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Math

American Kids Can't Do Math Anymore (theatlantic.com) 258

An anonymous reader shares a report: 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.

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 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.

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.

"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."

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.

American Kids Can't Do Math Anymore

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  • They won't be able to count how many genders are

  • It's over. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by methano ( 519830 ) on Thursday November 20, 2025 @11:18AM (#65807117)
    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, Insightful)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      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."

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        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

        • I'm having a hard time helping my kids with their math homework because every concept has some weird trick to get to the answer and they have to repeat that trick on the tests to get credit. So first I have to go and learn the trick myself and then help them.

          I do remember my own Dad having the same issue from time to time when I was a kid, but it's gone to an extreme today.

          • Pro-tip, if the homework assignment is to do the odd-numbered problems, then do the even ones as well since they will likely show up on the test

            Each lesson plan is focused on a mathematical theorem [wikipedia.org] or lemma (which is practical step of a theorem)

            The whole purpose of the chapter is to teach the student the 'new trick' as you put it and most textbooks are trying to re-word the theorem into some easily understood statement (and failing btw), which is probably what you are seeing with the new textbooks

            Good on yo

          • by bungo ( 50628 )

            There must be something strange with the way math is taught where you are. I haven't had that problem with my kids, including up to helping my son with his math in 2nd year Engineering - after that, it's all just applied and he doesn't learn many new concepts.

            I do have a BSc in maths and stats, so maybe I just don't notice the weird tricks.

            • Re:It's over. (Score:4, Interesting)

              by registrations_suck ( 1075251 ) on Thursday November 20, 2025 @01:18PM (#65807511)

              My kid is now in 4th grade. Over the years, I've seen math. Problems where they use weird terminology and ask questions in such a way that I have no fucking idea what the fuck they are asking. It's ridiculous. They will take something like "4+5= ?" And make it so weird that I don't have any clue that's what they are asking. "Use the 5 five rule and the 4 rule to complete the problem. Show your work".

              What the fuck is the 5 rule? What the fuck In the four rule? No idea, but I know 4+5=9. Now fuck off!

              These fuckers need to get back to just using plain English. I'm tired of have to Google shit just to figure out what they are asking.

              • Use the 5 five rule and the 4 rule to complete the problem.

                Nothing wrong with giving these things names. They don't have formal names and they are probably more standardized by textbook publishers rather than known by mathematicians.

                What they are bad at is providing parents with a definition guide and explaining to the students that the names aren't universal.

                They are teaching in many different learning styles, which helps with understanding but some schools are holding back on teaching the rote memorization part (which is still important). You need to know 4+5 f

              • We have a 14-year-old, so have seen similar stuff. I think a lot of what they're trying to do with Common Core is explicitly teach kids all the shortcuts that math-literate people use instinctively, without formal instruction. The problem is, those shortcuts shouldn't really be taught, or at least not as the main technique. You should teach the basic math facts and methods as simply as possible, then let students figure out the fancy ways themselves. Otherwise you just create confusion.

                For example, if I ask

    • Re:It's over. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by methano ( 519830 ) on Thursday November 20, 2025 @11:27AM (#65807167)
      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.
      • Yea... I have long since forgotten most of my math. But I actually graduated with a minor in mathematics, basically because I only needed two more MA electives (Differential Equations 3, which, admittedly, was a beast and Advanced Number Theory, which was a "Why the heck is *this* a 400-level class?" class.) than I already had for my CS degree. A few years back, I ran across one of those "This is how kids are learning now under Common Core" articles. And DAMN!!! WTF sort of jobs do the people who came

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Here is a case where in "the good old days" (of just a few years ago) things were actually better and there's no way to sugarcoat the decline.

        And people, nincompoops like dfghjk and rsilvergun want to blame Republicans; as if this same problem isn't happening in other countries, as if Republicans are the proponents of awful math curricula, as if Republicans are the ones admitting these innumerate kids into California post-secondary schools. This is an example of the complacent attitude of the Democrat party

      • The new methods work well enough for motivated students, my kids flew through the self guided apps and got way ahead of their peers. But yes I couldn't help them with the exercises as written with the new methods, so the teachers may vary in preparedness to teach the new methods. My kids also read real paper books and solve problems in physical space with tools so I guess they'll be gods amongst men in the dystopian hellscape.
    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by dfghjk ( 711126 )

      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.

