses out generic explanations:
“Researchers level to a variety of academic and societal adjustments over the previous decade, together with a retrenchment in class accountability, the lasting results of the Nice Recession and the rise of smartphones…”
However none of these elements clarify the depth of the drop after 2013. Nor do they account for why scores amongst high-achieving college students have remained comparatively regular whereas solely the underside performers plummeted.
What does clarify it? A lack of construction. A lack of rigor. A classroom setting now hostile to goal requirements, self-discipline, and educational excellence.
The Nice Awokening’s Actual Legacy: Failing the Poor & Needy
The actual tragedy right here isn’t simply statistical. It’s generational. A full decade of failed academic ideology — imposed top-down by activists, bureaucrats, and DEI consultants — has robbed a whole cohort of scholars of their probability to succeed.
And whereas elites ship their children to prep colleges and STEM camps, low-income kids are being experimented on with race essentialism, TikTok remedy classes, and Important Concept disguised as compassion.
The “Nice Awokening” was by no means about serving to the poor. It was about seizing cultural energy — and now, the results are being measured in check scores, dropout charges, and shattered futures.
These reviews are additional proof that President Trump’s efforts last month to dismantle the Department of Education had been lengthy overdue.
