Via my students’ accounts and my own observations, I am lamentably with each passing day finding the public schools to get worse and worse.
History, geography, and literature are consistently wretchedly taught:
Students have no sense of the substance or chronology of past events; most are lost when looking at either a United States or world map; and they read very little quality literature, know nothing of English grammar, and have little experience conducting genuine research or writing challenging essays. Teachers gather students in groups to produce a report, often on posters, with little guidance toward quality websites or reading material; any information that students do find in such exercises must be processed in the absence of context, because the teacher inevitably has provided little subject area information for students to evaluate what they are finding in their sources.
Education professors are responsible for the knowledge-deficient approach to curriculum that academic decision-makers and teachers follow in the public schools, and for the inefficient and ineffective pedagogy that teachers utilize.
And while education professors are objectionable generally, mathematics education professors are objectionable specifically:
Many mathematics education professors write long textbooks and produce overly long curriculum materials (running 200 to 300 pages) even for students in grades K-2, at which point the only truly important skills are addition and subtraction, necessitating only the anticipatory skills of counting forward by ones, twos, threes, fives, and tens; and backwards from twenty to one. But for all the inefficient exercises that pad mathematics education books and curricula, student skills over time atrophy as teachers turn to calculators as early as fourth grade.
Similarly, in grades 3 through 6, the teaching of multiplication is maladroit and long division is a mostly lost art; and teaching of fractions, decimals, percentages, ratios, proportions, simple probability, charts and graphs proceeds--- remarkably--- both too slowly and with lack of thoroughness in producing student understanding.
The teaching of science is mostly absent in elementary (K-5) schools, even in schools that claim to be STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) and not much better in middle school.
Then in high school, what is true also in United States history, world history, and English, is definitely true in biology, chemistry, and physics: the main chance that a student has after eleven (11) years in school, is to arrive in grade 11 with a chance of rising to the academic challenge of an Advanced Placement course--- and then to benefit only if the teacher is actually academically skilled enough to handle the level of rigor required in Advanced Placement.
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Thus K-12 public education is a mostly vacuous exercise the knowledge and skill deficiency of which is revealed on state summative assessments such as the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments (MCAs) and on the college readiness SATs and ACTs.
Most students are totally unprepared for these academically rigorous assessments.
In Minnesota, the ACT is taken free of charge by all students during the second semester of the grade 11 year. Only those who are self-starting readers with broad interests who have learned a great amount on their own, often inspired by parents with the same traits, are capable realistically of aspiring to a high score on the ACT.
The ACT is based on a high scaled score of 36 on four sections: English, Mathematical Reasoning, Reading, and Science Reasoning.
The national median score is 19.4.
The Minnesota state median score is 20.7
When describing the ACT to my students in the New Salem Educational Initiative, I present levels of performance as follows:
Score in
the 31-36 range Superior
Score in
the 28-30 range Excellent
Score in
the 25-27 range Very Good
Score in
the 21-24 range Good
Score in
the 19-21 range Average
Score in
the 15-18 range Below Average
Score in
the 10-14 range Far Below
Average
Score below 10 Disastrous
Many upper middle-class parents hire private professional ACT tutors (at $75-$150 per hour) who can help a student already primed for a performance in the middle to upper 20s strive for a perfect 36 score. At the level of middle or upper 20s demonstrated on practice tests, further instruction in mathematics and English can add to skill level, along with suggestions as to test-taking techniques.
Such ACT instruction is what I provide to my students in the New Salem Educational Initiative free of charge.
My observation over many years is that a student from an economically impoverished family with few family members who have graduated from a four-year college who is relying entirely on public school education can anticipate a score of 9 to 13 on the ACT. With additional tutorial training in mathematics and English, the score might rise to 18. This also includes reviewing with such students the level of reading expected and format of the Reading and Science Reasoning portions of the ACT. But both of these tests are essentially reading tests: The Reading test covers literary, social scientific, journalistic, and general science reading material; the Science Reasoning test features the sort of reading that one would conduct in biology, chemistry, and physics courses.
Because a knowledgeable and pedagogically adroit tutor can provide instruction on all of the mathematical concepts on the Mathematical Reasoning test, such instruction can be hugely valuable to the student. And because instruction in English usage can be similarly specific, covering punctuation, capitalization, syntax, and proper use of parts of speech, tutorials in English usage can also help a student greatly increase performance on the English section of the ACT.
But the only way to achieve high scores on the Reading and Science Reasoning sections of the ACT is to have done a great amount of reading across all major subject areas and on the latter section particularly in science. Having done such reading at Advanced Placement courses in biology, chemistry, and physics may be enough to achieve a high score on the Science Reasoning portion of the ACT. But for the type of vocabulary and comprehension demanded in the Reading section, only those who read many books on their own are likely to score in the 25-27, 28-30, or 31-36 ranges--- and may find achieving even a score of 21-24 difficult.
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Thus the reality is that all students in the United States are at a disadvantage in performing well on college preparatory tests such as the SAT and ACT by comparison to comparable assessments taken by students in nations with better public education systems (e.g., Singapore, Taiwan, Finland).
Impoverished students in the United States relying completely on the public schools are at a huge disadvantage.
Also at a disadvantage are students whose families are comprised of parents and other adults who are not themselves readers or engaged in the pursuit of knowledge.
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For me, this signals the need to ensure that all of my students receive great amounts of additional instruction in English usage and mathematics.
And I am now realizing that increasingly I must stress the need to expand vocabulary and subject area knowledge via individual student reading of books covering many subjects.
I have discovered very few self-starting readers among my students.
Most spend their free time at this temporal juncture in the year 2026 on their smart phones, especially with the apps TikTok and Instagram.
I already provide my students with an abundance of subject knowledge in history, government, geography, English usage, mathematics, literature, and the fine arts that they do not acquire in the public schools.
Now, increasingly,
I will also fill my students’ time with assigned readings of the sort that they
are not likely to conduct otherwise.
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