A version of this commentary appeared in the Columbia Missourian.
In fall 2025, faculty at the University of California—San Diego (UCSD) released a startling report documenting a sharp decline in students’ math skills. Between 2016 and 2024, the share of incoming freshmen requiring remedial math instruction—covering material from high school, middle school, and even elementary school—increased from less than 1 percent to more than 12 percent.
At Chalkbeat, education reporter Matt Barnum interviewed one of those students, Maria Alvarado, and asked what she believed led to her placement in remedial math. Her answer was revealing. By her account, her school focused on giving her good grades so she could move on —not on whether she had mastered the material. Even as a young college student, she recognizes that higher expectations would have helped her.
Ultimately, Alvarado’s high school failed her. She did not learn what she needed to know to succeed at the next level, and her teachers did not tell her.
Alvarado’s story illustrates a broader problem that has emerged in American education. Increasingly, our schools seem organized around avoiding failure rather than pursuing excellence. We move students along, protect graduation rates, soften standards, and reassure ourselves that things are going well—even with mounting evidence to the contrary.
Our schools have lost their ambition.
You can see the same mentality in the rapid spread of the four-day school week. Recent research estimates that over 2,100 schools in more than 850 school districts across the country are on a four-day school week, mostly in rural areas. Research generally finds that the four-day week harms academic achievement, which is unsurprising. But even setting the evidence aside, the policy reflects something deeper about the current mindset in education.
Imagine an ambitious school system—one singularly focused on maximizing student learning. Would its leaders ever propose reducing the number of school days by 20 percent? Would anyone serious about educational excellence describe fewer days in school as an educational improvement?
The four-day week is a statement about priorities. It reflects a system that no longer believes more learning is worth demanding more effort—from adults or from students.
The declining ambition in our schools is consistent with the trend in national test data: U.S. students are performing significantly worse academically than they did two decades ago. States like Mississippi and Louisiana have bucked the trend through aggressive literacy reforms and stronger accountability systems. But the handful of states that stand out as exceptions make the point: Most states show no urgency.
There are many possible explanations for our struggling schools, including the loss of federal accountability, the COVID pandemic, and ever-increasing smartphone use. But none of these fully fit the data. Test scores began to fall in the mid-2010s, before the pandemic, and before the widespread use of smartphones (especially among younger children). There is some evidence that the loss of federal accountability is a contributing factor, but research indicates it cannot explain most of the decline.
A simpler explanation is that we have stopped insisting on excellence.
At The74, Chad Aldeman is involved in a project to find “bright spot” districts and schools across the country. These are places where academic performance is significantly better than expected based on the poverty level. One example is in Steubenville, Ohio, where there is an intense, districtwide focus on literacy. Aldeman writes about all the things Steubenville does to push literacy in its schools. It’s impressive; even PE teachers are involved in reading instruction. But more than any individual action or policy, what stands out to me is Steubenville’s unwavering commitment to ensure children will learn to read—that is, its ambition.
In 1983, the U.S. Secretary of Education commissioned a report that came to be titled A Nation at Risk. Perhaps the most famous quote from the report reads: “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.”
The report served as a call to action. It led to reforms in most states during the 1980s and more broadly, is widely viewed as a jumping-off point for the 30 years of education reform that followed. People cared.
Today, by contrast, our educational decline is met with resignation, rationalization, or indifference. That’s the most alarming development of all.
