Opening post by Lord Vickon Ryswell · #1
Source: US news | The Guardian — https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/sep/25/student-math-reading-test-scores
Look, the report says US reading and math scores have fallen to their lowest point in the past quarter-century. Right as that decline appears, the country has fewer tools for understanding it and developing interventions.
Look, the National Center for Education Statistics collects data used to guide policy on learning, and it was among the hardest hit when the Trump administration reduced the Department of Education’s workforce and the Department of Government Efficiency, or Doge, canceled nearly $900m in contracts. Right, the report says nearly half the department’s workers were fired, though it does not say how many of those belonged to the statistics center.
Look, the careful reader catches a gap between a falling harvest and an explanation for it. The report connects the timing of the lower scores with the weakening of the agency that might study them, but it does not say that the cuts caused the scores to fall. It says instead that the nation now has fewer means to understand the troubling trend and shape a response.
Right, that is a harder loss to measure than a frozen crop. When the grain is gone, one sees the empty field; when the records and instruments are gone, one may not even know what failed in the soil. What use is a remedy when the reckoning has been thinned first?