Svetlana (Lana) Jitomirskaya is a mathematics professor at Berkeley (Wikipedia, which puts her at two other schools, is out of date), and is one of 29 authors (I’m in there, too) on a paper in the Journal of Controversial Ideas, “In Defense of Merit in Science“. Lana is also a winner of the American Academy of Science and Letters’s Barry Prize for distinguished intellectual achievement.
I mention this because she is distressed at the very low math performance of entering students in Berkeley (and other schools in the University of California [UC] system), but did some calculations to show, as Governor Gavin Newsom intended with his 2024 California Education Compact, that the chances of a student getting admitted to a University of California branch are higher the worse the student’s high school is! Newsom and some “progressive” educators are against using standardized tests like the SAT for students applying for college, because they believe standardized tests discriminate against minority students. Grade-point averages (GPAs) are one predictor of college and post-college success, but grade inflation is eliminating the inter-student variation that made GPAs useful, and data show that standardized tests add substantial predictive value to success (especially for highly selective schools like Berkeley), so it’s better that schools have both kinds of information for applicants. Nevertheless, in an attempt to achieve “equity,” UC schools have completely barred the use of standardized tests, and that was against the recommendations of both a UC faculty task force and members of the Board of Regents.
At my own University, standardized tests are optional, but, weirdly, are used only when they can help a student get admitted, which seems to defeat the purpose of using a standardized benchmark. Here’s what Grok says about the University of Chicago’s standardized testing policy for admissions:
UChicago has maintained a test-optional policy since implementing it in 2018 as part of its UChicago Empower Initiative (initially focused on expanding access for first-generation and low-income students). This policy applies to all applicants, including domestic, international, and transfer students.
No Harm Testing Policy. In addition to being test-optional, UChicago uses a distinctive “No Harm” policy:
- Submitting SAT or ACT scores is entirely your choice.
- If you submit scores, they are only considered if they would positively affect your chance of admission.
- Scores that could negatively impact your application are not used in the review process.
- You can self-report scores on your application (via Common App or Coalition); official scores are only needed if you’re admitted and enroll.
This approach gives applicants flexibility—strong scores can help, but weaker ones (or not submitting) won’t hurt you.
Lana maintains that the omission of test requirements, (and I’d add the use of “no harm testing policies”) hurts everyone: reducing the chances of really good students getting into even moderately good schools, while harming students from poorer schools by eliminating the pressure for them to study the “right” way: not memorizing but actually learning the material and learning to think, which you need to get good SAT scores. (It also eliminates the pressure for teachers to teach that way.) If you’re poorly qualified for a college you attend, the chances of you either dropping out or going into a “gut” major are higher.
The argument and the crucial graph is included in Lana’s new article in the Free Press, “Bring Back the SAT”. You can read it if you’re a subscriber by clicking below, but I’ll reproduce some of her arguments plus the graph:
Lana gives several extended anecdotes about great students, once destined for Berkeley or UC San Diego, not getting in and having to go to community colleges, as well as students who got high grades by memorizing but did poorly in schools because they didn’t really learn to think. Many of those students, due to the negative correlation, get into places like UC Berkeley and UC San Diego. I’ll mostly summarize the assertions about educational policy. (Quotes from Lana’s article are indented.)
What does an A grade in AP Calculus mean when it is paired with a score of 1 on the national exam? Exactly what a recent UC San Diego report revealed: In too many public schools, grades have become completely decoupled from learning.
None of this was Diego’s fault [his name is changed]. But now, he would face the reality of a world-class university. He would be required to retake calculus at Berkeley before moving on to the grueling upper-division requirements of mechanical engineering. With his immense drive and determination, common sense says he would catch up. Right?
“Getting into calculus in 11th grade is impressive,” I told him during the interview. “How and when did you realize you were good at math?”
“Math was always very difficult for me,” Diego replied. “But I worked hard and memorized all the formulas.”
This is the last thing a math professor wants to hear. Mathematics is not about rote memorization—it’s about conceptual understanding and logical reasoning, and Diego was never taught the difference. Like countless students at schools where teachers don’t understand mathematics themselves, he was instead taught what my colleague Hung-Hsi Wu calls anti-mathematics: a confusing, disconnected collection of unexplained procedures to be memorized for a test—and then immediately forgotten.
