Free Republic

California high school students are scoring more straight A’s than ever – but it’s not necessarily because they’re getting smarter, according to data and education experts. The number of college applicants reporting flawless GPAs of 4.0 or higher has doubled over the past decade even as state testing shows a post-pandemic plunge in reading and math comprehension — revealing a grade-inflation crisis that’s sending students who can’t even do fractions into top universities. Over the past decade, the number of students applying to the University of California system with straight A’s skyrocketed from 52,989 in 2015 to 103,138 for the...

Results from a recent global assessment indicate that reading scores for American high school students have dropped over the past three years, while math and science performance still falls behind their peers in several other developed countries.The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), which tests 15-year-olds in math, science, and reading proficiency as metrics for college and career readiness, conducted its last tests in 2025.The initial findings, released on Sept. 8, indicate that children from Singapore, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom continue to outperform American public-school children in those three subjects.PISA has not yet shared comprehensive...

Kentucky middle school parents are furious over instructional packets teachers assigned their kids that were filled with AI slop like misspelled state names and a faulty table of elements, according to a report. The packet, handed out on the first day of class at Farnsley Middle School in Louisville, featured a US geography map with jaw-dropping flubs like Kentucky being mislabeled “Venecky” and Louisiana as “Lookoong,” according to local news station WDRB. “Mom, did you know that we live in Venecky?” Stacey Morris said her son joked to her on the drive home after his first day. She didn’t know...

A Texas high school teacher was reduced to tears and broke down in front of his class when he realized the seniors he was teaching couldn’t complete a writing exercise. Darius Williams, a teacher for Houston Independent School District’s Wheatley High School, said he couldn’t get through the first class of the second day of school before his students’ poor literacy skills were too much for him. “I just finished a three-hour class, and I literally broke down in the middle of class,” Williams said in an Instagram video during his lunch break on Tuesday. Williams, a New Education System...

A conservative named Bonnie Wallace is suing the Texas school board because they kicked her out of a public meeting for reading passages from a book that is available in the school library.I hope she wins.It’s incredibly hypocritical to ban this book at a school board meeting, when the exact same book is available in the school library.https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/conservative-activist-sues-hisd-reading-235847171.html

My 11-year-old son joined the elementary school band, and so I went to the parents’ orientation night held at a local high-school. As the night went on it became obvious why young men rage against the larger social system and why they might find a character like Nick Fuentes attractive. The classrooms were inundated with DEI messages and trans pride flags. On the walls there were posters, stickers and decorations that all invoked the various totems of diversity. Black Lives Matter messaging, decolonization messaging, LGBTQ+ messaging and basically every sort of race and gender social justice messaging you can imagine...

A stunning report from UC San Diego has exposed a dramatic collapse in academic readiness that should alarm anyone who cares about California's education system. The numbers are jaw-dropping: between 2020 and 2025, the share of incoming freshmen requiring remedial math instruction for skills below middle school level surged nearly thirtyfold—from about 1 in 100 students to roughly 1 in 8. The 54-page report, released November 6 by the university's Senate-Administration Working Group on Admissions, paints a troubling picture. According to the report, these students arrive with solid high school math grades—many sporting 4.0 GPAs—yet can't handle arithmetic that elementary...

The student debt crisis isn’t a natural market phenomenon; it’s the predictable result of decades of government interference. Since 1980, average tuition and fees have increased by 1,200 percent, while consumer price inflation has risen only 236 percent over the same period. This massive increase has left students and families struggling to keep up, often forcing them to take on substantial debt just to attend college. Today, over 42.7 million Americans owe a combined $1.69 trillion in federal student loan debt. A combination of federal policies, including subsidized loans, government grants, bloated university budgets, and a complete lack of accountability,...

Elite universities know they’re in the wrong. For years, they’ve been: Charging upwards of 60% for “overhead” costs for federal research grants. Blatantly violating the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 Civil Rights ruling barring race-based admissions and hiring practices. Allowing rampant antisemitism on campus. Reliant on international students from illiberal regimes. Facing both mounting pressure from the Trump administration to change their ways, and vocal opposition from their Marxist students and faculty to remain the same, university presidents are starting to fold: