OPINION: Why Students Aren’t Prepared—and What Policies Are to Blame

All over social media, teachers are saying the same thing: kids are not coming to school prepared. Students in elementary school cannot read and struggle to do basic math; this does not get better as the students get older either.
This is in part due to the No Child Left Behind Act, introduced in 2001 by president George W. Bush, which instituted standardized testing for schools to receive their funding. However, the federal government did not set a standard that students needed to be at, leaving that up to the states.
There were multiple issues with No Child Left Behind, the main one being that teachers began to “teach the test”, which means they taught what would be on the standardized tests. This led to many students being just pushed along in school, with many students never reaching proficiency in what was being taught.
While the No Child Left Behind Act ended in 2015, the Every Student Succeeds Act followed. The Every Student Succeeds Act is basically the same thing as the No Child Left Behind Act; it just gives the states more control on when the standardized testing happens.
Part of the baseline issue with these acts is that they leave too much up to the states. For example, starting with the class of 2029, the diploma requirements to graduate high school were made ridiculously easy, and the only reason I can assume is so that Indiana’s graduation rates would go up.
The reason graduation rates are so low is because, as previously stated, teachers are teaching to the test and not what students actually need to learn. This has led to students no longer retaining information taught in earlier grades, which results in teachers needing to go back and reteach the same material every year.
This is not fair to the students who remember the material from previous years, as they cannot learn anything until the students who do not know the material are caught up.
In my experience, schools also tend to focus more on sight words rather than phonetic reading. which leads to students just memorizing what different words are instead of learning how to actually read. This is an issue because when students reach a word they do not know, most would rather give up than try to sound it out phonetically.
While this is not entirely the fault of the Every Student Succeeds Act, as social media has trained young children’s brains to get a dopamine burst every 30 seconds, this was an issue long before social media was popular with younger teens.