Social promotion and efforts to ban standardized tests are ways of shielding adults from accountability.
June 16, 2026 5:19 pm ET
If you stare really hard—and maybe squint—at last week’s federal report on long-term K-12 education trends in the U.S., there is some good news. Math and reading scores among 9-year-olds have improved a little since 2022, and most of the gains were driven by struggling students. It’s a signal that those in the youngest cohort of test takers are recovering from the disastrous pandemic school closures.
The good news pretty much ends there. Among 13-year-olds in nearly every demographic group, test scores in math and reading were flat. And most youngsters continue to lack proficiency in both subjects. Standardized tests have no shortage of detractors, but these evaluations have become more important in an era of grade inflation and meaningless graduation rates.
Last week several readers pointed me to a recent investigative report in the Philadelphia Inquirer about the pressure on teachers to pass students regardless of classroom performance or even attendance. The paper said it was “an open secret that in many schools, it is nearly impossible to fail a student.” The result is a school system full of children unable to perform academically at even the most basic level.
“On paper, Philadelphia students can fail courses, or be retained in a grade, so long as they are offered appropriate interventions and supports,” according to the Inquirer. “But many teachers said that they were discouraged or forbidden by their principals from flunking students, or that they have given out failing grades that were overridden. Others said failing students was permitted if justified, but the administrative burden to rationalize failure, even for students who did not show up to school, is onerous or impossible.”
The downstream damage of promoting students to the next grade based on their age rather than their mastery of the material might be incalculable, and it raises frightening questions about what our workforce will look like in the decades to come. The literacy and numeracy skills of Americans have declined in recent years. An Education Department study in 2024 found that 1 in 4 young adults are functionally illiterate, even though more than half received high-school diplomas.
Job prospects and earnings for people who lack rudimentary language and math skills can be severely limited. There are exceptions, but in general people with higher levels of education have higher incomes and a lower risk of unemployment. We talk about the earnings gap between high-school graduates and college graduates, yet many of today’s high-school grads function at or below a middle-school level of education. Eliminating standardized tests wouldn’t change that reality, and it would help policymakers and the education establishment avoid accountability.
The problems with our K-12 school system have been in the making for generations, and what’s frustrating is the feebleness of efforts to address them. Political leaders insist on the need for more education spending, but it isn’t expensive to teach children reading and arithmetic, something that was done competently for many decades on budgets much smaller than what educators have at their disposal today.
New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani has proposed smaller class sizes to address the learning gap. This is a hobbyhorse of the teachers unions that control public education (and the mayor) because it requires employing more dues-paying instructors and school staff. Nevertheless, empirical studies have shown that smaller class sizes have minimal effect on student learning. Countries that consistently outperform the U.S. on international tests, including Japan and South Korea, have larger classes on average. So do many high-performing charter schools. The data show that a good teacher is far more important than a smaller class, yet our public school system values seniority over competence.
Liberals are likewise focused on classroom diversity and on hiring teachers who share the racial or ethnic background of minority students. But you will be hard-pressed to find much racial diversity in the classrooms of Tokyo and Seoul, and the best-performing students in the U.S. tend to be of South Asian and East Asian heritage. They are among the groups least likely to be taught by someone who looks like them.
So much of what ails higher education in the U.S. is rooted in a broken K-12 system that fails to prepare college-bound students adequately. Grade inflation in high school necessitates grade inflation at universities. Lower high-school graduation standards lead naturally to lower college graduation standards to guard against high failure and dropout rates. Colleges have amassed redundant remedial programs to teach freshmen subjects they should have learned long before arriving on campus.
Historically, educational attainment has been an effective way of addressing social inequality, and standardized testing is one of the few ways to measure which policies are working and which ones aren’t. The educators and policy wonks who want to do away with these assessments aren’t looking out for children. They are looking out for themselves.
THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 