The Free Press
“We should have the best education system in the world. We should have an education system that reflects us being a superpower. But there is no one with a straight face who can say that the United States has a world-class education system.”
That damning verdict comes from Pete Shulman, the former deputy commissioner of the New Jersey Department of Education.
Shulman, who worked for the Miami-Dade County school system for five years before helping lead New Jersey’s public schools, recently launched “Wake Up Call NJ,” a campaign alerting parents to the crisis in our nation’s schoolrooms.
And that crisis, according to the latest Nation’s Report Card, is bleak: U.S. students are further behind in reading and math than they were in 2012.
What’s more, American students in the bottom 10th and 25th percentiles “are performing lower than they did in the early 1990s,” said Martin West, the dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a member of the National Assessment Governing Board. This disparity between the highest- and lowest-achieving students is known as the “achievement gap”—and the U.S. now appears to have one of the largest in the world, compared to other wealthy nations.
There are a number of theories as to why proficiency rates are declining. The pandemic lockdowns that started in 2020 and the omnipresence of cell phones in schools haven’t helped.
But instead of trying to solve the problem, a number of educators are actually covering it up—by lowering the educational standards in their states.
In 2024, Oklahoma schools seemed to perform a miracle. In 2022, the Nation’s Report Card scored only 24 percent of the state’s fourth graders as “proficient” in reading. But in 2024 the state reported that 47 percent of its fourth graders were reading at grade level—almost doubling the previous figure.
If that sounds too good to be true, that’s because it is.
In the last year, Oklahoma lowered its “cut scores”—which is the score a student needs to hit on a test to be considered proficient. This happened quietly, without a formal announcement of the move, meaning many Oklahoman parents assumed their kids had vastly improved at math and reading when, more likely, nothing had changed.
This trend is also happening in New York State. After not a single eighth grader in the upstate city of Schenectady (population 68,000) tested “proficient” in math in 2022, state officials lowered cut scores the following year. “We don’t want to keep going backwards,” the co-chair of an advisory committee told a local outlet, justifying the change. “We’re at this new normal.”
Wisconsin also lowered cut scores last year. This led to more than 50 percent of the state’s elementary schoolers testing proficient in math and reading in 2024, compared to 41 percent the previous year.
Jill Underly, the Wisconsin state superintendent, told The Free Press that the state exam “is more accurate and reflective of student performance for Wisconsin families.” Representatives from the Oklahoma and New York Departments of Education did not respond to Free Press requests for comment.
Now, Illinois too is considering lowering its cut scores. Both the Illinois Association of Regional Superintendents and the state superintendent, Tony Sanders, have endorsed the plan, meaning it’s likely to gain traction this year. Sanders claims Illinois’s standards are higher than in other states, which has created “an uneven playing field that is sending the wrong messages to students and families across Illinois.”
Bruce Rauner, who served as Illinois governor from 2015 to 2019, told me the move to lower cut scores, if it happens, will be “a tragedy.”
“We can’t kid ourselves or mislead parents or students or teachers on where the students really stand,” Rauner said. He added that increasing standards is “hard,” and it “takes focus and discipline and resources,” which is why so many states are lowering the bar.
“It’s the easy way out,” Rauner said.
Meanwhile, moms and dads are clueless about these maneuvers. A 2023 nationwide survey of almost 2,000 parents showed that almost nine in 10 believed their child was at or above grade level in reading and math. In fact, data suggests less than half of American kids are able to perform at grade level in these subjects.
Grade inflation is likely to blame, according to Cindi Williams, co-founder of Learning Heroes, the nonprofit that commissioned the survey.
“Grades are the holy grail for a parent. It’s a single source of information,” she said. This, she argues, is “the reason nobody’s asking for a better system, or for change.”
“You can’t solve a problem you don’t know you have.”
Meanwhile, the drive toward lowering standards is spreading fast. Last November, voters in Massachusetts decided to drop the requirement that students pass an exam in order to graduate from high school. In 2027, New York will start phasing out the state’s standardized Regents exams in the name of “equity.” Colorado recently decided to “temporarily” lower the passing score for the SAT math exam for the next two years, in response to fears that around 3,400 kids wouldn’t be able to graduate this May. New Jersey teachers no longer need to pass state-issued reading and writing exams to become certified educators. And multiple states, including California and Arizona, are even making it easier for law students to pass the bar exam.
“Why would anyone want to lower standards?” Shulman asked me, furious. “It’s like telling everyone that they’re a great swimmer when you know half of us really are drowning.”
For more on declining U.S. education standards, read Betsy DeVos’s Free Press op-ed, “Shut Down the Department of Education.”