By Francesc Borrull · June 1, 2026

Across the United States, student achievement is not merely declining. It is collapsing.

The latest National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), still the most respected benchmark of academic learning in this country, has revealed drops so severe that they have drawn national and even international attention. Forty percent of fourth-graders now read below basic, NAEP’s lowest category. Thirty-three percent of eighth-graders are also below basic in reading. On NAEP’s long-term math trend, the results are equally alarming: nearly three-quarters of high school seniors could not complete a simple tip-calculation problem.

The Education Recovery Scorecard, produced by researchers at Harvard and Stanford, tells a similar story. Compared to their pre-pandemic peers, students are now roughly half a grade level behind in both reading and math.

These are not abstract figures. They represent millions of children moving through school without the literacy and numeracy required to function, let alone flourish, in adult life. And although COVID accelerated the decline, we must confront an uncomfortable truth: this crisis began before the pandemic.

Something deeper is wrong.

A Crisis Bigger Than Schools

In November 2025, New York Magazine published a major investigative package titled “The Stupiding of the American Mind.” At its center was Benjamin Hart and Matt Thomas’s essay “A Theory of Dumb,” which examined a troubling trend: a measurable decline in average cognitive performance across the country.

Drawing on data from nearly 400,000 IQ tests between 2006 and 2018, the authors described what appears to be a reversal of the Flynn Effect, the decades-long phenomenon in which IQ scores steadily rose across much of the world. According to researchers cited in the article, IQ scores in the United States have been falling for more than a decade. The decline is not genetic. It is environmental.

The possible causes are familiar to anyone paying attention: decreased reading, increased digital distraction, weakened habits of sustained attention, a loss of deep-thinking practices, and a culture flooded with noise, stimulation, and passive consumption. Our minds, the authors suggest, are increasingly wired into everyone else’s mental noise, eroding our capacity for abstraction, reflection, and independent thought.

In other words, American cognitive life is shrinking at the very moment when academic expectations are weakening.

That is not a coincidence. It is a correlation we should take seriously. You cannot build excellence on a foundation of noise.

Public Education’s Forgotten Mission

Schools exist for one primary purpose: to teach children to read, write, think, and do math.

Public education has never been perfect; systemic challenges and inequities have always existed. Yet the current combination of collapsing academic standards, pervasive digital distractions, and eroding home literacy routines is unprecedented in scope and consequence.

Safety is the only priority that precedes academics. Everything else—sports, wellness programs, clubs, social-emotional initiatives, culture-building events, celebrations, assemblies, branding campaigns—must come after learning and remain in service of it.

But in district after district, public schools have drifted away from this mission. Curriculum departments are often understaffed. Tutoring is rare, inconsistent, or symbolic. The science of reading is unevenly implemented. Teacher coaching exists on paper but is too often sporadic or superficial. Data transparency is weak. Grade inflation masks serious academic deficits. Instructional minutes are lost to initiatives that may be well-intentioned but are not central to learning.

Ironically, school budgets continue to grow, yet too much of that growth fails to reach the instructional core. More money does not automatically produce better teaching, stronger curriculum, clearer accountability, or more learning. A system can spend more and still drift further away from its mission.

This is not ideology. It is evidence. NAEP, state assessment data, and the Education Recovery Scorecard all point to the same reality: American education has been moving away from academic rigor for years, and the students paying the highest price are often the ones who most depend on public schools.

The Achievement Gap Is Not a Mystery

The widening gap between high-performing and low-performing students mirrors another phenomenon discussed in the New York Magazine issue: the “fanning effect.” Students with strong home literacy, stable routines, educated parents, and consistent academic support have often held steady or even improved. But students in the bottom deciles, especially those who rely most heavily on public schools for structure and intellectual development, have dropped dramatically.

This should not surprise us. When expectations fall, the students who suffer most are not the privileged. They are the students who most need strong instruction, coherent curriculum, and adults who refuse to give up on them.

Lowering standards does not create equity. Avoiding data does not protect children. Replacing curriculum with screens does not build knowledge. Inflated grades do not reflect actual learning. They entrench inequality.

