AND THEN THERE ARE THE FACTS: About That ‘Historic Learning Loss” of Sen. Eliz..

[SVPete]

AND THEN THERE ARE THE FACTS: About That ‘Historic Learning Loss” of Sen. Elizabeth Warren

https://marktaps.substack.com/p/and-then-there-are-the-facts-about

So here we go again with former Oklahoma resident-turned-Harvard professor-turned-U.S. senator putting something up on X that bears only the slightest resemblance to the truth:

“Among other agencies, Trump has gutted the Department of Education, weakened food safety protections, and hollowed out the IRS. The result?
Historic learning loss in our schools. More food safety crises. And tax cheats getting away with skirting the bill.”

Where do we start this time around? How about let’s compare how America’s graduating high school seniors scores in the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) in 1992 compared to 2024? Here’s what NAEP says:

Reading is the most basic skill our students must learn if they are to have even the remotest chance of succeeding as adults, and yet here we see — after the Department of Education (DoED) was formed in 1980 and had a decade to improve public schools — the results show continuous decline in student achievement.

“The average reading score for twelfth-grade students in 2024 was lower by three points compared to 2019 and was lower by 10 points in comparison to the first reading assessment in 1992.
...
“Compared to 1992, the 2024 reading scores for twelfth-grade students were lower for lower-, middle-, and higher-performing twelfth-grade students at all but the 90th percentile. Scores for twelfth-graders at the 10th and 25th percentiles were lower by 24 and 15 points, respectively. The score for twelfth-graders at the 50th percentile was 8 points lower and the score for students at the 75th percentile was 2 points lower in 2024 compared to 1992.”

...
But look what Warren does, she points to Donald Trump, claiming his radical reduction of the DoED workforce from more than 4,000 highly paid federal bureaucrats to a little over 2,000 getting taxpayer-funded pay checks caused an “historic learning loss.”

But Trump’s DoED worforce(sic) cuts only began in 2025 and continue during the current year, yet DoED’s own data shows steadily growing failure on the most vital skill began more than three decades ago!/quote]

It took 12 years of Reagan and GHWB to create a framework that could measure and track what was happening in US PSs academically. So, allowing for the USDE to get organized and doing whatever they did, that's not knowing where the US started (ca. 1980) and not knowing 6-8 years of the results/consequences of USDE actions.

Fauxcahontas ASSumes that everything pre-Trump was great. It was not, as measured decline demonstrates. The USDE was never about improving education, it was always about funneling Federal $$$$$$ to the teachers unions, which include educrats along with actual teachers.