College preparedness of first-year students at the University of California San Diego has taken a plunge, revealing broader educational failures that are increasingly hard to ignore. Indeed, they may well reshape local and state politics for years to come.

A 54-page faculty report published last month reveals a math crisis at UC San Diego, one of America’s top-ranked public universities, where 12.5% of freshmen now require remedial classes for high-school math. Meanwhile one out of 12 freshmen has to study elementary-school and middle-school math in their first year of college.

The trend at UC San Diego is particularly pronounced, but other California campuses show the same pattern, according to the report. Likewise, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, commonly known as the Nation’s Report Card, reveals a similar trend, with reading and math scores declining over the past decade after years of improvements.

Besides pandemic-related school closures and mobile phones, these embarrassing trends mainly boil down to progressive educational choices to sacrifice merit in the interest of generating desired political outcomes. According to the UC San Diego report, “this deterioration coincided with the Covid-19 pandemic and its effects on education, the elimination of standardized testing, grade inflation, and the expansion of admissions from under-resourced high schools.”

Those moves produced the outcome that progressive reformers are seeking but which requires some form of affirmative action. Yet that merely creates another problem for the colleges accepting subpar students. The report states that “admitting large numbers of students who are profoundly underprepared risks harming the very students we hope to support, by setting them up for failure.”

Reports about low-grade students have been the stock-in-trade of educational Cassandras — going back to the 1955 wake-up-call prototype, Why Johnny Can’t Read — but the UC San Diego report corroborates broader trends. Educational declines have also arrived at Harvard University, which launched a remedial math course this year to boost new students’ algebra skills, blaming Covid-19 school closures for the learning deficiencies.

Over the past decade, the social-justice experiment for “racial equity” has led to the elimination of standardized testing, the shutting down of gifted and talented programs, and the gutting of honors programs. Reason and logic are dismissed as quirks of white culture, while “social justice math” is promoted and students receive additional credit for involvement in activism. Yet these efforts to break up the supposed Eurocentric cabal in education amount to little more than removing performance metrics which exclude underperforming students from elite universities, and these kids are disproportionately black and Hispanic.

Voter revolt has even reached ultra-progressive San Francisco. In 2022, voters ousted three Board of Education members who had proposed renaming 44 schools to remove historical figures allegedly associated with racism and colonialism. The board members had also sought an end to selective merit-based admissions at the exclusive Lowell High School.

A generation of American educators and administrators weaned on the social-justice model of education is not going to reform itself. Since American school districts are locally controlled, matters will continue to be decided by voters at the ballot box.