SEPTEMBER 9, 2025 – Today’s edition of the NYT included an eye-grabbing article, “Reading Skills of 12th Graders Hits New Low.” The second sentence in the article was, “Their math scores fell as well.” Given the critical importance of reading and math skills to . . . well . . . a healthy democracy and economy, we should be doubly alarmed by this report.
But the article mentioned a third disturbing development emblematic of the nihilistic regime that all too many Americans still actively support or, just as consequentially, quietly tolerate. Specifically, in its rip-roaring evisceration of federal agencies, the Trump buzz saw has all but vaporized the National Center for Education Statistics agency of the Department of Education, which agency administers the NAEP—the National Assessment of Educational Progress—the national exam considered by educators, policymakers, and researchers to be the gold standard for testing student progress. Trump’s purge of the Department of Education left just three people—three—down from 100 at the outset of 2025, to manage NAEP’s mission and purpose, namely, gathering reliable data concerning the status of education outcomes among the next generation of Americans poised to grapple with the imponderable challenges we all face.
The Republicans have long harangued about eliminating the Department of Education altogether, but we’ve entered an era in which the Irony Party (best described by the model slogan, “Down with government; up with authoritarianism!”) and its cult-figure leader are hellbent on eradicating all governmental agencies . . . except the Department of Retribution (formerly the DOJ), the Department of Deportation (formerly the Department of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services), and the Department of Testosteronic Bellicosity (formerly the DOD). What this full-on assault against government agencies means is the loss and degradation of reliable data. Without reliable data, we’ll be flying blind, and if we’re flying blind, eventually, well . . . we’re likely to experience a very hard landing or much worse.
One of America’s many incongruities has long existed in our education system. While many of our leading universities attracted the best and the brightest scholars and researchers from all over the world, we’ve failed many of our own citizens with checkered quality, broken down schools, low-grade curricula, grossly underpaid teachers, and in higher education, I dare say, we’re obsessed with collegiate sports, cushy accommodations, and “life style,” at the expense of undergraduate learning.[1] But now the Trump regime is well into an assault on education. Before the attack, only in MAD Magazine would you have expected to find the former head of World Wrestling Entertainment to be put in charge of dismantling the Department of Education. The contemptuous blitz is at all levels: shunning foreign students, yanking research grants, and defunding and degrading the Department of Education, and in the process, debunking the need for reliable data by which to steer the ship of education policy. Except . . . Wait! The ship has been torpedoed, and education policy is now flotsam among all the other wreckage of the common good in the troubled seas of our times.
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© 2025 by Eric Nilsson
[1] A sad commentary on our national priorities is the contrast in median pay between middle school teachers and NFL players, all of whom work 30 weeks a year (in the case of NFL players, including pre-season training and post-season playoffs): the former earns $55,000 a year, while the latter makes $860,000.It gets even more obscene in the case of mean salaries: given the gobs of money commanded by star NFL quarterbacks, the average NFL pay jumped to $3.2 million in 2025, a substantial increase from $2.8 million in 2024.