A child who receives an A or a B while reading below grade level has not been helped. That child has been misled. A family that is told everything is fine when the data says otherwise has not been reassured. It has been denied the truth. And a school system that confuses kindness with lowered expectations ultimately abandons the very students it claims to defend.

Where Are Parents in All This?

One of the most overlooked contributors to the decline is the role of parents and families.

A school is not an island. It is a mirror of the community it serves. We cannot expect schools to achieve excellence in a cultural environment where reading has collapsed, routines have eroded, and screens dominate daily life. Teachers matter enormously, but they do not raise children alone. Principals matter, but they cannot rebuild every home routine. Curriculum matters, but it cannot compete indefinitely against five or six hours of nightly digital distraction.

Many parents do not know when their children are behind. State test reports often arrive months late. Grades are inflated. Schools sometimes downplay deficits with language that sounds gentle but obscures reality. Parent portals may show A’s and B’s while hiding serious gaps in reading, writing, or math. The result is predictable: parents assume that if their child is earning good grades, everything must be fine. But NAEP tells a different story.

Reading at home has also declined sharply. Daily reading, one of the most powerful predictors of literacy development, now competes against phones, gaming, YouTube, TikTok, and endless passive consumption. Many children spend hours scrolling but only minutes reading. The issue is not that technology exists; the issue is that technology has displaced the habits that build vocabulary, attention, memory, imagination, and thought.

Many families also emphasize activities over academics. Travel sports, competitive teams, extracurricular schedules, and weekend tournaments can easily become the organizing principle of family life, while schoolwork becomes secondary. Activities have value, of course. Sports and clubs can teach discipline, teamwork, and resilience. But when they replace reading, study, sleep, and intellectual seriousness, something has gone wrong.

Parents are also powerful agents of accountability, but they are often missing from the conversations that matter most. School board meetings fill up when sports, discipline policies, boundaries, or cultural conflicts appear on the agenda. But curriculum quality? Reading scores? Math proficiency? Intervention systems? Grade inflation? Those topics rarely draw the same crowds. That absence matters.

Parents do not need to become teachers, but they do need to become active partners in learning. They can read nightly with younger children, monitor older students’ digital habits, prioritize academic performance over school branding, demand transparent data, support tutoring and evidence-based interventions, and limit passive screen use. They can ask principals a simple but powerful question: What percentage of students in this building read at grade level?

Parents cannot replace teachers. But teachers cannot compensate for the collapse of home routines. Parenting matters.

The Accountability Vacuum

Here is the most painful truth: almost no one in American education is truly accountable for poor learning outcomes.

If a child reaches tenth or twelfth grade unable to read fluently, write coherently, or do basic math, who answers for that? Right now, the system’s answer is usually: no one.

School board elections have low turnout and are often dominated by voters who may not have children in the schools. Superintendents face intense pressure to avoid bad data or public embarrassment. Districts celebrate graduation rates while quietly ignoring proficiency rates. Policies lower standards instead of raising them. Bureaucracy absorbs resources that should be directed toward instruction. A student can graduate functionally illiterate, and nothing in the system forces a serious reckoning.

This is not because educators do not care. Most teachers and school leaders care deeply. Many work themselves to exhaustion trying to help students succeed. But the system around them is often designed to protect appearances rather than confront reality.

Graduation can become a public-relations metric. Grades can become emotional comfort. Data can become a threat. Intervention can become a slogan. Accountability can become something everyone invokes but no one accepts. And meanwhile, children move forward without the knowledge and skills they need.

Schools Reflect the Culture Around Them

This is where the argument becomes larger than education policy. Schools are neither better nor worse than the societies they belong to. They are mirrors, not machines.

A school cannot fully repair a culture of distraction, an eroding attention span, a decline in reading, collapsing family routines, political polarization, civic apathy, consumerist values, and the normalization of shallow thinking. Nor can teachers alone counteract hours of nightly screen time, irregular sleep cycles, lack of structure, absence of adult monitoring, and diminishing expectations around homework and reading. We should not blame teachers for a society that has deprioritized thinking itself.

