THE CURRENT STATUS OF AMERICAN SCHOOLS Over the past decade, Mississippi has made such extraordinary progress in 4th-grade reading that it is often referred to as the “Mississippi Miracle.” In reality, there is nothing miraculous about it. All the state did was return to phonics, the traditional method for teaching reading.
Recently, more than 1,800 math and science lecturers at the University of California signed an open letter outlining a distressing problem. First-year undergraduates, they say, are increasingly arriving without the basic skills needed to succeed. At U.C. Berkeley, they maintain that 20-30% of students taking an early calculus course face “severe preparation deficits.” The challenge has become so great, they add, that instructors are forced to reteach middle-school math.