On the UC system’s abolition of SATs in 2020 and what it means for students like Diego:
To succeed now, Diego will need to unlearn these habits and rebuild his mathematical foundation from scratch, with much of what he has already learned not helping but standing in the way.
I desperately hope he manages to do so. But statistically, the chances are dangerously low. With the foundational deficiencies Diego demonstrated in his interview, the probability that he will survive his first Berkeley calculus course, even with a barely passing grade, is 50-50. He will spend his entire college career in a frantic, exhausting game of catch-up, and it is far more likely that he will be forced to change his major—leaving a hardworking young man’s confidence badly shaken, his engineering dreams derailed, and significant public resources wasted.
None of this would be as likely if the UC system still used a standardized test benchmark. The SAT was completely abolished for UC admissions by a Board of Regents decision in 2020, driven by concerns that standardized tests disadvantage minority and low-income students. This decision went against the unanimous, data-driven recommendation of the UC faculty task force—and against many of the Board of Regents’ own stated convictions. The SAT, imperfect as it is, measures knowledge of the absolute basics and the ability to reason clearly under a time constraint. An SAT score would have told us—and Diego himself—the truth about his preparation before it was too late.
Even more importantly, preparing for the test is itself a powerful intervention. If Diego knew that the SAT stood between him and a Berkeley engineering degree, his drive would have led him to use free, high-quality resources away from rote memorization and toward real mathematical reasoning. The preparation itself would have rewired his foundation. We failed Diego once by not providing him a decent math education. We should not fail students like him again by removing the incentive to build one themselves.
This is why my UC colleagues and I wrote an open letter to the Regents demanding a return to standardized testing. Within days, it garnered over 1,400 signatures, including those of 60 department chairs across the UC system. This unprecedented consensus is significant because STEM faculty aren’t political activists—they are the ones shaping California’s next generation of mathematicians and engineers.
That is indeed a powerful consensus!
According to Lana, the disconnect between grades and merit involves schools infusing courses with ideology:
Many of my colleagues teaching introductory gateway courses are not so lucky. They report a feeling of the bottom falling out of the classroom. “In my second-year engineering class, a student asked me to explain why 1/2 + 1/3 = 5/6,” one professor said. “The lecture had to stop while I explained fractions.”
The root cause of this bifurcation is California’s broken K-12 education. Teachers are trapped in systems that prioritize ideology over subject mastery, pressured by administrators to inflate grades, lower standards, and pass unprepared students along. The state has spent tens of billions of dollars on a high-speed rail line that has yielded zero benefit. It has spent far more, and done far worse, inflicting immense generational damage on California’s youth by failing to provide them a quality K-12 math education.
This is the fundamental reason why we cannot honestly satisfy the Newsom Compact’s goals. The onus for a decent math education has fallen entirely on parents. Those who can afford to move to a good school district or send their kids to after-school programs do so. Children of those who cannot are usually left trapped with subpar math instruction. Meanwhile, the schools that provide rigorous education become increasingly competitive. This is the engine behind the bifurcation we are seeing.
And here’s the critical and completely counterintuitive graph, the result of “progressive” thinking. Lana introduces it this way (bolding is mine)
An analysis of official California Department of Education data reveals that this is a systemic pattern. Over the last decade, the UC system has transitioned from a positive correlation between a high school’s math and English proficiency and its admissions success to a statistically significant negative correlation. Today, the more successful a public high school is at preparing its students, the lower its graduates’ chances of getting into top UC campuses like Berkeley and San Diego.
This is the kind of graph that only a mathematician could produce, as it summarizes a ton of data but to a layperson its point is not immediately grasp-able. (Thanks to Jay Tanzman, who put me onto the article and is a statistician, for explaining it to me.) It is a plot over time in which the Y-axis values represent correlations: the correlation in one year between the assessed quality of a high school itself (not of a student), and the probability of students from that school being accepted to two UC schools: Berkeley and San Diego. The points not only fall with time, but have gone below zero into negative territory, showing that the worse the school, the higher the chances of a its students getting into Berkeley and, especially, UC San Diego, where there’s a whopping -0.5 correlation between high school quality and probability of its students getting into UCSD. (If you’re statistically minded, you could say “how BAD a high school you went to is 25% of the reason you got admitted to UC San Diego.”)