      • You do realize the young people aren't choosing their own education, right? Its the previous generations making those changes.

    • by FeelGood314 ( 2516288 ) on Thursday November 20, 2025 @11:34AM (#65807191)
      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.
      • The current US budget has a deficit of about 34% over revenue and the opposition party was arguing for even more spending.

        Yes, but spending is only half of the budget. The slashed revenue policies of the current administration have had a bigger effect on the overall deficit.

    • by King_TJ ( 85913 )

      I agree we're in the state of decline. Every nation in history has gone through or is going through the same cycle of ramping up, peaking, and then declining.

      It's not just in the level of formal education people absorbed .... It's everywhere. I've always been into music and played in an alt-rock band for a while, back in the 1990's. I used to say there was no such thing as "bad music". It was all subjective and anything could be pleasing to the ears of the right listener. In recent years, I'd have to s

    • by Kokuyo ( 549451 )

      Well, since you admit to being a boomer I gotta say chapeau! I probably wouldn't have the stones to admit that considering this. Is. ALL. Your. Generation's. Fault.

    • We're [...] in rot mode now. No better evidence than more than half of the US voted for the orange one.

      >1/2 of the US did not vote for trump; see me after class.
      -UC San Diego

    • Re:It's over. (Score:4, Informative)

      by fjo3 ( 1399739 ) on Thursday November 20, 2025 @01:55PM (#65807623)
      Keep in mind that only half (usually less) of the US population votes. So it's more like "more than one quarter of the adult population voted for the orange one." The fact that half the population doesn't vote is not great, but I try to keep that in mind when I think that Trump got elected twice. Then I remember who his opponents were: two very, very unlikeable politicians. So really, the Democratic establishment and Democratic primary voters elected Trump more than anyone else.
  • 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.
    • by Muros ( 1167213 ) on Thursday November 20, 2025 @11:53AM (#65807257)

      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.

    • That's not terrible if they replace it with some kind of standard entrance exam to all of the UCs, as is often used in Europe - break the College Board cartel, but also maintain high admission standards.
    • Colleges can collect ACT/SAT scores, high school grades, recommendations, and essays. We've seen grade inflation over the past few decades where students can all easily get A's regardless of whether they actually deserve them or not. Students can easily cheat on recommendations and essays. The only objective measure of a student that's not easily cheated are the ACT or SAT. Removing those requirements means that universities have exposed themselves to students interested in cheating their way into college.
  • by SlashbotAgent ( 6477336 ) on Thursday November 20, 2025 @11:21AM (#65807131)

    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?

    • They don't have to the school has bean counters to do the math. The parent just need to keep piling the Benjamins high enough on the table until the bean counter says "Thats equal to a lab, drama auditorium or wing".
    • by fjo3 ( 1399739 )
      Rampant grade inflation, and the removal of standardized testing as a requirement on applications. What do they care if students are unqualified for university, as long as they get their federal money! If they flunk out, or never use their degree - that's their problem!
  • by MpVpRb ( 1423381 ) on Thursday November 20, 2025 @11:21AM (#65807135)

    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.

    • 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

    • by Mr. Dollar Ton ( 5495648 ) on Thursday November 20, 2025 @11:46AM (#65807237)

      Talent, as one talented person put it once, is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.

    • 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
    • It does not take unusual talent to master middle school math concepts. That's a failure of education, not some Idiocracy-level population shift.
    • by sjames ( 1099 )

      The one thing education can do for the talented people is quit bogging them down for 12 years in whatever the latest educational flavor of the day is. They don't need the kooky way math is approached now, they need the basics. Teach them addition, subtraction,multiplication, and division the way it was taught in the '70s, then point out a couple mental tricks. They'll then develop their own set of tricks that work for them doing math in their head.

      The less talented will at least come out of it knowing how t

  • by FeelGood314 ( 2516288 ) on Thursday November 20, 2025 @11:22AM (#65807139)
    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
  • by ebonum ( 830686 ) on Thursday November 20, 2025 @11:27AM (#65807157)

    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.

