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The state of Oregon will no longer require its students to demonstrate proficiency in math, reading and writing in order to earn a high school diploma in a bid to bolster minority students. Gov. Kate Brown signed a bill late last month suspending the state's 'essential skills' requirement for graduation for the next three years while its Department of Education seeks alternative graduation requirements. The bill extended a suspension of the requirements that was put in place during the coronavirus pandemic. Proponents of the measure have said the state's proficiency specifications hurt disadvantaged students, while opponents say suspending them lowers...

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...

Homeschooled students scored substantially above national norms in reading, language, mathematics, social studies, and science, according to the first peer-reviewed nationwide homeschool achievement study of its kind in approximately 15 years.

Colorado state officials on Thursday morning released the results of spring 2023 K-12 achievement tests and the results are mixed -- suggesting that where students were developmentally when their learning was disrupted by the COVID pandemic may play a role in how well they're succeeding academically today. In the English Language Arts portion of the Colorado Measures of Academic Success for example, higher percentages of students in grades 5, 6 and 7 met or exceeded expectations than in 2022, but grades 3 and 4 saw drops or nominal gains. The CMAS tests students in grades 3-8, finding that across the...

Gov. Gavin Newsom refused to take a position on a raging debate over standardized testing in University of California admissions — dismissing as “anecdotes” the alarming reports from college professors about students who can’t do basic math. The governor was asked at a Wednesday press conference in Hayward about an open letter from more than 1,200 UC professors, including Nobel prize winners and leading scientists, who warned of a “severe” crisis of incoming freshman who are unable to even do fractions, forcing educators to dumb down Calculus and other advanced courses. “Show me the data,” Newsom said. “I have feelings...

A San Francisco high school where students get top grades simply for showing up now has the highest acceptance rate in the state to the prestigious University of California, Berkeley — as critics blame rampant grade inflation and rock-bottom standards for a surge in ill-prepared college students who end up dropping out. Mission High School had a 45% acceptance rate into the elite university, with 34 out of its 76 applicants gaining admission last fall, far ahead of the state average of 15%, according to data compiled by the San Francisco Chronicle. But it’s not because of superior academics, critics...

A well known University of California-Berkeley mathematics professor has slammed admissions standards at the top-flight university — where she says huge portions of her students are failing to keep up with college calculus and she’s forced to teach middle-school algebra and fractions students. “Some students are five to eight years behind in mathematics. Office hours that should be spent discussing integrals instead become lessons on fractions and basic algebra you would expect students to learn in middle school,” wrote Zvezdelina Stankova, of UC Berkeley, in an op-ed piece on Saturday for the San Francisco Standard. Stankova — who rose through...

The general consensus among conservatives on public education is that government schools are nothing more than indoctrination centers. Even beginning in kindergarten with children as young as five, public schools are not hiding the fact that they are teaching the left-wing agenda. But as students progress through the system and go on to higher education, college professors are learning that students are sorely lacking in areas that are actually necessary. Wait getting rid of math tests led to students who can’t do math getting into college? No way. https://t.co/KnrPDYKpMq— Chris Heatherly (@chrisheatherly) May 26, 2026On Tuesday, hundreds of faculty members...

Google Deepmind's new framework AlphaProof Nexus has autonomously solved nine out of 353 open Erdős problems it attempted, including two questions that had gone unanswered for 56 years. The system also proved 44 out of 492 open conjectures from the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences (OEIS), settled a 15-year-old question about Hilbert functions in algebraic geometry, and improved a known bound in convex optimization. Inference costs ran just a few hundred dollars per problem, according to the research paper. Unlike (potentially) pure natural-language approaches such as OpenAI's recent solution, the underlying language model in AlphaProof Nexus—in this case Gemini 3.1...

OpenAI says its AI model solved a famous 80-year-old maths problem that puzzled experts for decades, marking a major breakthrough in AI-powered research and reasoning.The artificial intelligence boom is real. Sectors like healthcare, IT, education and many others are rapidly moving towards AI adoption. Now mathematicians have also acknowledged how AI is proving its mettle. OpenAI announced on Wednesday that one of its reasoning models has solved a famous maths problem that humans could not solve in 80 years. Notably, the maths problem, known as the ‘planet unit distance’, was initially proposed in 1946 by legendary mathematician Paul Erdős. Since...

San Francisco is restoring eighth-grade algebra after more than a decade, with the San Francisco Board of Education voting 4-3 Tuesday night to approve the change, reversing a controversial policy that had eliminated the course in middle schools in the name of equity. The vote follows years of debate over academic rigor, access and declining outcomes, as families increasingly pushed the district to expand advanced coursework options. "Families want to see a public school system that offers rigorous coursework. This is absolutely an instructional strategy," school board President Phil Kim said, according to The New York Times. "But it’s also...

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YouTube transcript reformatted at textformatter.ai follows. The Oldest Unsolved Problem in Math | 31:32 Veritasium | 19.9M subscribers | 19,504,750 views | March 7, 2024

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 thirty fold—from about 1 in 100 students to roughly 1 in 8. ****** The reality check came through placement testing. When UCSD's math department assessed Fall 2023 students in remedial courses, the results were sobering: 25% couldn't solve "7 + 2 = ___ + 6," and 61% couldn't round 374,518...

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...

Math professors are ringing alarm bells about the rapid and disastrous decline in students' ability to do even basic math. Almost 15% of incoming students cannot perform math at the 1st-grade level, and fewer than one out of five can perform math at the 8th-grade level. These are college students at a fairly prestigious university, many of whom have achieved very good grades in math prior to graduation. They have been awarded good to great grades without being able to do the most basic math. We're not talking about students having trouble dealing with calculus or Algebra II. Many students...

The design is modeled on the Prisoner’s Dilemma, a classic game theory scenario involving two players who independently choose between cooperation and defection.obe University researchers have unveiled an interactive web application that transforms the abstract concepts of quantum game theory into a tangible, musical experience, drawing parallels with the “emergent dialogue” in jazz and improvisational music. This development is the world’s first browser-based interactive music system built on quantum game theory, and it offers users real-time visual and auditory feedback on how their strategic decisions intertwine. The project, led by quantum engineer Souma Satofumi, aims to bridge a significant...

American students are experiencing a math crisis marked by a decline in scores that began over a decade ago and rapidly accelerated in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, a new report shows Almost 4 in 10 eighth-graders scored below basic in math on the Nation’s Report Card, leading to the lowest scores since the test began in the early 2000s. The gap between high- and low-performing students is higher than ever. Students who saw strong gains in math since the early 2000s — girls, low-income students, Black and Latino students, students with disabilities, and English learners — have seen...

Elon Musk wants H-1B visas because he says America needs more tech workers. The real reason for these visas is our schools aren’t teaching math well enough. By law, H-1B visas go to foreigners who do specialized jobs, mostly in tech. Every year, 65,000 regular visas are handed out, plus 20,000 for advanced degrees. A 2023 federal report showed 65% of H-1B jobs are computer-related, but less than 1% go to social sciences. America’s math problem is getting worse. In 2024, a staggering 72% of eighth-graders failed to score at the proficient level in math, which is up from 66%...

For many high school students returning to class, it may seem like geometry and trigonometry were created by the Greeks as a form of torture. So imagine our amazement when we heard two high school seniors had proved a mathematical puzzle that was thought to be impossible for two thousand years. We met Calcea Johnson and Ne'Kiya Jackson at their all-girls Catholic high school in New Orleans. And, as we first reported last year, we expected to find two mathematical prodigies. Instead, we found at St. Mary's Academy, all students are told their possibilities are boundless. Come Mardi Gras season,...