NAEP test scores for America’s most vulnerable students have collapsed — and the timeline tells the story mainstream media won’t: the “Great Awokening” is failing the very kids it claimed it was trying to help.
A recent New York Times article accidentally admits what conservative education reformers and frustrated parents have long warned: academic standards in America are collapsing — and it’s the poor, working-class, and disadvantaged kids who are being hurt the most.
In a piece titled “The Pandemic Is Not the Only Reason U.S. Students Are Losing Ground”, the Times finally acknowledges that the nation’s lowest-performing students began falling behind years before COVID — right around 2013. That timeline is key, because it coincides not only with the decline of the Bush-era No Child Left Behind legislation but also the rise of radical progressive dogma in public education — a cultural shift critics have called the “Great Awokening.”
NAEP, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, data show that from 2003 to 2013, even the bottom 10% of test takers — the kids most in need of educational support — were slowly gaining ground. But starting around 2013, that trend reversed. Since then, the lowest scorers on math and reading tests in both 4th and 8th grade have steadily declined, with the drop accelerating after 2020.
“Today, the country’s lowest-scoring students are in free fall,” the Times concedes.
The American Enterprise Institute says this data represents a “five alarm fire” about America’s educational progress.
Leftists are dismissing the data as reflecting nothing more than racial differences and cheating on the NAEP tests and aren’t worth worrying about.
This isn’t about kids in the top percentile doing marginally worse. It’s the bottom quartile — disproportionately made up of students with disabilities, English-language learners, and children from low-income families — who are bearing the brunt of the educational collapse. According to the data, even as higher-achieving students began to stabilize post-pandemic, these students continued to lose ground.
The top-scorers are treading water during the woke era’s schooling, but the bottom-scorers are watching their scores fall off a cliff.
“Equity” in Practice: Woke Policy, Declining Academic Performance
While the New York Times scrambles to blame factors like the Great Recession, smartphone use, and the expiration of Bush-era school accountability laws, it refuses to confront the elephant in the classroom: the sweeping transformation of public education into a laboratory for progressive social experiments.
Since 2013, public schools have been rapidly reengineered to prioritize equity over excellence, activism over academics, and “lived experience” over logic and literacy. Standardized testing, discipline, gifted programs, and even math instruction have been attacked as “racist.” Phonics and factual history have been replaced by feelings, narratives, and DEI training sessions.
As author and writer Steve Sailer noted in his Substack commentary on the same NAEP trends, the decline isn’t random: “White collar kids do okay going to school on Zoom, but blue collar kids benefit from going to school in person and being talked at by middle class grown-ups.”
That’s two years after 2013 — just when schools began fully embracing identity politics, anti-merit ideology, and cultural radicalism under the guise of “inclusive education.”
The shift from teaching core subjects to indoctrinating students with gender theory, racial resentment, and anti-American narratives didn’t just waste classroom time — it has eroded the structure and authority that vulnerable students rely on to succeed.
Collapse by Design?
Under No Child Left Behind, schools had to show results. Teachers were pressured to produce gains in reading and math, and test scores were scrutinized by parents and administrators alike. That model may have been stressful and controversial — but according to the standardized scores it worked, particularly for kids who lacked academic resources and other support structures at home.
When that system collapsed — first under Obama-era waivers and later through bipartisan neglect — schools were cut loose from accountability just as the “equity” movement took over. The new focus? Group identity, social justice, “anti-racism,” and vague “trauma-informed” teaching. And what followed?
A measurable, decade-long collapse in performance — felt most acutely by the very children the Left claims to champion.
The bottom 10% didn’t just lose ground. They were left behind by design, as public education stopped being about equal opportunity and started being about ideological conformity.
The current collapse in academic performance among low-income students also eerily echoes the Cloward-Piven strategy, a radical political theory developed in the 1960s by sociologists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven. Their idea was to overwhelm and destabilize public systems — like welfare — by deliberately increasing dependency and pushing those systems to a breaking point, thereby creating a crisis that could be used to justify sweeping federal intervention and structural transformation. In today’s education system, a similar pattern has emerged: discipline is dismantled, academic standards are eroded, and merit is decried as oppressive — all under the guise of “equity.” As a result, schools fail the very students they’re meant to uplift, fueling a larger political agenda of centralization, dependency, and permanent grievance. Whether intentional or not, the net effect resembles Cloward and Piven’s original vision: a failed system that paves the way for radical change under crisis conditions.
Mainstream Media Catches On — But Still Misses the Point – And Protect the Left-Wing Agenda at Work
The Times article, to its credit, documents the trend. But like so many left-wing corporate media outlets, refuses to say the quiet part out loud. Instead, it tiptoes around the decline and tosses out generic explanations:
“Researchers point to a number of educational and societal changes over the past decade, including a retrenchment in school accountability, the lasting effects of the Great Recession and the rise of smartphones…”
But none of those factors explain the intensity of the drop after 2013. Nor do they account for why scores among high-achieving students have remained relatively steady while only the bottom performers plummeted.
What does explain it? A loss of structure. A loss of rigor. A classroom environment now hostile to objective standards, discipline, and academic excellence.
The Great Awokening’s Real Legacy: Failing the Poor & Needy
The real tragedy here isn’t just statistical. It’s generational. A full decade of failed educational ideology — imposed top-down by activists, bureaucrats, and DEI consultants — has robbed an entire cohort of students of their chance to succeed.
And while elites send their kids to prep schools and STEM camps, low-income children are being experimented on with race essentialism, TikTok therapy sessions, and Critical Theory disguised as compassion.
The “Great Awokening” was never about helping the poor. It was about seizing cultural power — and now, the consequences are being measured in test scores, dropout rates, and shattered futures.
These reports are further proof that President Trump’s efforts last month to dismantle the Department of Education were long overdue.
