Opinion | UC San Diego report: Incoming students are not ready for college – The Washington Post

Opinion

Megan McArdle

The signs of educational decline are now impossible to ignore

UC San Diego report shows students are not prepared for college, especially in math.

November 23, 2025, 5 min

Some years ago, during a dinner party, our smoke detector started beeping while we were broiling steaks. I dashed into the hallway and poked at the detector with a broom, which paused, as if surprised, then resumed wailing. My husband came out of the kitchen and had a go. His more muscular attention bought us perhaps 30 seconds of relief, but the machine recovered and more aggressively assaulted our ears. Eventually we pulled the cursed thing out of its frame and ripped the batteries out.

The best of The Post’s opinions and commentary, in your inbox every morning

That’s when one of our guests said, “Guys, that’s really a lot of smoke.” It sure was, because as it turned out, our bathroom was on fire (thanks to a candle).

Life is full of these messy signals. Prices are a signal. They tell us how much people want stuff, how much that stuff costs to produce and how much of it we have available. Standardized test scores are signs, telling us whether kids have mastered certain skills. Those warnings are, like my smoke alarm, highly imperfect. (We’ve had many alerts and exactly one fire.) But they contain vital information, and we ignore them at our peril.

Unfortunately, because these signals are messy, we are often tempted to ignore them, especially when the information they contain is bad news, like “your bathroom is on fire,” or “your schools are failing to close persistent racial and income gaps,” or “regulations have made it too hard to build new housing.” Ideally you’d extinguish the fire or fix your failing schools or amend the regulations before the problem worsens. But solving problems is hard, and in politics, it often involves taking on well-organized constituencies that will wave away the smoke and insist that everything is just fine. So institutions often choose to disregard the underlying issues and simply whack the alarm with a hammer until it stops beeping.

🎤

Follow Opinions on the news

There has been a lot of that going on recently, most notably in education. Instead of rectifying disparities in preparation and achievement, people decided it would be simpler to adjust the measurements. Parents opposed standardized testing, got their kids disability diagnoses that allowed them extra time on tests and lobbied teachers to change bad grades. Exhausted teachers responded with grade inflation, which also helped conceal that low-income and minority kids weren’t doing as well as their richer and White peers. Progressive educators watered down curriculums, gutted gifted and talented programs, and weakened admissions standards for honors classes and magnet schools. Colleges dropped standardized testing requirements, in part because that made it easier to diversify their student body. None of these things happened everywhere, but they happened in many places, and all of them made it harder to see — or rectify — pandemic-era learning loss.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Opinion | UC San Diego report: Incoming students are not ready for college – The Washington Post

#educationalDecline #incomingStudents #institutions #mathematics #meganMcardle #messySignals #notReadyForCollege #opinion #pandemicEraLearningLossMath #standardizedTesting #theWashingtonPost #ucSanDiego #ucsd

Opinion – Infrastructure’s diminishing returns since the Golden Gate – The Washington Post

Opinion

By Megan McArdle

In 1916, Emily Post published her book about driving across America. Yes, that Emily Post, the society maven who invented the modern etiquette column. Before she started telling us all how to behave, she wrote “By Motor to the Golden Gate,” which is still worth reading more than a hundred years later. Not just because Post is a delightful writer with a keen ear for the telling vignette, but because her book sheds light on an issue that’s on everyone’s minds these days: infrastructure, and why we can’t seem to build it any more.

Post was born at the beginning of America’s “special century,” the period between 1870 and 1970 when we traded muscle power for motor power, moved from farms to cities and built most of our public infrastructure. In 1916, much of that infrastructure was still in the future. The rail network was largely built out, cities had made enormous strides in water treatment and electrification was well underway. But outside cities, telephone networks were still primitive and paved roads scarce. Unfortunately the rural areas were where most people still lived. 1920, when America crossed the 50 percent urbanization mark, lay four years and one world war away.

So motoring across the country meant navigating dirt roads that threw up dust when it was dry and dissolved into mud puddles when it rained, forcing the traveler to hole up in a hotel for days or weeks until the road could be dried out and repaired. In the sparsely populated West, Post had to do some patching herself, using barrel staves to plug ruts that ran deeper than the 10-inch clearance of her car’s undercarriage.

Post downplayed these frustrations with well-bred WASP understatement. But you can imagine how grueling it must have been to pick up those barrel staves and lay them down in a rut over and over, or to sit in an open car that was barely inching through the desert. You can also imagine how good it must have felt to get back onto a paved road.

Hold onto that thought, because it’s relevant to something else that comes through in her writing — the incredible optimism and wild ambition that runs through Post’s America. The Midwest, particularly, seems to be in the middle of a youthful growth spurt, with cities springing up out of the prairie full of vim and vigor and plans for the future.

That sense of optimism, or rather, our longing for it, is at the heart of the Republican nostalgia politics I tweaked in last week’s column. And the Democratic nostalgia politics I could have tweaked, because it’s also a powerful force. Where Republicans yearn for the bygone days of tariffs and factory jobs and nuclear families, many Democrats long to reenact the welfare state expansions and titanic infrastructure projects of the 20th century — down to branding climate policy as a “Green New Deal.” But really both those groups are asking why we can’t recapture the spirit of an age when America felt young and hopeful and capable of doing extraordinary things.

It’s a great question. But after following Emily Post across America, I think the answer is that we already did them.

There’s an old joke about an engineer who finds a colleague banging his head against a brick wall.

“Why are you doing that?” he asks.

“Because it feels so good when I stop.”

It feels really good when you can stop running across a frozen yard in your nightshirt and just pad down the hall to an indoor toilet; when you exchange sooty kerosene lamps for clean electric lights; when you trade jolting over dirt and cobblestones for gliding over smooth macadam. But those are one-time transitions, and once they’re over, you’ll never feel that same sweet relief again.

You can try to relive that excitement by installing a second bathroom, developing a more advanced power grid or constructinga bigger highway. But the more infrastructure you build, the more the marginal utility of new infrastructure declines.

Think of it this way: If your house has no bathroom, installing one is a no-brainer. If you have two bathrooms already, well, is having a third place to powder your nose really worth the hassle and expense of construction? Something similar is true of big public projects. When the Golden Gate Bridge was built in the 1930s, it turned a long ferry ride into a quick drive. Widening the bridge, or building another nearby, might make traffic move faster. But not as much as moving from a ferry to a bridge.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Opinion | Infrastructure’s diminishing returns since the Golden Gate – The Washington Post

#18701970Era #democrats #drivingAmerica #emilyPost #goldenGate #infrastructure #meganMcardle #nostalgiaPolitics #opinion #optimism #republicans #theWashingtonPost #wildAmbition

#meganmcardle - The 🍊🤡 has no, none, zero, zip, nada political skills. Even suggesting so is laughable.

Hopefully he’ll be incarcerated well before the election

3 reasons we’re stuck with Trump and Biden https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/05/30/trump-biden-2024-election-options/

With #MeganMcArdle ‘s libertarian streak, you’d think she would appreciate a decentralized governance structure like #Mastodon ‘s — not so much, though. For me, the column echoes discussions about television early in the cable era, but comes-down on the side of the Big Three:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/01/17/twitter-mastodon-replacement-social-media