    • I think the intro math classes are college level, they just haven't typically been needed for STEM applicants.

    • by TWX ( 665546 )

      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.

      In my experience, college was where instructors of all sorts (TAs, lecturers, professors) graded on a curve the most, and in my own personal case, was the only place I directly experienced grading on a curve. Having listened to my extended family of the prior generation, grading on a curve was already prevalent among colleges back in the sixties, and possibly well before that.

      So what you propose in your second bullet point has not really ever been the standard, at least during the lifetime of the vast majo

      • I never really understood the point of grading on a curve. What difference does it make if some brainiac gets a perfect score? The assessment should be of the individual's understanding of the content and not against the class with some curve that can be set by an outlier.

        Maybe to weed folks out I suppose. That would mean only the handful of truly brilliant kids would get 'A's and the rest would fall to 'B's and 'C's. Oh well, 'C's get degrees, as they say.

    • Yes, BUT.... 1. I colleges don't take them, their enrollment drops. They have dorms sitting empty. They have classrooms that aren't used. They have professors with no classes. Like all pyramid schemes, colleges need to keep growing to keep the tuition dollars flowing. 2. See #1. If you fail kids, they no longer pay tuition. College has become a big business, and they simply can't afford to cut off their tuition pipeline.
    • 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.

      As we assume to tell a college their job now, lets remember one thing. Those aren’t students anymore. They’re high-paying customers.

      A colleges job as a capitalist for-profit institution in America, is to make money. They could honestly give a flying fuck if every graduate took eight years to complete a four year degree. As long as the checks are clearing, they ARE doing their job. If middle-school remedial math courses are what’s needed to lower the bar of high profitability, so be i

  • by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Thursday November 20, 2025 @11:27AM (#65807159) Journal

    until they pass the basics. If they have to take remedial courses, so be it. Graduate at 21 if necessary.

    • by TWX ( 665546 )

      Then fund education correctly.

      To fund education correctly it would probably be around 70% of any given state's annual budget. It's expensive to fund education because to do it right takes a lot of qualified people. Most people don't want to pay so they push to lower the per-capita amount, which leads to education suffering accordingly.

      • Funding is not the problem in most places. It is that so much of those resources are directed at the less capable while the majority of everyone else is just pushed through and taught to the same low level of standards. See, it is no longer acceptable to label anyone as less than any other. This is what you get, a bunch of equally under-educated students.
  • Common Core Results (Score:5, Informative)

    by aardwolf64 ( 160070 ) on Thursday November 20, 2025 @11:27AM (#65807163) Homepage
    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.
  • 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.

  • by RitchCraft ( 6454710 ) on Thursday November 20, 2025 @11:34AM (#65807195)

    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.

    • This is all driven by parents with dumb children. If you can't compete lower the bar for everyone, then litigate until it's low enough. But that's just half of the problem. The other half is the bloated administration departments sucking up resources that should be going into teaching.
    • This aspect is troubling to me too. You know they keep making changes because "studies show..." Yet so much of the time, what studies show does not pan out IRL. I am (was) a researcher (in a technical field), I am not anti-intellectual. I want there to be an evidence-based argument for designing programs that work better than before. Yet it seems like it is not working.

      I feel the same about discipline (or rather the lack thereof) in the classroom, "studies show" being coerced is bad for them, but now o

    • by TWX ( 665546 )

      I'm seeing how using computers to teach elementary math isn't working. It needs to be taught with paper and pencil. There needs to be a certain amount of simple rote memorization for the basics like multiplication and division but that doesn't seem to be the point of emphasis.

  • 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

  • by Voice of satan ( 1553177 ) on Thursday November 20, 2025 @11:59AM (#65807275)

    Where i come from (French -speaking Belgium) it was even worse already 20 years ago. Every moron and his dog had to decide how math is taught except actual mathematicians. So save a few "elite schools" our standards were very low.

    Factor in political correctness ( A huge problem for the ghetto kids who happen to be serious and want a future: their educational standards are even more lowered than the ones of the other kids. In the name of antiracism. As if they had not enough problems already.) and a misunderstood egalitarianism. When the gov noticed the huge discrepancies in the academic level of high schools it paid inspectors to forbid teachers to grade on anything else than the minimalist official program so the teachers were afraid to do their jobs. And the good schools aligned with the bad ones.

