Last week, New York Times correspondent Nikole Hannah-Jones published an article that set social media ablaze. “In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?” tells the story of Hannah-Jones’ shock at learning her then-eighth-grade daughter, Najya — who had been earning A’s in honors math — had failed the state algebra exam.

This is the same test that the New York Board of Regents is phasing out as a requirement to earn a diploma from a New York public high school. The exam made educational officials uncomfortable because it uncovered significant gaps between students’ grades and their demonstrable aptitude. It also revealed meaningful disparities in performance across race and socioeconomic status.

So, in the name of equity, the Regents is throwing the test in the trash.

To her credit, Hannah-Jones admitted she hadn’t focused sufficiently on her daughter’s mastery of math. But if she was truly surprised by the chasm between grades and subject knowledge, then she hasn’t been reading the news.

Anyone paying attention to recent education-related headlines knows that education bureaucrats across the nation are burying evidence of a widespread and unpleasant truth: Public high schools are churning out barely literate, almost innumerate graduates.

New York is just the latest of many states to throw out its test in order to hide the evidence. Massachusetts no longer requires students to pass its statewide MCAS to graduate. Oregon suspended its mandate for students to demonstrate essential skills in reading, writing, and math. Beaver State administrators brag about the Class of 2025’s 83 percent graduation rate, but the previous year, only 45 percent of that class met the state’s English language arts standard, and a measly 20.3 percent met the math benchmark.

The result? Diploma-clutching undergrads show up on campus woefully unequipped to do college-level work.

Over 3,000 professors in the University of California system recently signed a petition begging their university system’s Board of Regents to reinstate standardized testing, which it had eliminated from the admissions process in 2020. In that time, the percentage of first-year University of California students unqualified to take entry-level precalculus has skyrocketed. At the University of California-San Diego, the number increased 24-fold. Seventy percent of these of these students’ math skills fell “below middle school levels.”

Their skills were so rudimentary, professors had to stop class to teach fractions and basic algebra while adequately prepared pupils twiddled their thumbs. Likewise, an English professor at Berkeley reported, “After the SAT was dropped, I got students who could not write a sentence.”

As the professor attests, these policies have consequences. There was a reason we used the ACT and SAT — because they are highly predictive of which students will succeed at the college level, and especially in elite universities. Their elimination not only ushers the ill-prepared students into competitive lecture halls, but it is also intellectually dishonest. As one Berkeley tutor put it, “If we’re really looking for equity in classrooms, we need to … understand who’s falling behind in high school and help them fix that before they apply to university.”

The state algebra exam did exactly this for Najya when it revealed her “huge gaps in the building blocks of math.” Fortunately, with tutors and extra studying, she has caught up and put herself on the right path. But a child whose parents cannot afford tutors needs this kind of warning even more, and much earlier.

Discarding standardized tests does not benefit struggling kids, any more than throwing out my scale will help me get back in shape. But it’s happening everywhere educational bureaucrats can get away with it. They don’t want their failures to be measured, even though our children’s success demands it.

News articles about these cynical bar-lowering maneuvers don’t make for thrilling reading, but they do demonstrate a disturbing trend that is weakening the next generation of Americans. We must pay attention.

Paul Ollinger is a writer and comedian in New York City. He is the host of the ‘Reasonably Happy’ podcast and serves on the respective boards of two independent schools.