This result is in fact what Newsom and other higher-ups had in mind, for high schools rated of lower quality also have a higher proportion of minority students. This negative correlation largely, says Lana, resulted from an ongoing attempt to achieve equity by upgrading the admission chances of students from poorer schools. I believe Lana’s point is not that this situation is the result of dropping SATs—for the correlation was already falling before 2020 when SATs were abolished—but that we now need the SATs to be able to assess how good students really are.
I’m told that nearly all high-school students in California get straight As now, so GPAs are a terrible predictor of success, even though I’m also told that “conventional wisdom” says that GPAs and standardized tests are roughly equally important in predicting success in college. That may be wrong, at least for California, but I’ll depend on diligent readers to look it up.
Whatever the case, it’s certainly true that if you go to a worse school, your chances of getting into the two best UC branches improve! Lana winds up for calling for the reinstatement of SATs, and I’m with her:
It is too late to reintroduce the SAT for the 2026 cycle, but we can still help thousands of students like Diego who will apply to the UC system in 2027. That is why a growing coalition of faculty members is rushing to force an emergency course correction. If a car full of your children is hurtling toward a cliff, it is not the time to create yet another subcommittee. You’ve got to slam on the brakes. The University of California must recognize this academic emergency for what it is and act to immediately restore objective standards to the admissions process.
Now if you’re a “progressive”, you’ll object to her characterizing SATs as “objective”, but that’s an argument for another day.
h/t: Jay Tanzman
Dear white people and race baiters, you do not do us favors by lowering standards or getting rid of them all together. Doing so, delivers an inferior product to the people you supposedly want to help. Instead of assuaging your made-up guilt…understand that MERIT is the great equalizer. Lift students up to the standards. Don’t sentence them to intellectual slavery and inferiority.
This, ladies and gents, is the education policy of the Democratic Party (for international readers: California is a stronghold of the Democrats):
Another quote from a Wall Street Journal article Lana co-authored:
Svetlana Jitomirskaya & Zvezdelina Stankova: The University of California Needs the SAT Back. Wall Street Journal, June 1, 2026
Even the overwhelmingly liberal Berkeley faculty are fed up with the admission of unprepared students.
https://archive.ph/iYyJ2
These problems are very widespread. When we moved to France in 1987, France was ranked just below the USSR in the excellence of its mathematical education, and fortunately that remained true throughout the 1990s when our daughter was at school. No more, however.
As a different example, the first edition of my book on mathematics for biochemistry students was assessed by Keith Dalziel as being too elementary for his students. He had unrealistically high expectations and thought that biochemists should know about trigonometry, differential equations and other topics that have very little application in undergraduate biochemistry, but in general his assessment was reasonable. 17 years later I made a proposal to Oxford University Press for a new edition. They had it reviewed by four experts, all four of whom said that the first edition was too advanced for modern students. I asked a former colleague who had moved to Oxford what he thought. He said yes, that I wouldn’t believe how low was the mathematical level of students coming to Oxford to study biological subjects by that time (mid-1990s), and that many of them had no idea what fractions were and how to use them. So of course, in my second edition I started with a chapter on fractions, something I wouldn’t have dreamt of doing 17 years earlier.
Jerry’s post is clear and so is Lana’s article. But the overall perspective is confusing. The justification for no SATs was always economic: poor black and hispanic kids can’t afford the test prep tutoring that wealthy white and asian kids can buy. The student Diego wasn’t harmed by ditching SATs – he was harmed by the degradation of math instruction in some high schools. Those two changes are unconnected to each other: whether or not he got into Berkeley, he was already harmed by his incompetent high school math teachers.
“To succeed now, Diego will need to unlearn these habits and rebuild his mathematical foundation from scratch, with much of what he has already learned not helping but standing in the way.”
But that’s true whether Diego is at Berkeley (where he has lots of other opportunities and benefits) or at a community college (where his actual math abilities probably warrant placing him). Diego isn’t suffering any more because he didn’t have to use SATs to get admitted. The only way he doesn’t “need to unlearn those habits” is if he doesn’t go to college at all and never needs to use math again.
It’s UC Berkeley that suffers from the loss of the SAT in admissions. I kinda think this should be the focus, and without trotting out sympathetic students whose suffering we should regret. The SAT issue is a problem for the university, not the students. [edit to add: I understand the main focus is the low quality of math instruction in high school.]
A student who gets into a good school without the qualifications and either drops out or has to change majors because they can’t keep up IS harmed. And you can get free test prep and tutoring if you’re poor. The justification was never solely economic; it was to get equity.