    So basically the math education is partially privatised by autodestruction of the public system.

    Now, if you want a serious STEM education there you need to either have a STEM parent who will take your instruction out of the hands of the public system or be of very superior abilities.

  • Math being taught today is not the math most of us on this site grew up with. The way they are teach math is likely one of the causes of the decline IMHO. Just check out the text books being used today. Takes my wife and I time to determine what the section our kids are learning is trying to teach.The "No Child Left Behind" and other initiatives has likely complicated the process of teaching/learning basic math skills.
  • 9th grader in Algebra 2, 7th grader in Algebra 1. Both score 99th percentile on standardized tests. The public schools around here care more about teaching pronouns and gender bending than they do basic learning.
  • Nobody is going to like this, but the secret to doing arithmetic: repetition.
    You're not going to get it right the first time. And you're not going to remember it long-term unless you've been drilled on it so much that you've been in tears over it.

    Math isn't natural for our brains, so it's rather difficult to learn at first, but everyone needs some basic grasp of arithmetic in this society. We're not hunter-gathers anymore, we have bills, taxes, and far more complex lives than we did 1000's of years ago. And

    • That is correct, but you do not need to be very good at arithmetic to study serious math. Mathematicians are usually quite bad at it because they don't bother with it since a long time. They tell you: "I have done a degree in mathematics, not calculations". In science/applied science you need to train enough as not to be slowed down when you move on to the rest that uses arithmetic.

      After all the article is about the proficiency of entering university students, after all.

      Bu i agree, you learn by doing. A lot

      • For the most part, when the media talks about "math" in primary and lower secondary school we're talking about arithmetic. I remember learning Calculus as a teenager, and it was confusing and not intuitive, but once I got it there was very little more I needed to do. That was a completely different experience compared to multiplication, where I had to drill with flash cards before I had enough of the fundamentals in order to do arbitrarily large multiplication problems, and later it proved to be a vital pre

  • When I moved to the area as an adult 20 years ago and started taking some classes there, I needed remedial algebra as I hadn't used it in the 20+ years since I'd left high school, and it came back pretty quick. They require everyone to take tests in math and English. And yes, the number who need remedial education is truly frightening. The primary and secondary education system in this country has been methodically destroyed over decades, and it's going to be a long slog to reestablish it - if it ever ha
    • The weird thing that I was in the same boat (15 years since basic algebra/calc, and it came back quickly even without remedial classes - and I was a C student in undergrad, likely due to latent ADHD). I was actually better off than many of the younger students who were only a few years post high school maths.
  • Another article where we see that things started getting worse in the 2012 to 2014 timeframe. Which just happens to be when a lot of teenagers started to get smartphones. It's not a coincidence.
  • by b0s0z0ku ( 752509 ) on Thursday November 20, 2025 @01:26PM (#65807529)

    I wonder if cashlessness is part of the problem. Counting physical money and counting/checking change helps develop elementary arithmetic skills.

    The solution for universities is to force them to learn - give paper exams, no calculator, but with "simple" numbers to have them practice basic math like 0.05mol / 0.5L = 0.1M solution. Make them develop a sense of numbers if they want to pass.

  • Some years ago, I ran into a very interesting paper in a mathematics education journal. Unfortunately, I don't have the reference readily available. The paper broke K-12 mathematics into a set of topics organized by essential order of exposition and development. It then compared this model sequence to actual curriculum structures in a number of US districts, and I believe also a couple of European examples.

    The US curricula were not correlated well, in longer segments, to the model. A particular finding was

  • American Kids Can't Do Math Anymore

    The current president has stated several times he / his administration will bring down the price of prescriptions 500%, 1000%, 1500% and people go, "Cool".

    Noting that 100% mean free and +100% means they pay you. (Sorry, but the premise here means I had to include that.)

    • He also said that Kamala planned to raise taxes by 400% (4x) during the debate, and the terminally credulous believed his nonsense.

No amount of careful planning will ever replace dumb luck.

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