The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) has been conducting assessments of student academic performance since 1969 and publishes these assessment results as The National Report Card.
Results of the most recent assessment succinctly demonstrate the failure of our public education system. The chart below shows the national percentage of twelfth grade students to score at a basic, proficient, advanced, or below basic level for several core functions of education.
Less than a quarter of twelfth grade students, scored at or above proficient in any subject other than reading or economics. In reading, less than one third of students scored proficient. The highest overall academic achievement was in economics with less than half (42%) scoring at or above proficient. Not more than 6% of all students scored at an advanced level in any subject.
These dismal academic scores are indicative of how well prepared twelfth grade, soon to be graduates of our education system are to enter the workforce or to pursue higher eduction. What should be even more alarming is that each of these students, despite being significantly under educated, all hold, or will soon hold, the civil right and duty to vote in elections and to influence national policy.
The NAEP also regularly asses the academic performance of fourth and eighth grade students. The results are equally alarming. As clearly evidenced by the above results, as well as the results of similar studies, our modern progressive education system has failed our students and the families of those students in its goal of providing meaningful education. The risk that our failed education system poses to the liberty and prosperity of our nation cannot be understated.
The NAEP defines an advanced achievement level in reading for eight grade students as follows:
“Eighth-grade students performing at the NAEP Advanced level should be able to make connections within and across texts and to explain causal relations. They should be able to evaluate and justify the strength of supporting evidence and the quality of an author’s presentation. Students performing at this level also should be able to manage the processing demands of analysis and evaluation by stating, explaining, and justifying.”
www.nationsreportcard.gov
In the 2019 assessment of eighth grade students the NAEP found that only 4% of eighth grade students demonstrated the fundamental ability to make connections within and across texts, to explain casual relations, and to evaluate and justify the strength of supporting evidence. Consider the profoundness of this widespread academic inability by 96% of students in regards to their ability to see past emotionally charged rhetoric and misleading partial truths, or outright lies, widely circulated today in both media and politics.
Combine that with the fact that students performed the worst in U.S. history. Only 12% of students scored at or above proficient in U.S. history, with an astonishing 55% scoring below a basic knowledge of our founding. It is becoming increasingly evident that young people in our nation not only lack a fundamental understanding of our history and the values and principles that our nation was founded on but also appear to display a rapidly growing distain for our country and system of government. Because these children and young adults do not understand the principles behind our system of government they not only are unable to defend our way of life, but are beginning to seek its destruction by voting for and promoting the ideologies of socialism and communism.
The foundation of a free society is not a document or a government, it is a well educated and moral people who choose to act within the bounds of rule of law and who maintain that system of justice by holding their elected representatives accountable. When the people do not understand their own history and loose their widespread ability to make casual connections and to evaluate and justify the strength of supporting evidence, they lose their ability to see through deception or to hold their government accountable to their interests and subsequently lose their ability to self govern.
The key to tyranny is the destruction of education.