Hey, welcome to Politics by Faith. Mike Slater. Thanks so much for being here. If you're new to the podcast, the point here is that I get way too anxious about the news and I don't want to be anymore. So what we do is we present a problem and anxiety creating story that's in the news and then provide

some historical perspective and biblical peace to hopefully make all of that anxiety wash away.

I want to get right to this story because we're not really talking about this issue now.

I don't know if it's getting drowned out by the midterms.

We should be talking about it as a midterm issue because it's that awful. The National Assessment

of Educational Progress, it's a nationwide test. Eighth graders, 26% are proficient in math.

26% of eighth graders are proficient.

Now, this is being framed by the media that does talk about it as,

well, this is the effects of COVID.

And it is, these scores are down, but in 2019, only 34% of kids were proficient in math.

So it's not like we were knocking out a bunch of Einstein's three years ago.

Eighth grade reading, only 31% can read.

Only 31% of eighth graders can read.

So that means if you line up 10 average 8th graders, only three of them are able to read. How do you think the rest are going to do in high school? How do you think the rest are going to do in life? This is not, by the way, evil conservative saying that this is bad.

Miguel Cardona, he's the Secretary of Education, said, I want to be very clear.

The results in today's national report card are appalling and unacceptable.

This is a moment of truth for education.

How we respond to this will determine not only our recovery, but our nation's standing

in the world. Now, his solution, of course, is more money. It's more money, raise taxes, more

union control, more of all the things that got us here. No one in the Democratic Party, and very

few in the Republican Party, you're talking about a full transformation.

Like blow it all to smithereens and start from scratch.

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