I think you should know that plenty of students have to drop out or change majors because they get into a school for which they are not qualified. And what about the poor white kids or wealthier minority kids? What is the economic reason for eliminating the SATs for them? If you want to do that, you should have a “poverty exemption”.
I asked Grok if poor students can still get help preparing for SATs and paying for them, and this is what it said (it gave links, too, which I’ve omitted).
Can poor students still get help with preparing for the SATs and paying for them?
Not really true. The justification was simply that black and Hispanic kids don’t (on average) do as well as white and Asian kids.
That’s not about wealth or SAT preparation (controlling for family SES is easy, and it does little to explain gaps). Tutoring for the SAT only works a little bit. And plenty of Asian families are not that well off (yet their kids tend to score well).
At some point society will have to face up to the possibility that different groups do not all have the same group-mean ability.
Since education is important there has been a vast amount of research over decades into what affects outcomes. And that research says that what gets attributed to poor schools or poor teachers is nearly always about the aptitude of the intake.
Yes, schooling matters, but all schools are doing their best with the students they get. The effect on a student of going to a “good” school and having “good” teachers versus going to a “bad” school with “bad” teachers is not that much.
Coel, this is exactly what the self-declared Marxist and holder of a Ph.D. in education Freddie deBoer has written:
For anybody who cares, these are truly excellent:
Yes, Freddie deBoer is spot on here. And (despite me being the opposite of a Marxist) I respect him for following the evidence on this, even when it flatly contradicts left-wing orthodoxy.
This, from Quillette:
Well, I have only read the free part, since I have no subscription to Quillette. Maybe somebody can archive it.
This is for Peter, above. Archives of Quillette don’t work, they still are limited. But if you give me your e-mail, I may be able to help out. I’m at chrisATdrmossDOTca
All schools are not “doing the best with the students they get.” Some school districts are purposefully doing the opposite. A number of school districts have eliminated advanced tracks in math and English precisely because they give high-performing students the opportunity to excel. In California, state policy officially discourages advanced tracks, although the state hasn’t, or can’t, officially ban them.
See, for example, this article.
Maybe I should have said “the public justification for no SATs”; the private motivation was of course racial equity.
I asked Gemini “Why should we eliminate the SATs in college admissions”, and got a reply almost entirely about economic considerations. So I guess Gemini is trained on the apparent rather than the real motivations of progressive college admissions reformers.
“Arguments for eliminating the SAT in college admissions center on reducing systemic socioeconomic barriers, as wealthy students can afford expensive test prep. Critics also note the tests do not fully capture a student’s holistic abilities and that high school grades are often a stronger, fairer predictor of college success.” [To avoid overcommenting I didn’t copy over the rest, including multiple references.]
Mike, this is such a nonsensical answer, showing that Gemini has no ability to independently evaluate the evidence. SAT preparation cost no more than $US 50. Buy a book that explains the test and gives sample exams. That’s really all there is to this. The people who claim otherwise are liars, bullshitters (in the sense of Harry Frankfurt) or simply have no clue about this issue.
Naturally! Gemini is a model Wikipedian; it cites reliable sources and zealously refuses to engage in original research.
It seems to me that you asked Gemini a leading question—one that suggested you wanted positive reasons—and it dutifully gave you the answer it thought you were looking for. Alternatively, Gemini is left-biased.
In contrast to your experience, I asked Perplexity.ai, “Why have many U.S. universities eliminated standardized test scores from consideration in admissions decisions?”
And its response, which mentioned the test-preparation issue, but emphasized DEI goals, was:
If you want to see Perplexity’s full response, click here.
Gemini is the “Well, bless your heart, at least you tried” AI.
“Maybe I should have said “the public justification for no SATs”; the private motivation was of course racial equity.” I suggest that underneath the “private motivation” was the underlying, post-modernist rejection of the very idea of
objective standards. And underneath that stance (or pretense), I submit there was a simple academic power-play by academic careerists—much like the early (1930s) use of Lysenko’s fakery by Soviet academic careerists.
I read something about this recently elsewhere, perhaps in the Atlantic. It’s good that it’s getting attention.
I feel concern for the brightest of the bright. Are they immersed in such a vast sea of mediocrity that they receive a lesser education than their brilliance allows? Do our competitors, e.g., China, treat education the same way, or do they offer their most gifted students the resources they need to excel?
