this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2025
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Literacy and numeracy scores in the US in general peaked in 2012.
If you graduated high school / college around then, statistically, everyone +/-5 or greater your age is generally less literate, less mathematically literate, less knowledgeable than you, ceteris paribus.
Do you have any data on that? Maybe it's my personal bias but it seems to me, having graduated high school in 2002, that people ten years younger than me tend to be less literate. That's charitable language. They certainly struggle much more with tech.
https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=38
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https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/2023/national_results.asp
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They unfortunately rework the metrics by which they measure this stuff, and have many different ways of trying to measure roughly the same thing... but hey, thats true of NBER and the BLS and FRED over this same time period too, way before Elon/Trump basically fired everyone.
So yeah, its hard to pinpoint exactly, without... doing my own meta analysis of all their data, but basically around ~2012 were the peak of totally averaged literacy and numeracy scores.
Before that, it was climbing, then peaked, and has since been falling, quite rapidly the closer you get to present day.
Your anecdotal observed deviation is indeed biased, you probably do not spend your time around a purely statistically average set of people, how/why exactly that is the case would require me to get some PID from you to attempt to explain though, lol.
Most likely explanation would probably be regional / location variance.
US education systems vary wildly in quality by Zipcode, the average net worth of families in the zipcode you grew up in is still the most statistically significant way to accurately predict overall life outcomes.
Very interesting. Especially the first link showing how different life circumstances appear to influence performance. I'm fairly certain this is also tied to income inequality.
The practice of funding schools based on local property taxes is incredibly harmful.
Yes, thats like, the whole main problem with American society.
It is statistically true that working hard, staying out of jail, and getting an education is absolutely not a guarantee that you will achieve what the Boomers call 'middle class lifestyle', or better.
It might help you at least tread water, in terms of generational advancement, maybe?
But if you don't have a stable home, family situation, food situation... shouldn't be surprising that you tend not to do well in school.
A huge part of that problem is indeed tying together local property taxes and school systems.
People have been saying this and proving it with numbers since at least the 90s.
But, we never changed it in a way that would fix anything, instead, the Republicans have spent my entire lifespan on this planet deliberately destroying public education, because they want to give taxpayer money to privately run religious schools (Christian, of course), and then make everyone pay for basic, K-12 education, via some kind of voucher/marketplace of schools system.
They know dumb people are easier to lie to, and most of our own Founders knew that a functional democracy is impossible without a foundation of an educated and well informed populace.
So, of course, blow all that up, revert to Theocracy, thats the plan, its basically mostly Reagan's fault for setting all this in motion.
Agreed on almost everything. My only difference is I'd say it started with the Nixon administration and was made far worse by the Reagan admin.
Well, I am just a silly youngin', what would I know =P
Less snarkily, could you tell me what Nixon did in relation to the US education system?
I'm fairly decent with my US History, but I could be forgetting something, or have not heard of it before.
I guess I got a bit off topic. I meant more like a general decline of the US kinda way. In a brief search I found out he vetoed the Comprehensive Childcare Development Act. It would have established a nationalized childcare system, with facilities owned by the federal government. Could have been interesting.