Math Skills Are Plummeting. Can Testing Reverse the Trend?

Across the US, there are students bound for college who are below a middle school level with basic math skills. For years, the criticism of advanced math was its lack of practical application. When would any normal person ever actually use calculus? The combination of increasingly lax school standards and a criticism of standardized tests may have created a void where basic math proficiency is rapidly disappeared. Add to this the growing ubiquity of AI tools offering the chance for students to easily automate their homework without learning basic principles and you can see what has driven this crisis.

As Stanford math professor Brian Conrad noted, "the premise that foundational ideas don't need to be learned anymore is a recipe for idiocracy." Beyond math skills, this idea that we are losing the focus on having students learn the most basic skills such as reading comprehension or the ability to analyze ideas is becoming a very real problem. This can also be wildly inconsistent across an entire country. One unexpected solution for this may be to reprioritize standardized tests.

For years, education experts and the media alike have been critical of programs that "teach to the test" and the very idea of quantifying achievement in such a unilateral way. The biases and inequity built into standardized tests is a very real issue. To date, these tests remain the best way to measure a baseline level of math proficiency. Does this mean we may see a resurgence in the importance of standardized tests and is that the solution?