Without standardized testing it’s impossible to compare student readiness in Math either to that of other students or to a standard. Sadly, that’s the point.
I have never understood why eliminating the SAT scores in admissions is favored by progressives. Certainly, those with higher income can give advantages to their children, and this correlates with race, but all other measures are MORE discriminatory based on race. It seems to me that putting kids in a room without any assistance and testing their knowledge would be the choice that is least discriminating against racial minorities. Unless we want to have separate quotas for different races or simply use a random lottery, then reliance on testing seems the best that we can do. (And, of course, we should take dramatic steps to better equalize the preparation for such tests among school districts.)
It now also has a letter from faculty in the humanities, social sciences, etc.
https://ucstudentsuccess.org/socscihum/
Thanks for informing us about this excellent letter. The seniority and broad distribution of its signatories was impressive, but I was struck by one feature:
very little representation of the School of Ed. Predictable, I guess.
Thanks a lot, Jerry, for advertising this through your kind and thoughtful post! Has some small errors in description, but none essential. But why would anyone still rely on wikipedia? I stopped a long time ago. I am not sure who created my bio, but when I tried to include “Jewish family” there, it was quickly changed, twice.
Well, most of the time I found it accurate, and in fact I had to call up Anna too find out why there was a disparity. I cannot believe they did not allow your edit, though!
Do let me know about the small errors!
I was surprised a few years back to discover there was a wikipedia page on my grandfather, who played for Aston Villa a very long time ago. It had an error, stating he died in the late 1930’s in Crewe. In fact I attended his funeral in 1964 in Wiltshire. Every time I changed it, the author changed it back; he didn’t want to be wrong. Eventually, after pleading in the talk section, he let my edit stand.
Prompted by the fact that apparently some reasonable people still read wikipedia, I just edited my page. We’ll see.
This seems… mathematically impossible? The meaning of saying that a high score will help is precisely that, without that score (or with a lower one), you would be less likely to get in.
In fact this koan is a beautiful summary of the whole thing. Of this wish to find a nice way to arrange the words to make the problems of brute reality go away.
(Edit — if anyone knows exactly what on earth this policy really means, please post a link. I found an official FAQ which has similarly confusing words. Conceivably they really mean that scores below some floor are all thrown out, that 1200 and 1400 and not-submitted are all the same? But I’m guessing and this does not match the words they provide.)
Precisely. In the postmodernist world, “1200 and 1400 and not-submitted” ARE all the same—or don’t exist at all. The only things that exist are positionalities, and whatever can be disentangled from verbiage of the Judith Butler variety.
Reintroducing SAT scores will not change much. What is needed as well is funds : funds for teachers, classes, special classes, courses, after-school programs. Funds for all districts, and not separate between “low income schools” and whatever… Money, as usual, is the underlying problem.
Are you a teacher?
Despite decades of rising real per-pupil spending in U.S. K-12 education, NAEP scores in math and reading have largely stagnated or declined since the early 2000s, with many states showing higher spending paired with lower outcomes.
International comparisons and state-level data further illustrate the point: high-spending jurisdictions like New York often underperform relative to lower-spending ones on standardized tests, indicating that systemic factors such as family background, curriculum choices, and incentives matter far more than raw dollars.
My brother and sister-in-law were both teachers in public school systems. There are indeed problems in areas with low property taxes; sometimes teachers had to pay for textbooks out of their own pockets. If tech can solve such problems, that would be great.
A more general problem is teachers unions. they work hard to keep incompetent teachers from being fired, and many push against standardized testing and for educational theories that are not evidence-based. The unions have their own agendas, which often do not coincide with actual education of students. (This is not meant as criticism of the teachers themselves. From the anecdotes that I have heard, the vast majority are hard working and truly care about their students.)
No, money is not the problem. The system is well-enough funded and there is very little correlation between money spent and outcomes (e.g. Utah is a low-spending state with good outcomes; if you’re wondering why think of the demographic; and there are inner-city schools with vast spending per child and very poor outcomes; again, the overriding factor is the demographic).
To my great surprise, a lot of humanities professors have now joined the STEM professors in calling for the restoration of the SAT. Imagine how bad things must have gotten for that to happen.
