The American Math Crisis

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Nov 21, 2025

Guest

Kelsey Piper, a journalist focused on education policy, Rose Horowitz from The Atlantic, who covers literacy declines, and Joshua Goodman, an economics professor, dive into America’s troubling math crisis. They discuss alarming trends in grade inflation and the stark reality of incoming college freshmen needing remedial math despite good grades. Cultural pressures around easier grading and the impact of technology on learning are explored, along with the implications of accountability policies and standardized testing on student performance.

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ANECDOTE

UCSD Freshmen Shock

UC San Diego found many incoming freshmen needed remedial elementary and middle-school math despite straight A's in high school.
One quarter of remedial students missed a simple 7+2 equals 6+? question, showing deep gaps.

INSIGHT

Policy Shift Coincides With Decline

Math scores rose from the late 1990s to about 2013 and then declined after policy shifts reduced federal accountability.
Joshua Goodman links the decline to weakened No Child Left Behind incentives and the Every Student Succeeds Act changes.

INSIGHT

Global Decline Suggests Global Causes

Declines in math and reading are widespread across high-income countries, suggesting global drivers beyond U.S. policy.
Rose Horowitz and Doug Stager point to phones and screens as plausible broad explanations.

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The University of California San Diego is one of the best public colleges in America. So it was fairly shocking when the school released a report on the steep decline in academic preparedness of its freshman. The number of incoming students in need of remedial math has surged in the past few years. These students did not fail high school math. Many of them got straight A's. Other colleges have seen similar trends: declining mathematical ability from students who aced their high school tests.

I think that there are several ways to frame the problem we’re looking at here. One is that American kids can’t do math: That’s the headline of a recent Atlantic article by Rose Horowitch. Another frame, as Kelsey Piper writes in the online magazine The Argument, is that grades have stopped meaning anything. I think that the full story is somewhere in between. The age of grade inflation is also the age of achievement deflation. We are giving more and more A's to students who are learning less and less.

There is a lot of talk these days about America moving into a postliterate future. One piece of evidence for this is declining test scores for literacy among students and adults. Fewer people talk about a post-numerate future. The problem here is bigger than UC San Diego. National assessments in the U.S. and even throughout the developed world show that people are getting worse at math. But why?

Today we have three guests to help us answer these questions. Rose Horowitch of The Atlantic, Kelsey Piper of The Argument, and Joshua Goodman, an associate professor of education and economics at Boston University. We talk about plummeting math scores for American students, why it’s happening, and why it matters at a moment when carbon-based humans seem to be getting dumber at the very moment that silicon-based machines are getting smarter.

If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com.

Host: Derek Thompson

Guests: Rose Horowitch, Kelsey Piper and Joshua Goodman

Producers: Devon Baroldi

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