Christopher Jacobs writes for the Federalist about the impact of misguided teaching education programs.
The recent release of results from last year’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests confirms on a macro level what [Nikole] Hannah-Jones described at length from a micro perspective. The international test of 15-year-olds showed that American youths continue to lag behind those in many other peer nations — which might have something to do with the woke ideology pervading the schools that educate the next generation of teachers.
The PISA results brought discouraging news regarding the global competitiveness of American students. The Wall Street Journal noted that since 2018, “math scores in China have improved by an impressive 21 points (equivalent to roughly one year of learning) while those in the U.S. have fallen by 15 (three quarters of a year of learning).” And whereas more than half (54 percent) of students in the four Chinese cities tested qualified as “top performers,” fewer than 1 in 10 (only 8 percent) American students did. This is not a positive development given the importance of engineering and computer science in the global economy.
If anything, the PISA reading test results proved even more worrisome. Americans’ reading scores plunged by 14 points since the last round of tests in 2022, and they now sit near their lowest point this century.
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which organizes the PISA tests, noted that reading scores have declined generally since 2012. Perhaps unsurprisingly, some of the blame may point in the direction of smartphones and social media shortening attention spans. The OECD notes that “the share of ‘hasty readers’ — students who rush through texts and give quick but incorrect answers — almost doubled between 2018 and 2025.”
But in the United States at least, another factor may help to explain students’ poor academic performance. A separate paper by researchers at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) illustrated the ideological obsessions within graduate schools of education, which train the next generation of teachers going into American classrooms.
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