I have written previously in some thread here about the Collapse of Public Education, ongoing since shortly after my graduation from Stuyvesant in 1974 and in an increasing downward spiral ever since.  It actually probably was already underway by then, just I wasn't aware of it due to having been tracked into a program run by NYC schools to identify the top 1% of students and provide them a college bound preparatory curriculum.  I recall that my sister's regular local NYC HS H.S. was already a worthless shithole when she graduated 6 years before me.

The decay inspired Ronald Rayguns to warn of the failure in Science & Math education way back in 1982.

https://www.nytimes.com/1982/05/13/us/reagan-warns-schools-are-failing-to-meet-science-and-math-needs.html

According to Paul DeHart Hurd, emeritus professor at Stanford University, the typical grade-school pupil gets only one hour of science and four hours of arithmetic every week. Only a third of high school students are graduated with three years of mathematics, he said. Lack of Qualified Teachers

Citing a growing shortage of math and science teachers, he said that half the people teaching those subjects in high schools this year were unqualified and were teaching only with emergency certificates.

The reasons for this are tooo numerous to mention in detail, but one of the biggest was the massive difference in pay scales for teachers actually proficient enough in these subjects to be qualified to teach versus what the same people could earn in careers in Banking, Engineering, Medicine, Pharmaceutical manufacture etc.  Starting pay to begin with was better, but the difference after a 10 year career ran into the 6 figures.  Good teachers simply left after 5 years, realizing they woul be lower middle class the rest of their lives, whereas a move before it was too late meant a future in the upper class or at least upper middle class.  Combine this with the ever increasing number of working mothers and single parent households, the system was already well into collapse by this time.

In 2001, right before the WTC came collapsing down on 911, Curious George Bush announced the "No Child Left Behind" initiative, which in practice was the No Child Allowed to Flunk system which dropped the bar so low even a Monkey like Curious George could graduate.  During my stint teaching in the 1990s, things were already so bad that most of my 9th grade physical science students couldn't even grasp basic formulas like Density=Mass/Volume, and my class devolved into a show & tell  hour of some flashy demo of blowing up something then passing out a connect the dots and fill in the blanks organizer since they couldn't take notes off the blackboard (granted, my handwriting was illegible, lol) and a 10 question quiz at the end of the week where I gave them the questions the day before so they could look up the answers.

Fast forward to today, where the SATs are now being dropped as a requirement for college admissions already, the Oregon State Dept of Ed has now dropped even the lower than low bar of No Child Left Behind era tests designed to graduate you on time as long as you could sign your name to a car loan and use a calculator to add up your grocery bill:

In public education's latest blunder, the Oregon Department of Education has just decided that basic reading, writing and math skills are not required for students to graduate with a high school diploma.

https://thehill.com/opinion/education/4288044-oregon-just-dropped-all-graduation-standards-failing-all-of-its-students-in-the-name-of-equity/

Prior to the passage of Senate Bill 744 in the Oregon Legislative Assembly's 2021 session, the state's "Assessment of Essential Skills" requirement for high school graduation was sensible: "read and comprehend a variety of text, write clearly and accurately," and "apply mathematics in a variety of settings." Students were required to demonstrate these skills by "earning at or above a cut score on the Oregon Statewide Summative Assessment test."

HTF are any colleges going to discriminate between applicants without not only national SAT scores but even state proficiency tests of basic skills?  Basically, most of them won't discriminate, they'll sign up any warm blooded Homo Sap who can fog a mirror and will take out a loan to pay  tuition to remedial classes.  The only ones discriminating will be the Ivy League schools, who will base it on their grades from Andover, the recommendation from herdads Congressman and the amount of money he will donate to the endowment.

Forget college, and forget public schools.  Let your kid study online and take a GED test.  Public Education has Officially Collapsed.

RE