The Educational System is in Serious Crisis

This is a story about national education policy. I have another story coming out shortly on the IINS Schools Proposal to the District 65 School Board coming later this week. You can read their proposal here or sign their petition.

Two education stories landed in my feed almost simultaneously:

University of California San Diego’s Senate-Administration Workgroup on Admissions: UCSD found that in Fall 2024, 12.5% of the entire freshman class required remedial math instruction. The majority of these students show elementary and middle-school level math deficiencies, not just missing Algebra II.
Chicago Public Schools Inspector General “Significant Activity Report”: The CPS Inspector General detailed massive expenditures on travel, luxury trips, and a lack of financial oversight.

The UCSD report is brutally honest and I think, the first of many to come from universities wrangling with collapsing student performance in math. The report details the registration to a remedial math class: Math 2. You can view the Math 2 Syllabus at this link or one of the midterm exams.

According to the report, the registration for this class has spiked:

2016–2021: < 100 students per year
Fall 2022: ~ 400
Fall 2023: ~ 500
Fall 2024 onward: Math 2 + new Math 3B exceed 900 combined

The report includes this wild example below. The percentage to the right of the question (in red) shows the percentage of a sample of Math 2 students that answered the question correctly. Consider for a second #14 - only 39% of students knew how to round to the nearest hundred!

UCSD points to a variety of factors:

Grade inflation in the K-12 schools: Students reported taking courses such as AP Precalculus or AP Calculus but placed into courses “more than four years below the prerequisite level.”
Pandemic-Era Learning Losses: Students’ math knowledge was set back “to middle-school levels,” a result consistent with statewide declines.
Removal of Standardized Testing: The University of California system removed standardized testing in admissions in May 2020. The report advocates a return to testing.

This isn’t just a California problem. This is an Illinois problem too.

It was only two weeks ago when the state published the IAR testing reports. You can read my reporting on District 65. Our test results were not great: only 53% of students met or exceeded the state standard for mathematics. For Black students, that number was 20%. We are far behind our peer suburban districts.

District 65 is still ahead of is Chicago Public Schools. The State report card shows that 27.3% of Chicago Public School students met or exceeded math standards. These numbers are absolutely brutal and this should be an all-hands-on-deck crisis.

Meanwhile, in CPS, lavish spending is out of control. This Inspector General report is wild. You really should go read it.

The genesis of this OIG initiative was a complaint that one elementary school had paid more than $20,000 to one vendor for staff travel to Egypt, had not received the required approval for the trip, and had undertaken other lavish staff outings. Faced with this news, CPS canceled the Egypt trip one day before its scheduled departure and eventually canceled three of this vendor’s other overseas outings, two of which also had not been approved.

Holy cow, what!? The continue;

An OIG investigation ultimately found that eight schools had used more than $142,000 in CPS funds to pay this vendor for 15 staff trips to Finland, Estonia, Egypt and South Africa for professional development and school visits. These tours also featured numerous scheduled as well as optional tourist activities of debatable value, including a visit to a South African game park, a hot air balloon ride, camel rides and a visit to a bazaar. Thirteen of the 15 trips were never pre-approved, as required

They detail other crazy things, like Hawaiian vacations;

One teacher’s $4,700, seven-day trip to a luxury Hawaiian resort for a four-day professional development seminar. This is just one example of an employee using taxpayer funds to stay beyond the scheduled days of a conference at a location of questionable necessity.

Or spa resorts;

Multi-day education retreats at spa resorts or large hotel complexes that were less than 50 miles from work sites — and therefore not lodging expenses that should have been funded by CPS under district travel policies. In contrast, one suburban school district official said her district uses its school buildings, local banquet halls or local hotels for professional development and would “never ever” allow a retreat at a resort or spa.

Or private black cars to-and-from the airport.

Private sedans via a limo service to carry employees to and from Chicago airports.

This one is familiar, you may remember that Dr. Horton used the District 65 purchasing card for Lyft Luxe rides in Los Angeles. I’ve written for years about things District 65 wasted money on that should’ve gone towards instruction (Food, Cars, Friends)

The list goes on on and on. Seriously go read the CPS report.

I can’t help feel hopeless about this situation. We’re closing schools at a time when the academic standards are collapsing - we should be investing more in instruction, not less. Universities are screaming that students are showing up unprepared, yet when you watch the presentation from Foster School principal in the 11/3 meeting, (slides) actual bon-a-fide instruction seems like an afterthought. Sometimes I wonder if we’ve lost sight on who the schools are actually for.