This post, and the excellent articles it cites, address a critical problem. Innumeracy among the general ;ovulation is bad enough, but when it becomes a critical problem among university students the future of society is bleak indeed. And when medical schools cancel calculus requirements, and the administrators of those schools ask “why do doctors need calculus?”, one can feel a new dark age approaching.
The anti-science movement, aligned with the anti-merit in education movement, are indicative of a general push for decline of enlightenment values: the decline of the West, as some would put it. It is up to those who value the results of the Enlightenment to fight for our values, and those academics who push for merit in university education are leading the fight.
Unfortunately, in these times, we are at a disadvantage. We now read results of studies showing that university students seem incapable, and/or unwilling to read (what seem to me) even minimal reading assignments. Even worse, they are abysmal at reading comprehension. It seems to me that this is a result of lowered expectations and standards form an early age, and the rise of the tweet generation, who are educated by society to believe that they can become in formed about a subject by reading a few lines of text. The “why bother to read?”, along with the “why do I need math?” Ideologies of ignorance terrify me.
Too true 🙁☹️💢.
At the very start of Western Civilisation’s higher education, the entrance to Plato’s Academy is said to have the sign “Let no one ignorant of geometry enter” — a proto-SAT for an elite university.
As for “why do I need math?”, to quote a politician from a different age, “not because [it is] easy, but because [it is] hard; because [it serves] to organise and measure […] our energies and skills….” O tempora, o mores!
Yes, math(s) is difficult, a distilled form of the difficulties of all rational step-by-step thinking and planning. Learning it is usually neither fun nor easy. And discovering that it does not care about your opinions and intuitions, and that no amount of complaining about that makes the slightest difference, is a distilled form of one of the necessary difficulties of growing up. And your typo is particularly apt regarding growing up: ISTM today’s general population of students are not just being treated like infants, but like ova.
A friend tells me that in China high school students are using general relativity equations to precisely predict the paths of satellites. Just thought I’d put that out there for contrast.
That is probably far less impressive than it sounds. The Chinese students are probably just given equations of a simple algebraic nature that are derived from GR without any explanation of the physics and then given numbers to plug into the equations to calculate things. It doesn’t follow that the students are learning anything about general relativity or have any idea why the equations are true.
For example, here is an equation that describes general relativistic gravitational time dilation:
Δt’ = Δt (1 + Φ/c^2)
If I was teaching high school students, I could give them numbers for Φ (the gravitational potential), c (the speed of light), and Δt (a time interval as experienced by an observer far away from gravitational masses) and ask them to calculate Δt’ (the time interval experienced by an observer in the gravitational well subject to the potential Φ). It is all very deep, but actually the students are just learning how to plug numbers into a formula and do some arithmetic, probably with the aid of a calculator).
I don’t doubt you are right, but we should probably remember the Chinese are not doing away with merit and substituting equity. When WW3 starts…..
Substitution of “equity” for objective standards and attention to evidence has gone almost as far in our academia as Lysenkoism once did in the Soviet galaxy far away. Probably, then, this development will affect our world almost as much as the Lysenkovshchina affected research in Genetics and Biology, teaching and practice in agronomy, and productivity of agriculture, in the USSR. The Lysenkovshchina really held power for only about 20 years, and was fairly quickly reversed, at least officially, in the 1960s. Our DEIshchina lasted perhaps 10 years, and its seeming reversal is under way, but proceeding slowly and erratically.
IIRC, according to the John Birch Society, WW-III started in the 50’s — the group’s namesake is the first US soldier killed in that war (aka the Korean police action). 🎶🎶 “Socialism is the -ism that we all abhor….”
The one thing I take issue with is the idea that parents who can’t pay to send their kids to good schools are stuck with “subpar math instruction.” I have worked in many low-income schools, and if anything those teachers worked harder. The problem in public schools is that students are passed on whether they learn the material or not. If a teacher tries to assign grades accurately, the administration will bully them until the grade is changed or they will find a way to get rid of that teacher.
I can see why people would think it’s poor math instruction. When I taught trig identifies in Precalculus, my students could not do anything with regular fractions, much less fractions with variables and trig functions. I would explain fractions over and over and over throughout the entire year and take class time to keep practicing those skills. At the end, students still couldn’t reliably do arithmetic with simple fractions. It was completely mind-boggling to see this in students who otherwise seemed intelligent and capable.
Sadly, sports may be the last bastion of meritocracy.
That and other entertainment arts: music, movies, etc. Amusing ourselves to death?