If American public education is crumbling, it is partly because the intellectual scaffolding of American society is crumbling. A culture that does not read will eventually produce children who struggle to read. A culture that rewards speed, noise, outrage, and distraction will eventually produce citizens who struggle with patience, complexity, and judgment. A culture that treats education as customer service will eventually weaken the authority of schools to teach, guide, correct, and expect.

This does not absolve schools of responsibility. Schools must teach better. They must use stronger curriculum, better interventions, clearer data, and more coherent systems. But the wider culture must also tell the truth: learning requires effort. Reading requires practice. Thinking requires silence. Knowledge requires accumulation. Excellence requires discipline. None of this is glamorous. All of it is necessary.

What Works

Despite the bleakness, success stories exist. Mississippi, Louisiana, and Tennessee have shown that meaningful improvement is possible when systems focus on the fundamentals: high-quality curriculum, phonics-based early literacy instruction, teacher coaching, transparent data, high expectations, early intervention, and accountability.

Mississippi’s rise in fourth-grade reading between 2013 and 2022 is especially instructive. The state did not improve through slogans, technology fads, branding campaigns, or bureaucratic expansion. It improved by focusing on reading instruction, teacher preparation, early identification, and coherent expectations. There is nothing mysterious about this. It was not magic. It was not marketing. It was not another fashionable initiative. It was discipline.

And discipline is exactly what American education needs to recover—not punitive discipline in the narrow behavioral sense, but intellectual and institutional discipline. The discipline to focus on what matters. The discipline to say no to distractions. The discipline to look honestly at data. The discipline to protect instructional time. The discipline to insist that children can learn more than the culture expects of them.

A Way Forward

To reverse the decline, both academic and cognitive, we must restore clarity and courage. Academic achievement must return to the center of schooling. It cannot be peripheral, symbolic, or buried beneath layers of competing initiatives. Schools must once again be judged primarily by whether students are learning to read, write, think, and do math.

Leaders must also be accountable for measurable results. Not rhetoric. Not branding. Not slogans. Outcomes. If students are not learning, adults must be willing to ask hard questions about curriculum, instruction, interventions, grading, attendance, behavior, leadership, and family engagement.

Reading and math programs should be evidence-based, not built on ideology, marketing, or wishful thinking. Families deserve transparent, accessible data, even when that data is uncomfortable. Funding should be redirected toward instruction rather than bureaucracy. Teachers should receive meaningful training, coaching, and manageable class sizes, not just more initiatives added to already impossible workloads.

Parents must be engaged as partners, not spectators. A school culture cannot become serious about learning if the surrounding adult culture treats academics as optional, secondary, or negotiable.

And finally, we must rebuild a broader culture that values deep thinking. Schools cannot accomplish what society refuses to honor. If children are surrounded by distraction, passivity, noise, and intellectual laziness, schools will spend more and more energy fighting a battle that should also be fought at home, in communities, in churches, in libraries, in media, and in public life.

A healthy democracy depends on citizens who can read, think, analyze, and discern truth. That is not a partisan statement. It is the foundation of self-government. A society that cannot think clearly cannot remain free for long.

Conclusion: Instruction First, Culture Too

We can no longer pretend that American education is suffering from a minor cold. It is facing a systemic, cultural, and cognitive crisis—one documented by national assessments, research on cognitive performance, and the lived experience of educators in classrooms across the country. But there is hope, because the solutions are not hidden.

They are not glamorous, but they are known: teach well, read deeply, expect more, parent actively, lead with honesty, build strong curriculum, limit distractions, and demand accountability.

Schools cannot do this alone. Teachers cannot do this alone. Children certainly cannot do this alone. A society that values learning must participate in the work of learning.

If students are not learning to read, write, think, and do math, nothing else matters. Not screen initiatives. Not new buildings. Not programs. Not politics. Not slogans. Not talking points. Just learning. Instruction first. Culture alongside it. Together—or not at all.

© Francesc Borrull, 2025-2026